Terraformable planets, no atmosphere

[Caramel Clown]

Run into few of those terraformable planets, however - there's no atmosphere, and no volcanic activity. It's in a habitable zone, but what exactly is there to terraform? It looks like planet has ice that could be melted perhaps, but in stats it lists it as rocky and metallic with no ice. Anybody has theories? Just another quirk of stellar forge?

Spoiler

 

[CMDR Yates]

I've found that these airless terraformable are usually slap bang in the middle of their Goldilocks zone. I think the lack of an atmosphere is a big minus for terraforming, but it's not a deal breaker, there are other properties that, if positive enough, can boost its attractiveness for terraforming. Getting a perfect amount of solar radiation is probably one of them.

It probably also helps that it has a decent amount of gravity, enough to easily sustain an atmosphere if the right matter was added in the right quantities (by dropping icy comets, or reacting rock layers to release gases en masse).

There are a lot of other properties modelled by the stellar forge that aren't shown in game as well. It might be that the planet has a strong magnetic field that would give extra protection to a nascent atmosphere, or there might be a lot of comets in the vicinity.

Edit: also, an ice cap probably wouldnt have enough mass to register as even 0.1% of the planet's mass in the overview, but might have enough material to kick-start a thin atmosphere.

 

[varonica]

Run into few of those terraformable planets, however - there's no atmosphere, and no volcanic activity. It's in a habitable zone, but what exactly is there to terraform? It looks like planet has ice that could be melted perhaps, but in stats it lists it as rocky and metallic with no ice. Anybody has theories? Just another quirk of stellar forge?

Spoiler

You just push a shedload of icy comets at it and seed it with cracking nanites to break the resulting water down into an oxy/hydrogen atmosphere, bleed off the excess hydrogen, seed the seas with algae to produce nitrogen and bingo, ELW!

 

[Sapyx]

The current composition of the atmosphere (or lack thereof) is not taken into consideration for terraformability calculations. It is considered an engineering problem, not a laws-of-physics problem.

A lack of atmosphere is probably more easily corrected, via comet-bombardment or similar, than an excess of atmosphere, which requires some kind of processor and, presumably, an outsource or means of disposal of the unwanted gas.

I recently found a terraformable waterworld in the Bubble - it was actually in the process of being terraformed - with an atmosphere at 32 atmospheres pressure, composition about 90% nitrogen, 9% argon, 1% oxygen. Which means the oxygen content is actually about right, it's getting rid of all that excess nitrogen and argon that will be the problem. Some of the nitrogen will need to be used up by fixating it into the soil but 32 atmospheres worth is way too much for that; nor can that much gas be buried, or dissolved in the ocean. The only way to get rid of it is to physically pick it up and move it off-planet. Massive-scale liquefaction and export seems to me to be the only possible solution.

I've always thought that it would be cool if, on a planet like this, "liquid nitrogen" and "liquid argon" were purchasable commodities, whereas on a planet with 3 atmospheres of 99% oxygen, "Liquid Oxygen" would be the excess gas commodity, and nitrogen and argon would need to be imported. This would give the Terraforming economies "logical" supply and demand for their specific planetary needs, rather than a generic "they demand everything and produce only biowaste" economy.

 

[Rooster Podunk]

We 'think' we can see the day when "terraformable" would be possible. Me I think we are fooling ourselves. We be good, I don't believe we'll ever be that good. The biggest roadblock, I believe, is biological. How the hell do you vaccinate for a flu that has been evolving 3 billion years before you even knew it existed, or eyeball eating gophers?

 

[Sapyx]

Ah, here it is, in the LP 51-17 system. Didn't quite recall the stats perfectly, but the argument still stands.

...How the hell do you vaccinate for a flu that has been evolving 3 billion years before you even knew it existed...

Ah, the "H.G. Wells fallacy", the theory that a lifeform whose ancestors were never exposed to a potential pathogen would be particularly vulnerable to it. We see from history what happened when smallpox and other Old World diseases hit the Americas or Australia for the first time and extrapolate that behaviour to assume the same would be likely to happen with human first contact with viruses on other planets.

The trouble with the theory is this: the native humans living in the Americas and Australia were physiologically identical to the Old World colonists, so the viruses could exploit the same loopholes in the human immune system that it "knew" were already there and had been designed to detect and exploit. An alien virus does not have that advantage, because it's never seen a human immune system or anything remotely likely to resemble a human immune system before. So our immune system would detect it and shut it down before it could even get a foothold - just like it does for the vast majority of non-pathogenic Earth-native viruses that try to infect us every day.

Now, we can never say never; given enough planets with native ecosystems (and in the ED universe there are certainly plenty), there are bound to be a few out there with a virus that just happens to be a "good fit" for a loophole in our immune defence. And we see in ED lore that there are plenty of new diseases, such as the Cerberus Plague, that afflict the galaxy as a whole and specific star systems. But even so, such things are much rarer than H.G. Wells might have imagined. And even here, we are uncertain what proportion of galactic pandemics are caused by genuinely "alien viruses", and which are caused by normal everyday mutations of Earth-origin viruses.

 

[marx]

The biggest roadblock, I believe, is biological. How the hell do you vaccinate for a flu that has been evolving 3 billion years before you even knew it existed, or eyeball eating gophers?

Well, we are talking about terraformable worlds here, which means that either they don't have complex life on the surface, or if they do, then it had to evolve for vastly different conditions. In which case it would almost certainly be incompatible with our biochemistry.

So, in this one regard then, it could actually be more dangerous to colonize an Earth-like world than a terraformed one. Still, I'd imagine that even with ED's technology, surveying a planet for potentially harmful organisms would still be easier than terraforming another planet.

 

[Caramel Clown]

Huh, honestly totally forgot about comets. Devs said comets were modeled somewhere in a background, but I guess we just have to take their word on this.

 

[Rooster Podunk]

Ah, the "H.G. Wells fallacy", the theory that a lifeform whose ancestors were never exposed to a potential pathogen

Great response!

All I know for sure is that when they ask for volunteers to take off their helmet, I'll be at home watching on TV. Cheers!

 

[CMDR Yates]

Huh, honestly totally forgot about comets. Devs said comets were modeled somewhere in a background, but I guess we just have to take their word on this.

Apparently, you can "visit" one comet in Pareco. I haven't been, but I've been meaning to for ages.

In that system there are several stations all orbiting a comet, close enough to one another that you can fly between them in normal space. The comet isn't modelled, and doesn't have a nav marker or even a hitbox, so it looks like the stations are orbiting nothing. But if you fly to the midpoint between the ring of stations (without FSDing), at the very centre, you'll see your location at the bottom left of the HUD change to "Pareco Comet 2". Presumably, there's a "Pareco Comet 1", and possibly comets in almost every system, but finding them in normal space, without a marker (or an informal one like Pareco's orbiting stations), would be like finding a grain of sand in the Atlantic Ocean.

So they're almost definitely "there", and they even have their own instances, we just can't target them or see them. Yet! (fingers crossed!)