Woof bark Darwin

[hirez]

A number of months ago I was idly considering a story in which Jolly Dutch Anarchist Astronauts pitch up on a random asteroid with spacegoing versions of a RepRap and fusion reactor in order to hollow it out and bootstrap themselves an orbital habitat.

It was to have been an extended ramble on the nature of gezellig because I had recently come back from HAR2009 and I felt that in an applied form of that environment, all bugs would be an excuse for a hackathon followed by beer and techno.

However, the concept of instantiating a biosphere appeared to be firmly in No Can Has territory.

And now there's this. I'm going to guess that there's a lot more to it than having a bunch of Jolly Jack Tars plant a random selection of trees. Probably to do with airborne insects/microbes/yeasts or somesuch. But given they did just randomly plant things from completely different bits of the planet and it appears to have worked, um, donkey. Yes.

Comments

[zotz]

The Ascension article's impressive, but not entirely unparallelled. Culzean estate was heavily planted at around the same time, which also altered the local climate.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that by the time your Dutchmen get their rocket-Long-John into orbit, the tweaking of genes will have become an understood art.

At that point, it might turn out to be quite simple to instantiate a simple, all-engineered biosphere. Though that would be a lot less fun that turning up with the Royal Navy's Instant Island Kit, issued in seed form as part of every survival pack.

[zenmonkeykstop.livejournal.com]

Danish goons are testing their first suborbital rocket this weekend. Better get cracking on the biosphere side.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

:-) Very topical. I'd forgotten that bit.