{"id":7878,"date":"2012-12-11T07:37:31","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T12:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=7878"},"modified":"2012-12-11T07:54:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T12:54:47","slug":"trope-tuesday-terraforming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-terraforming\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Terraforming"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The fantastical element here isn’t that Mars could actually look like this in a millenia or two, but that NASA might actually get the funding.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought<\/a>). \u00a0In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere close (Mars) is a radiation-blasted desert with only the barest hint of an atmosphere and a surface temperature colder than Antarctica. \u00a0To get around this problem, you can do one of two things: build an artificial enclosed environment<\/a> to house the colony, or change the world itself to make it more Earthlike–in other words, terraform it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The actual science of terraforming is far too complex (not to mention way over my head)<\/span> to do it justice in this post. \u00a0Instead, I’ll just point you to the Terraforming Wikipedia page<\/a> as a starting point and focus on how the concept is used as a story trope.<\/p>\n

According to tvtropes and Wikipedia, the term came from a 1942 novella by Jack Williamson titled “Collision Orbit.” The concept of changing the environment of an entire planet actually goes back much further, with H.G. Wells subverting the trope in\u00a0War of the Worlds<\/em> (instead of humans terraforming other worlds, the hostile Martians try to xenoform Earth to make it habitable for them<\/em>). \u00a0Before the U.S. and U.S.S.R. put probes on the surface of Mars and Venus, it was fairly common for writers to speculate that those planets were able to support human life, at least on a basic, rudimentary level. \u00a0Once the science showed that that isn’t actually the case, terraforming as a story trope really began to take off.<\/p>\n

Today, this trope occurs commonly across all ranges of the Mohs scale<\/a>. \u00a0Soft sci-fi stories (such as Firefly) use it as an excuse to have planets that look and feel like Earth. \u00a0Hard sci-fi stories (such as\u00a0Red Mars, Green Mars,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Blue Mars<\/em>) use it as a fundamental premise, or to pose questions like “what is the ultimate destiny of human evolution?” or “how important is it to our species’ survival that we spread out beyond Earth?” Although it’s not something that we as a species have (yet) done, our present science seems to place it well within the range of the plausible, and that means that makes it fair game for any kind of science fiction.<\/p>\n

In order to be believable<\/a>, however, any significant terraforming project requires two things: resources and time. \u00a0LOTS of time. \u00a0We’re talking on the order of centuries and millenia here. \u00a0Because of that, stories that use this trope generally fall into the following categories:<\/p>\n