"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

didn't try to terraform Mars. They never tried to terraform Mars. What they did
was ecopoiesis, and they succeeded spectacularly, more than anybody had a right
to expect."
"Ecopoiesis," I said, "terraforming, same thing."
"Not at all."
#
The way Leah told it, it was part epic, part farce.
It's hard for us, now, to imagine what it was like in the age of confusion,
before the fusion renaissance and the second reformation, but the people of the
twenty-first century had a technology of chemical rockets and nuclear reactors
that, although primitive, had its own crude power. By the middle of the
twenty-first century, Mars had been explored, cataloged, and abandoned. It was
too cold to harbor life, even of the most primitive sort; the atmosphere was
closer to vacuum than to air, and there were far more accessible resources in
the asteroids. Mars was uninteresting.
It didn't even make good video. The largest canyon in the solar system-- so big
that if you stand in the middle, the walls on both sides were out of sight over
the horizon. The biggest mountain in the solar system--but the slope so gentle
that it meant nothing on any human scale. Ancient fossil bacteria-- but not even
a hint of anything that hadn't been dead and turned to rock a billion years
before trilobites crawled the oceans. A hundred spots on Earth and across the
solar system were more spectacular. Once somebody had climbed Olympus (and in
the low gravity of Mars it wasn't a hard climb), and had placed flags at both
poles of Mars, why go back?
The ecopoiesis of Mars was done by a band of malcontents from one of the very
first space settlements, Freehold Toynbee. Habitats--they called them "space
colonies" back then--were crowded, dangerous, undersupplied, constantly in need
of repair, and smelly. They were haven to malcontents, ideologues, fanatics, and
visionaries: the vanguard of humanity, the divine agents of the manifest destiny
of mankind into the universe. More succinctly, the habitats were home to people
who couldn't get along with their fellow humans on Earth. Arguments were their
way of life.
It was an engineer named Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick who proposed that Toynbee
could transform Mars. The people of Toynbee debated the question for a year,
arguing every conceivable point of view with a riotous enthusiasm. At the
beginning, the consensus of the colony seemed to be that since human destiny was
in space, even to consider living on planetary surfaces could only be idiocy, or
some deviant plot to subvert that destiny. But Kirkpatrick was more than just a
maverick engineer with wild dreams, he was a man with a divine mission. A year
later, the quibble about living on a planetary surface wasn't even part of the
argument. Toynbee decided that the right of Mars to remain unchanged was
preempted by the imperative of life to spread into new niches. They had
convinced themselves that they had not merely a right, but a divine duty to seed
life on Mars.
Mars, back then, was completely inhospitable to life. The atmosphere was less
than one percent of the Earth's, and the average temperature was far below
freezing, even at the equator. But their analysis showed that the climate of
Mars just might be unstable. The surface of Mars showed networks of canyons and
run-off channels, dry lakes and the seashores of ancient oceans. There had been
water on Mars, once, a billion years or more ago, and plenty of it. All that