“It’s a . . . a good planet.” There was a trace of wonder in Tania’s voice. She wasn’t looking at the dreary landscape, but at the information that appeared projected in ghost images onto her viewplate:
Gravity 0.916 Methane 0.004
Temperature 27.67^ Xenon 0.003
Atmosphere: Sulfur Oxides <10E-7 Pressure 0.894% Carbon Monoxide <10E-7 Nitrogen 0.357 Nitrogen Oxides <10E-8 Argon 0.297 Hydrogen Sulfide <10E-8 Oxygen 0.212 Ammonia - Water Vapor 0.051 Halogens - Carbon Dioxide 0.047 This didn’t mean they could open their helmets and start breathing. For one thing, there was too much water vapor and carbon dioxide: sitting still in a chair, you would start to pant in a few minutes. And there were things like bacteria, viruses, and nerve gases that a suit’s equipment couldn’t detect, but which could be fatal in concentrations of less than one part per million. But Tamers had brought more formidable worlds under control. Groombridge might never be the garden spot of the universe, but if the AED thought it worth the trouble, men might walk unprotected on its surface in not too many years. “Wish we’d brought a mouse,” Carol said. “Next time. We’ll take some air back.” 8 - Geoformy 1 (From Sermons from Science by Theodore Lasky, copyright © 2071, Broome Syndicate. Reprinted from The Washington Post-Times-Herald-Star-News, 16 September 2071:) “To geoform” is a transitive verb, an inelegant neologism that means, rather obviously, “to change into [something having certain qualities of] earth.” The first planet to be geoformed was earth itself. Consider: men can’t destroy a planet’s ecology, not with hydrogen bombs, not with nonreturnable bottles (remember them?). All they can do is change it. Even a featureless radioactive billiard ball of a planet has an ecology, albeit not a complex one. Men started to geoform the earth in the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, a lot of the early work was done by people who failed to see the earth as a closed set of mutually interrelated systems. Typically, they would drive around in petroleum-powered vehicles, picking up cans (which were trying their damnedest to rust and get back into the soil). Then they’d drive the cans to a recycling place that ultimately burned coal to melt down the cans to make more cans. In the process they were using up very finite supplies of fossil fuels-and incidentally gave New Jersey the most spectacular sunsets this side of the planet Jupiter. More generally, the problem was that in order to fix something up, you have to apply energy to it. And taking energy from anywhere on the earth-be it coal, uranium, or a waterfall-will have an effect on the earth’s ecology. So you have to fix that up, too. And so on. The obvious solution was to get energy from someplace else. The sun wastes 99.999% of its energy trying to warm empty space. So in the fullness of time, they tossed up a couple of satellites with huge mirrors that turned sunlight into electricity. The electricity powered big lasers, also in orbit, that pumped energy down to ground-based collectors. From that point on, things got complicated, but suffice it to say that there eventually was plenty of extremely cheap energy which could be had at no expense to the environment. They made the deserts bloom. Unfortunately, nature is perverse in this regard, and making one desert bloom will turn some perfectly good piece of real estate somewhere else into a new desert. What the hell, send up another satellite. It took quite a few satellites, but eventually the whole world was covered with green grass and nodding grain and the sweetest air this side of the Garden of Eden. That this organic, polyunsaturated paradise was precariously maintained by the several million megawatts of brute power that screamed down from the sky every second-this was only the concern of a handful of scientists and technicians who smoked too much and snapped at their spouses. Eleven billion people lived fairly comfortable lives because of those megawatts. But theorists estimated that if the power failed, fewer than one in ten would live out the year. And it was unlikely that the survivors would be very civilized. It looked as if geoformy might provide a kind of insurance against this rather probable disaster: make an alternate earth, an independent colony on another planet. Then humanity could go on even if earth were in a shambles.