so there is this speculative evolution project known as “serina”. the premise was terraforming a moon and placing several species of fish, invertebrates, and plant, but the only land vertebrate, is the domesticated canary,. then they let the species evolve over the course of 225 million years until the cooling of the moon’s core. I could see after ascension you could terraform a new planet and start the cycle over again, playing as new life.
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One of the planned ascension tools (acquired when you reach ascension stage (or just a very late-game item)) would be a planet editor, though earlier on you would be able to acquire less effective versions of that tool.
Yeah I think terraforming could well be a major thing in the space stage. Like terraforming Mars should be one of humanities main goals over the next 10k years IMO.
I also think that if we are running species simulations of each planet then there’s no particular reason why you couldn’t pick stuff up, even microbes, and put it on another planet. It could be the space stages version of farming.
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but could you switch to playing a species on that planet?
Probably not in the first pass. I.e. I think the general feeling in the team is we want to kind of get all the basics working, like having creatures that can evolve and make civilisations and get to ascension.
After that is all done we might go back and add extra features, like maybe you can evolve on a world which has had another species on it already and you are running through the ruins as a jaguar or something. Or yeah maybe an ascended species can incarnate as any animal it wants or something.
However those things are kind of beyond the roadmap at this point, like once the game is done then we might add them.
Though, as with all future stage discussions, we’ll have to see how it all shakes out, no one is making decisions for them now.
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I don’t understand why everyone’s so obsessed with playing as another species during a run. Literally just open a new game. Its not that difficult.
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But it reminds us that we all come from one common singular cell ancestor. Besides, it would be tiring to restart the whole freakin’ game in Ironman mode every time you die. Case in point.
EDIT : Woops, I necroed. Strange, the thread was in the most recent ones according to the list…
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Yeah, when you consider it, the far-off apocalypse of solar global warming is a lot less important than the very current apocalypse of anthropogenic global warming, which is also, you know, actively happening. It’s far more likely that, in a 1 billion year time span, humans will be wiped out through any number of threats that aren’t the Sun. That’s irrelevant.
Things we actually need to care about:
- Our ongoing efforts to push the planet back to the Carboniferous.
- The risk of industrial war, especially nuclear war, and other such very large, destructive conflicts.
- Pandemics (a bad one could kill us all and they happen randomly).
- Resource crises (water, population, food if the population crisis gets really bad, and economic resources like fossil fuels and the 50 critical minerals).
- AI destroying us (I personally find this extremely unlikely but it’s more likely to be a concern than solar apocalypse).
Talk about getting off Earth and moving to other planets has some merit, but I think most of the time it’s a distraction tactic to dodge discussion about the unsustainability of current economic activity (if everyone consumed at US levels, we’d need five Earths to support it). Also, have you seen how difficult it is to colonise Mars? (It’s usually Mars with spacers.) It’s physically impossible to terraform it without importing an atmosphere, it only has 7% of the carbon needed for a full atmosphere. (I’m not sure if the ‘full atmosphere’ in that is meant to be everything or a 100% CO2 atmosphere, but either way, you aren’t getting something thick enough to deal with meteorites.) Plus the innumerable other concerns (the incredibly long travel time, all the myriad risks that could kill everyone, the fact that everyone would need to live in underground bunkers forever until the planet was terraformed, etc.). The Moon would be a lot easier to colonise, and has more theoretical value than an endless expanse of geologically dead desert.
And if you’re concerned about space, then why not terraform the Sahara? It’s a lot more feasible and would benefit a ton of people.
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Terraforming sahara would still be very difficult at our level of development since it exists due to climate patterns. Even during the “green sahara period” There were large patches of deserts in that region.
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In order to terraform Mars, even more important that fixing the atmosphere would be restoring/replacing its magnetic field, which protects against space radiation. Without that, generations of terraforming could be undone by one random wave. We could try restating its cooled off molten core, but more likely we would need a series or towers and an insane amount of energy to artificially generate a field for it. The second is debatably scientifically possible, but it would be easier to fix our own planet. Or make bunkers under our own planet surface.
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I’ve heard you could use a space structure, some sort of coil, to serve as an artificial magnetic field to protect Mars from outside Mars itself. I’m not sure what the energy requirements on that are, but I vaguely remember them not actually being so bad. A smaller Dyson swarm could probably power it.
That being said, once you’re talking about Dyson swarm energy generation you’re getting pretty far from the current capabilities of a species which only went to the moon to stick it to geopolitical rivals.
As to the terraforming Sahara thing, if that’s hard, then terraforming Mars is impossible. And terraforming the Sahara is hard, although there are some methods for reshaping its ecology. (For instance, digging shallow, crescent-shaped water holes, which keep water long enough for plants to grow, making the ground more resilient and further increasing the amount of water retention due to plant shade. It won’t make rain happen more, but it can support plants and with enough pits some animals as well.)
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I guess that if there is one planet in the solar system that can be terraformed, it would still be Mars. Venus is surely the second.
Should Thrive implement terraforming for such hostile environments or should it stay behind some sort of a non-LAWK option but for technologies?
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Terraforming makes total sense in an SFIA-ian “if brute force isn’t working you clearly aren’t using enough of it” kind of way, and brute force is easy to come buy with a dyson swarm or even just a hat for the sun. It should be in the final game.
Venus and mars are totally terraformable if you’re comfortable with huge mirrors floating in space. Or a dyson swarm. Other places are too, if you’re happy with needing to point a weak nicoll-dyson beam at them to have any daytime.
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What does “SFIA” stand for?
Science and Futurism with Issac Arthur. i haven’t watched any of his stuff in ages, but he’s a very “the only actual requirement we don’t have is energy and we have a sun over there so it is in fact possible and even probable if this sound cool enough.” kind of guy.
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Speaking of huge space mirrors, just how much extra infrastructure would you need to make them not immedietly shatter from a micrometeorite collision?
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Massive radar array and some reaction wheels. And well programed rasperry pi. Light reflecting off huge mirrors pushes them. If you use multiple small mirrors instead of big ones you can tilt them with the reaction wheels to push them around. Detect problem rocks with radar, correct with the rasperry pi. Truly tiny meteorites will just need to be repaired I guess.
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Could tidal forces or other gravity-related stuff be enough to tear such orbital mirrors apart?
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if you make them the size of moons. Don’t do that.
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you meant mirrors here and not meteorites, right?
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