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Terraform: Difference between revisions
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== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Andromeda]]'' has the Pyreans, aliens who exist on planets like Venus -- super hot, toxic, and deadly to most organic life. They "pyroform" planets by burning them to their tastes, the [[The Federation|old Commonwealth]] had to seriously fight them not to lose precious human habitable worlds.
* ''[[Firefly]]'', where ''every'' planet and moon in the system is terraformed. The terraforming is mainly done by massive machines brought from [[Earth
** Plus, terraforming often has unintended side effects, like the newly introduced atmosphere interacting with minerals or gases to cause a massive plague, and at least one planet is considered an uninhabitable "black rock" because the [[Blatant Lies|terraforming never took]].
* In ''[[
* ''[[Star Trek the Next Generation (TV)|Star Trek the Next Generation]]'' had a surprisingly good first season episode where the Enterprise was trying to help terraform a desert planet by pumping water for irrigation. Unfortunately, the planet was occupied by sentient lifeforms who were annoyed enough at the attempt to terraform to sabotage the drill. It took a while for everyone to figure this out because they were microscopic silicon lifeforms, and so were mistaken for parts of the sandy scenery.
** However Federation Terraforming regulation require a planet to be devoid of any trace of life, so not even possible future species might be prevented from evolving naturally.
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** Terraforming was the backgound plot of '' Back to Reality'': Planet engineers in an ocean seeding ship had terraformed an ocean moon and created a marine ecosystem teeming with lifeforms by vastly speeding up evolution. Unfortunately it backfired when one lifeform arose that wiped out everything else: the Despair Squid.
* The ''[[Cosmos]]'' episode "Blues for a Red Planet" discussed the possibility of terraforming Mars with dark-colored, hardy plants.
* ''[[
** In the episode "The Doctor's Daughter", the planet Messaline is turned from a desolate wasteland into a beautiful planet full of life by using a terraforming device.
** In ''Terror of the Zygons'', the Zygons planned to modify the Earth’s climate to make it more suitable for their species.
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* Egosoft's ''[[X (Video Game)|X-Universe]]'' games have terraforming as the event that started the whole series. After a ''[[AI Is a Crapshoot|glitched software update]]'', the machines that man had sent out to terraform the system started terraforming ''everything'', including inhabited planets and ships. Mankind fights back, the terraformers swat them out of the way, and all seems lost until they're tricked into moving en masse to a distant part of the universe -- which they promptly start terraforming as well.
* ''[[Escape Velocity]]'': [[Broad Strokes|In these games]], Mars was always the first planet to be terraformed. And it always [[Gone Horribly Wrong|went very, very wrong]], and the next few hundred years are spent trying to fix the mess.
** ''EV Nova'' also lets you see somebody get terraforming right in one quest line. And the [[Higher
* Starting from ''[[Space Empires]] IV'', you can terraform a planet's atmosphere to suit your population.
* ''[[Fallout]]'' has an example in the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK), which turns several square miles of nuclear wasteland into a lush, green paradise.
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== Real Life ==
* The Earth, in its long existence, has had [
** Venus is basically stuck with a stage two atmosphere, because it lacks water. Possibly something to do with being too close to the sun, and thus outside the habitable zone. Earth had, literally, oceans of water even early in its existence. Where the water came from is still a subject of debate. But water is necessary for the carbon sequestration that removed most of the carbon dioxide from the stage two atmosphere.
* Terraforming planets, by current human technology standards, ''is'' possible, but scientists theorize that any such process to turn a completely uninhabitable planet into a habitable one would take hundreds of years, perhaps even a full millennium. Planets that are closer to Earth standard might be capable of terraformation in as little as 300 years. So, ''don't count on it''. (As a point of interest, many scientists theorize that ''Venus'' would be a better candidate for terraformation, instead of Mars, due to the fact that Venus is tectonically active, while Mars isn't.)
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*** Mars has some issues with potential terraforming, but atmosphere retention isn't really a huge problem. The planet could hold on to a breathable atmosphere for tens or possibly even hundreds of millions of years, unlike a possible terraformed Moon.
*** This is largely conjecture, but if the atmosphere is being blown away over millions of years is it really that absurd to import atmosphere to replace it as it is blown away? To even settle Mars at first would require at least some level of casual inter-planitary travel.
* To an extent, terraforming is already happening right now, here on Earth: Human beings have been "[
** Also, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11137903 this]. Darwin did it first, guys.
* The age of a star can change the conditions of whatever planets orbit it as it grows bigger and hotter as it ages by pushing the habitable zone (an invisible boundary where liquid water can exist) outwards. While doing so will render any planet originally in that habitable zone uninhabitable, it will also make planets too cold for life to become warm enough for life to evolve. When our Sun dies in about 5 billion years, this will actually happen to all of the outer planets in our Solar System. In fact, even Pluto may eventually become Earth-like one day!
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Terraform]]
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