[FH] Colonisation again (was Re: Sa'Vasku Colours)

G'day Tom,

 >or if there is, get rid of it. the first step in colonisation is
scouring
 >the planet, the next is terraforming it :). not popular with the
greens,
 >i'd imagine....

If we learnt anything from colonisation of our own world I'd hope the
first 
think we did was send a lead team/probe to discern whether the life was 
hazardous or not, rather than just straight avoid or straight 'zap em
all'. 
(Yes the cynic in me does realise how unlikely that is).

 >no but seriously folks, my thinking is that if a planet has native
life,
 >we won't colonise it. ....
 >instead, we'd settle dead worlds....

I'm curious, what do you mean by dead worlds? Ones which could easily 
support life and just don't or ones that don't have life because they
can't 
(anymore or yet)? Besides that I think you're setting a pretty stiff
task 
if you 'disallow' use of existing ecosystems (assuming they're even part

way compatible with us), based on my current understanding (and a little

supposition) I'd reckon most planets that can support life will already 
have some examples of it by the time we get there. OK it may not be 
possible to coexist with it because we have no 'common ancestory' on the

flip side it may be very possible that our lack of ancestory means we
can 
live side by side with little or even no impact on each other than
resource 
use (the most obvious being space, though any others aren't a given 
depending on how the system is set up). There are two ways I can think
of 
right now where this may happen...
1) The physiology and resultant interdependencies, resources and 
interactions the organisms display are literally so alien that we can
both 
be in the same environment without effecting each other - say, for 
instance, their life was based on silica (I'm not sure if that idea is
now 
out of favour, but silicon used to be thought of as a viable alternative

for carbon based on chemical properties such as the way they form
lattices) 
then there is nothing to say that our carbon based life will even need
the 
same things as them beyond common needs for space (and most likely
liquid 
water).
2) There may be vast tracks that are unexploited as nothing has evolved
to 
use it, for instance (and if there's someone with a better knowledge of
the 
early epochs than I please correct me here) say we came upon a planet
that 
was in the same condition Earth was 500 million years ago, our land
based 
needs wouldn't necessarily have any impact on the ecosystem as
everything 
would still be in the seas, even if it was like 375 million years ago
you 
still wouldn't have much animal life to compete with on the land. OK
you'll 
probably have some purists who advocate leaving it alone, but there's 
nothing to say that society and decision makers will agree with them at
the 
time and maybe that in itself leaves the way open for an interesting 
faction for someone to play (the militant greens out to cleanse the
galaxy 
of misguided contamination of nature...actually someone has come up with

something similar if I remember correctly(??)).

Right now any alien life seems of so precious to us, but I figure as we 
know more about how common (or not) it is then our attitudes may well 
change. If it turns out life is fairly common (and especially if all the

nicest most resource rich planets are already taken) and if it also
turns 
out that way can live with it (even if it requires a monthly dose of
some 
or other drug to neutralise the killer laserlight mosquito reaction)
then 
I'm guessing we'll just push right on in. Regardless of all our higher 
ideals the forces behind our evolution dictates that you can't pass up a

resource if its staring you in the phase and we are really still ruled
by that.

Guess it would make for an interesting mosaic (and even more of a 
competitive pressure between nations for the early sites) if you ended
up 
with a mix of planets along the lines of "can live here at a push, but
must 
build the ecosystem for yourself" + "everything we need and it isn't 
deadly, its just like home" + "life but not as we know it, so you must
take 
your pills every other morning or turn purple keel over and drop dead" +

"there's life there, but when we saw what it could do we ran like hell, 
built a huge wall around it and threw away the key... and we still get 
nightmares". Make for some interesting DS/SG scenarios if you landed on
the 
wrong planet...

Sorry for the ramble, probably got a bit carried away (as usual).

Have fun

Beth

P.S. I've just got a new version of Eudora which puts up those annoying 
grey bars (which probably do awful things in digests, if they don't I
won't 
worry in the future) instead of the > when you reply, I'm having to
remove 
them by hand (which feels like a very dumb solution) so does anyone know
of 
the computer literate way of doing this?

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Elizabeth Fulton
c/o CSIRO Division of Marine Research
GPO Box 1538
HOBART
TASMANIA 7001
AUSTRALIA
Phone (03) 6232 5018 International +61 3 6232 5018
Fax 03 6232 5053 International +61 3 6232 5053

email: beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au