From "Project Exodus/What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?" by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (which I believe is available even to nonsubscribers).
I'm reading that because I read The New Yorker, but by coincidence, I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes. (Because yesterday, it became necessary to remind you: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.") And I loved this one:
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."Remember the Mars canals?
Almost as entrancing at The Man in the Moon:
But to get back to the garden — and to The New Yorker — here's a March 2007 piece by Adam Gopnik titled "Voltaire's Garden":
Voltaire goes on to detail the hideous theatrics of the Inquisition: the yellow robes, the burnings and flogging set to Church music, the whole choreography of Christian cruelty. The point of “Candide” is that the rapes and disembowelments, the enslavement and the beatings are not part of some larger plan, not a fact of the fatality of life and the universe, but fiendish tortures thought up by fanatics....
By “garden” Voltaire meant... the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action... The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing... The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.
पोस्ट्स
६० टिप्पण्या:
Over at the New Yorker, when the desolation of your own garden gets too much, the juice of your latest piece dribbling down your chin, you can attend seminars in the community garden: Mars, Global Warming, The Artist, Money, New True Trends etc.
Didn't Candide make a point about that saying that this was "the best of all possible worlds"?
There had to have been a worthy joke there somewhere.
Humans will never travel much beyond the solar system. Human bodies - chemical brains - were not made to survive the brutality, time, and distance of space. Instead, we will travel in robot form - our minds downloaded into a computer - existing in a cyber world. Only then can we survive the million year journeys to distant stars.
I suspect many of the public (and most New Yorker authors) are somewhat vague on the details of Hohmann transfer orbits. Mars at its closest approach is about 35 million miles away, but the actual length of the voyage is significantly longer.
Saying Mars is a rugged environment seems an understatement, as the air pressure on the surface is roughly equal to pressure here at an altitude of 100,000 feet. Which is to say, survival on Mars surface requires a full pressure suit.
" 'No bucks, no Buck Rogers,' Impey observes." But the usual formulation is the opposite: NASA gets no $bucks without a Buck Rogers (that is,, the public is easily bored with robotic space probes but publicists can gin up some interest in astronaut personalities/celebrities and thereby obtain funding. And, umm, could there be a bigger funding hook than "give us a $trillion or the astronauts die on Mars!" ?).
Arthur C. Clarke is usually credited with the concept of the geosynchronous communication satellite, yet when he did so he imagined there would be a crew on board. Yet most comm. satellites are commercial, and no one's going to put a crew up there (at fantastic cost) when the job is easily automated.
The reality is that space transportation is not all that much better than it was fifty years ago, yet electronics are incomparably better. If the mission is science, the obvious way to do it is with robots and not with astronauts. For the cost of a single crewed mission to Mars one could send hundreds of robotic probes. As for "No bucks without Buck Rogers," well, these robots can be linked via Internet and provide telepresence for all who are interested, and why would that be less interesting than Buck Rogers?
In short, terraforming Mars may be a worthwhile goal, but it seems obvious that technology is just not up to doing that yet. Without terraforming, Mars remains less attractive real estate for human colonization than Antarctica.
The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds.
So surprised that he left out the Commissars and the members of the People's Revolutionary Committees. But I suppose those particular fanatics wasn't around in Voltaire's time.
"In short, terraforming Mars may be a worthwhile goal..."
Ecocide.
It is difficult to imagine any planet-wide disaster that we could not survive on Earth with greater ease than escaping to Mars.
Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not.
Yeah, because the challenges posed by our own intelligence are the only challenges humanity might ever face.
Ecocide
What do you believe is living there to be killed?
Ecocide
Barsoom was already dying when John Carter arrived there. Now there's.nothing left to kill.
They will need Wi-Fi on Mars so that it will be inhabitable. Then we can skype to the colony.
I'll admit to not reading the linked article, so perhaps it addresses the issue that not colonizing other planets is comparable to having all of your eggs in one basket.
Proponents of colonization point out that as long as all humans are on a single planet they are vulnerable to planet wide catastrophes. A single meteorite of sufficient size could wipe out all multi-cellular life on Earth.
Perhaps we don't see any evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations because the emergence of an intelligent, technically advanced species is incredibly unlikely and if any others did develop they experienced an extinction event before they could colonize other planets.
http://io9.com/5501565/extinction-events-that-almost-wiped-out-humans
@Ignorance
Per Wikipedia: "The term ecocide refers to any extensive damage or destruction of the natural landscape and disruption or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory to such an extent that the survival of the inhabitants of that territory is endangered... It is generally associated with damage caused by a living agent whether directly or indirectly. An organism might inflict ecocide directly by killing enough species in an ecosystem to disrupt its structure and function...."
I don't think anything needs to be living in the landscape for the word "ecocide" to apply. We would be destroying the natural landscape.
"I don't think anything needs to be living in the landscape for the word "ecocide" to apply. We would be destroying the natural landscape."
Well then you are ignoring the very definition you posted which states:
"... to such an extent that the survival of the inhabitants of that territory is endangered."
The way I read that definition, the disruption or loss of ecosystems is a required element.
I guess the definition could be parsed as The term ecocide refers to any extensive damage or destruction of the natural landscape and The term ecocide refers to disruption or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory to such an extent that the survival of the inhabitants of that territory is endangered..., but I don't think that is the way it is intended.
“We must cultivate our garden”
But better not plant wheat to feed your own animals.
And if you grow something, you didn't really grow that anyway.
Voltaire underestimated the Enlightened Inquisitors.
Turns out, he was the most naive optimist of all.
Anything with "cide" at the end means "kill". If nothing lives there, it can't be killed.
It's another example of definition creep by those with an agenda (not necessarily talking about our hostess).
@tim in vermont
The philosophical statement that "this is the best of all possible worlds" was being satirized in Candide.
The theory is that given human free will God can only do so much to alleviate suffering and that as bad as it is, this is the best of all possible worlds.
In Candide Voltaire humorously disputes that notion by showing just how much unjust suffering goes on in the world, much of it inflicted by the self-righteous.
A particularly effective portion is the scene where, after a devastating earthquake in Lisbon, priests were going about selecting people to burned at the stake because they believed the quake to be a punishment from God.
You think you can do anything you want to a landscape as long as nothing living is destroyed? Or are you quibbling about the word as a word?
Peter said...
Arthur C. Clarke is usually credited with the concept of the geosynchronous communication satellite, yet when he did so he imagined there would be a crew on board. Yet most comm. satellites are commercial, and no one's going to put a crew up there (at fantastic cost) when the job is easily automated.
He first published that idea in 1945 before the transistor had been invented. Vacuum tubes tend to burn out and have to be replaced, so the idea of having a crew of tube swappers was somewhat reasonable at the time. In the era of vacuum tube computers, they used to crank them up to excess filament voltage before the start of the day's computations. Marginal tubes would quickly burn out, so the techs could replace them and hope to get a day's work out of the computer. Perhaps ironically, many communications satellites still use a very expensive type of vacuum tube called a Travelling Wave Tube Amplifier (TWTA).
As for the ages old humans verses robots debate, robots are certainly less expensive but quite limited in what they can accomplish. A human geologist could accomplish in a few days what it takes rovers years to accomplish. Rovers are limited in the scientific instruments they carry and only transmit images when stationary. That means they could roll past something very important and the people on Earth would never know about it.
"You think you can do anything you want to a landscape as long as nothing living is destroyed?"
Yeah, I do. Why not?
Would it be wrong to build nuclear power plants and use the power to run desalinization plants so that the water could be used to restore the Sahara Desert back to the way it was prior to 1600 BCE?
You think you can do anything you want to a landscape as long as nothing living is destroyed? Or are you quibbling about the word as a word?
In the long, proud tradition of this blog, I'm quibbling about the word as a word.
And no, I don't think we can do anything we want to a landscape. But I do think that we can do many things if the benefits to humanity greatly outweigh the loss of the existing landscape. If we could successfully terraform Mars, that would easily count.
"You think you can do anything you want to a landscape as long as nothing living is destroyed? Or are you quibbling about the word as a word?" Jeepers. Some of us think that it was wrong what the Europeans did to the Indians. But, had there been no Indians there, totally fine with it. I have much less problem messing with a dead world than I have on strip-mining Pennsylvania, which actually does wreck eco-systems.
A lot of the current sneering at space exploration has to do with the price of access. If SpaceX succeeds in landing a booster, which will probably happen this year (and maybe this June 26) - and reusing it - the price of access may plummet. (Of course the article threw in some idiotic comment about how the last test didn't work, somehow implying that the next one won't either, or something.) Google is investing a billion bucks in SpaceX, to put up thousands of tiny satellites, revolutionizing internet access. That's the kind of thing you can do if access gets cheap.
Look what happened when ISDN/DSL made internet readily available. Till then Arpanet was for geeks. Suddenly people found incredible opportunities there, things that no one in the world had imagined. New wealth appeared out of nothing. We'll see what happens if space entrepreneurs find it _profitable_ to do things in space. One asteroid can have precious metal resources worth on the order of a trillion dollars.
Once that happens, then it will be time to discuss issues of lots of people living off earth. Because it will be profitable. Then we will need to get good at keeping people healthy off-planet long-term, and seeing if we can bear children, and loads of other issues. Luddites can think what they like.
The city of Los Angeles is situated in a desert and can only exist by using water taken from elsewhere, Owens County (and others), creating an ecological disaster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_Valley (check out the section about the California Water Wars)
What is the moral culpability of the people who live there?
(I'm looking at you, tree hugging movie celebrities!)
"I don't think anything needs to be living in the landscape for the word "ecocide" to apply."
Oh, for crying out loud. "The term ecocide refers to any extensive damage or destruction of the natural landscape and disruption or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory to such an extent that the SURVIVAL OF THE INHABITANTS of that territory is endangered." You may not be happy that the landscape is altered, but no inhabitants, no ecocide.
Bill Nye lives in Los Angeles, and is apparently a neighbor of well known environmental activist Ed Begley Jr. Shouldn't someone point out to them that every time they turn on a tap they are harming the environment?
Begley had a reality TV show for awhile and I remember on one episode he was using a water hose to clean off his solar panels, bought to reduce pollution.
With respect to vacuum tube technology, the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable (TAT-1) was laid in 1956, using vacuum tube technology for the underwater repeaters. Transistor technology of the time was considered unreliable.
TAT-1 was retired in 1978 after 22 years of service.
Lots more information on TAT-1's vacuum tubes in the Bell System Technical Journal vol. 36-1. https://archive.org/details/bstj36-1-163
"For the cost of a single crewed mission to Mars one could send hundreds of robotic probes. "
Agreed. It seems a total waste of money to send humans to Mars on a round trip. For example, one problem with Mars over the moon is that is about 40% of the gravity of earth compared to the moon at 15%. So you need that much more fuel to launch a return trip from the surface of Mars.
Better to populate it with robots over several decades before sending humans or maybe send humans on a one way trip.
Mars is definitely my favorite Greek god. He never put up with peace and love. Those silly useless emotions stopped glorious wars before the Troy and its inhabitants could all be slaughtered.
Can't we just rename the Planet Mars. I like Mary Anne. That should solve the funding problems for NASA as men try to reach a female planet that needs our seed.
That's not how I read the last line of Candide at all. I think what Voltaire was saying was that a solitary, contemplative life, devoted to simple pursuits, and removed from the craziness and distractions and pain and suffering of the world, is ideal. The garden is the metaphor for that sort of life (as any devoted gardener can attest).
""But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious.""
The obvious is that real colonization of Mars if it can be done at all will require serious advances in genetic engineering. Our bodies and those of any plants and animals we take to Mars are uniquely adapted to Earth conditions. Mars isn't the Earth and can never be. So until such time that humans and the accompanying plants and animals are genetically engineered to be able to live and thrive on Mar's gravity we will eventually have exploration but not colonization.
By the way, while looking around for the name of the valley where LA gets water from to the detriment of the environment I came across a post asking if LA was recycling toilet water and not telling anyone. You know, like it was a conspiracy.
The funny thing is that not one person responded by informing the poster that he was an idiot.
Ron Winkelheimer wrote:
"Proponents of colonization point out that as long as all humans are on a single planet they are vulnerable to planet wide catastrophes. A single meteorite of sufficient size could wipe out all multi-cellular life on Earth."
Go underground or underwater. You will have resources that you will not have on Mars, for more people, for a fraction of the cost.
Mars is a difficult planet for telescopic observation. Except during a couple of month period every 2 years, it's tiny. Additionally, the low-contrast surface features are usually obscured by (Terran) atmospheric turbulence.
Ann Althouse said...
"In short, terraforming Mars may be a worthwhile goal..."
Ecocide.
Presumes there's an Eco there to cide.
MikeR:
"A lot of the current sneering at space exploration has to do with the price of access. If SpaceX succeeds in landing a booster, which will probably happen this year (and maybe this June 26) - and reusing it - the price of access may plummet. (Of course the article threw in some idiotic comment about how the last test didn't work, somehow implying that the next one won't either, or something.) Google is investing a billion bucks in SpaceX, to put up thousands of tiny satellites, revolutionizing internet access. That's the kind of thing you can do if access gets cheap."
Musk is hoping to break the $1000/lb barrier. This is still not cheap, and $1000/lb is not for human payloads. That will be higher.
Space flight is really, really hard. When you are in the atmosphere on the way up or down you have high mechanical stress. When you are outside the atmosphere, you have radiation and microgravity issues. Feynman seemed to think we would lose about 1% of missions launched from Earth. We lost two shuttles in a little over one hundred launches.
The easiest way to bend the cost curve -- on paper -- is to build an RLV. People have tried, and it hasn't worked out, at least for manned missions.
The idea behind colonizing Mars is to have another home for a fragment of the human race in case Earth is ever wiped out (say by a giant asteroid impact).
But I can't imagine any catastrophe to humans on Earth that is served by relocating to Mars, short of the complete annihilation of the planet itself (cf. "When Worlds Collide").
It's certainly possible that a giant asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth someday. But the answer to that is to deflect or destroy the asteroid, not to flee to Mars. That's the technology we need to be developing. For starters, we need to beef up our space radar network to detect an asteroid heading toward Earth while it's still billions of miles away, giving us time to develop a response.
And that's true of all the other possible catastrophes: If there are plagues, develop better treatments. If there is global warming, develop other sources of energy or ways to counteract the warming effect (say by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface). In no case can I see a reason to give up and just flee to another planet.
MikeR: "We'll see what happens if space entrepreneurs find it _profitable_ to do things in space. One asteroid can have precious metal resources worth on the order of a trillion dollars."
The Outer Space Treaty (1967) would seem to forbid much private exploitation of deep space. It states that all of these worlds are "the common heritage of all mankind" and so any benefits gained by exploration must be shared by the entire human race.
That's why Robert Heinlein was very much against the U.S. signing this treaty. He was a realist and understood that much of the exploration and exploitation of our own planet was driven by naked profit-seeking (including Columbus' voyage).
"Didn't Candide make a point about that saying that this was 'the best of all possible worlds?'
"There had to have been a worthy joke there somewhere."
That was Dr. Pangloss...and of course it was a very bitter joke.
"It is difficult to imagine any planet-wide disaster that we could not survive on Earth with greater ease than escaping to Mars."
It's otherwise known as being between a rock and a fucking hard place.
The worst case impact would be an Oort cloud comet. They can come from any direction, at any time, and they are very fast, so there is a lot of kinetic energy.
One interesting scenario is a smaller impact -- a nation killer -- that we see coming a long way off. An attempt to deflect the asteroid may simply make it hit some other part of the Earth.
"The easiest way to bend the cost curve -- on paper -- is to build an RLV. People have tried, and it hasn't worked out, at least for manned missions." Well, that's what SpaceX is doing now. Not relevant that it hasn't worked out yet; we'll see if it works out now.
"The Outer Space Treaty (1967) would seem to forbid much private exploitation of deep space." Nah - that is not the opinion of most of those I've seen. It just forbids a nation claiming a heavenly body.
Obviously, more laws would need to be worked out once commercial exploitation begins.
"It is difficult to imagine any planet-wide disaster that we could not survive on Earth with greater ease than escaping to Mars." That is missing the point. We need to be a space-traveling civilization; that would allow us to do things like stop asteroids, or put up thousand-mile-wide solar panels, or take other emergency actions if needed. Right now, there is nothing we could do, because we can't get there fast enough in sufficient quantity.
"Go underground or underwater. You will have resources that you will not have on Mars, for more people, for a fraction of the cost."
A fraction of the current cost.
We aren't going to be doing any real colonization until the costs vs benefits ratio improves immensely. There has to be more profit in doing it off-earth than on-earth. I don't know if we will ever get to that point.
Property rights in space:
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/property-rights-in-space
One of Napoleon's stated reasons for invading Spain was to overthrow the Spanish Inquisition. Over several centuries, the Spanish Inquisition killed about five thousand people. Napoleon knocked off that many before lunch on a slow day. And the tortures inflicted on the Spanish peasants (and French soldiers) were bizarre and rule beyond all imagining........,Napoleon was after Voltaire's time, but he was a favorite among the enlightened. Not just French writers like Stendhal and Hugo stood in awe of the man, but also men like Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven engaged in hero worship. Even English writers like Carlyle and Byron genuflected before Napoleon's image....,,,,I think nowadays we understand Napoleon in terms of Hitler, but in the century after Napoleon's death enlightened people considered him a latter day Charlemagne. They were forgiving off all those corpses, abandoned armies, and maimed soldiers because Napoleon pursued goals of which they approved. But Napoleon was just another edition of the Spanish Inquisition,and his many intellectual supporters were his Dominicans, heating up the pincers.
Until we discover a planet inhabited by long legged, big breasted women, not much money will be spent on manned space exploration.
"Over several centuries, the Spanish Inquisition killed about five thousand people." That's silly. They may have killed that many in the Inquisition's conventional manner. But soldiers working for the Spanish, trying to reconquer the world for Catholicism, burned their way across Europe, killing untold thousands. Look up Wallenstein, or William of Orange. Civilians, not soldiers.
...I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes.
I need to amend my living will so that if I'm ever found doing that, I'll be put out of my misery forthwith.
Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens."
Or, much more likely, because either there's no way to achieve practical FTL travel, or life that smart is pretty rare and doesn't bother looking for others that haven't even left their own sun yet.
Every so often I feel a need to remind people that there is no evidence at all of life anywhere but on the Earth. Not yet, anyway.
"Perhaps we don't see any evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations because the emergence of an intelligent, technically advanced species is incredibly unlikely and if any others did develop they experienced an extinction event before they could colonize other planets."
I think this is correct. There is no paradox in the Fermi Paradox. Their assumptions in formulating it were likely to be orders of magnitude off. Start making a list of things that would halt development and evolution of life on a planet. Just the things we can think of. It doesn't take long at all to have a hefty list of deal-breakers. Think about how long it took evolution to produce an "intelligent" species here, and how many total extinction events can occur over that timeframe.
If you've got a lot of money to spend or a library with a copy, check out Martyn Fogg's book on terraforming. It's a bit old, and not exactly my area of expertise so I'm not sure what the current thinking in the field is, but it is a hard science look at the prospects for terraforming as well as related endeavors.
If Snopes.com is so sure of those alleged Dan Qualye quotes, why have they not bothered to cite the dates and occasions? Snopes does admit that those many of those same idiocies have been attributed to ex- VP Al Gore. Why should anyone take Snopes word for it? Law professors ought to err on the side of caution, ought they not?
Regarding the canals rumor has it that Lyndon Johnson was disappointed and confused by the earlier television images of Mars taken by the Mariner 4 spacecraft on 14 July 1965. "Where are the goddamned canals?" the notoriously salty-talking president issued to have complained... That's just rumor, mind you.
@Crimso
And even the assumption that an intelligent species will become technologically sophisticated is a totally unwarranted assumption.
The only example we have is our own and for most of our species' existence we flaked rocks to create makeshift knives.
Technological civilization would seem to require the ability to organize into large social organizations, rewarding innovators, and intelligence surpassing a certain threshold among some portion of the population.
At least.
Suppose a species lacking any of those attributes. Not going to be constructing any space probes. Unlikely even to make the leap to agriculture.
"Suppose a species lacking any of those attributes."
Indeed. Lacking those attributes are additional entries on that list I suggested.
That's why I put intelligent in quotation marks. As opposed to a drawn-out description getting into the details of what constitutes technology, etc. Other species arguably use tools. So we listen for E.T. to give us hints as to their existence using our one data point to decide what we should be looking for. IIRC, Fermi's group thought the immediate surroundings should be awash in life. So it would seem that even if radio signals are but a very brief flash in the timeline of a species we should still be hearing SOMEBODY (hey, if Fermi got to make assumptions then I do too).
Still possible there is a window in the development of a technologically advanced species where they would foolishly be broadcasting their existence to anyone listening. And our galaxy alone is vast beyond comprehension. Wonder what the limits of detection are for us to hear our own signals at a given distance (I'm sure that's known; may be easy to calculate but I'm way too lazy right now). There's also the fact that time is also distance. Nobody (err, nothing) 1000 ly from here is picking up reruns of "All in the Family."
Althouse wrote: Ecocide.
Ecocide - a politically loaded neologism meaning "destruction of the natural environment, especially when willfully done."
Destruction of the natural environment is what Nature does all the time. People who think otherwise are deluding themselves. If terraforming Mars ever becomes practical there's no reason not to consider it, especially since there is no evidence of a Martian eco to 'cide. By the time terraforming has evolved from a pipe dream into a technology we'll have long known whether there are Martians to give a shit.
Actually Mars is shit. Though it is about 1/2 the radius of Earth Mars has only about 10% of Earth's mass, mostly due to a dearth of iron. Earth is the Iron World. Iron gives our planet a powerful magnetosphere, and it provides us with sufficient gravity to hold an atmosphere rich in O2. A billion years ago Mars may have had oceans of water and a breathable atmosphere, but once volcanic outgassing ceased Mars was doomed. Without a substantial Fe core whatever goodness Mars had probably leaked into space before any form of life took hold. The odds 99.9 to 1 that the Martians are us. We just haven't taken up residence yet. Perhaps we'll spent the next 1000 years decorating, picking out drapes...
The character of the exoplanets discovered so far, and especially the prevalence of hot Jupiters, suggests that optimistic models of planetary evolution are likely to be mistaken. The quiescence and orderliness of our own solar system may well be highly exceptional. Humanity may not be much in the estimation of some of us, but perhaps we're the best that Nature has been able to evolve in this neck of the galaxy. To let ourselves go extinct over some squeamishness about the fate of some theoretical Martian microbes is perverse.
If you've got a lot of money to spend or a library with a copy, check out Martyn Fogg's book on terraforming. It's a bit old...
Old is right. There was a proposal to sew the clouds of Venus with cyanobacteria, which would metabolize the CO2, release O2, which would reduce the H2SO4 into sulfites and water vapor, which in turn would over many centuries break the Venerian greenhouse and rain out as rivers and oceans on the surface. Turns out the solar winds has stripped Venus of much of the hydrogen the biological approach requires.
Of all the planets and satellites in our system, we may find Titan to be the best bet.
Titan may be the best bet solely from a "mining" standpoint. It may at some point become economical to get raw materials from those hydrocarbon seas and ship them back here (or to the terraformed Mars). That last bit was only a little sarcastic. True terraforming will take a very long time.
Ecosystem: a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.
No life, no ecocide, next case.
My "best of all possible worlds" line had to do with unifying the post and applying it to the relative merits of Mars and Earth as planets.
We have all read Candide, and yes, Christians have done some terrible things, I, personally, am over it.
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