Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,80
big, and there are too many factors, many of them unknown. But what we will learn from it will be useful in controlling Earth’s climate, in avoiding global warming or a future ice age. It’s an experiment, a big one, and it will always be an ongoing experiment, with nothing guaranteed or known for sure. But that’s what science is.”
People would nod at this.
Arkady as always was thinking of the political point of view. “We can never be self-sufficient unless we do terraforming,” he pointed out. “We need to terraform in order to make the planet ours, so that we will have the material basis for independence.”
People would roll their eyes at this. But it meant that Sax and Arkady were allies of a sort, and that was a powerful combination. And so the arguments would go around, again and again and again, endlessly.
And now Underhill was nearly complete, a functioning and in most ways a self-sufficient village. Now it was possible to act further; now they had to decide what to do next. And most of them wanted to terraform. Any number of projects had been proposed to begin the process, with advocates for each, usually those who would be responsible for doing it. This was an important part of terraforming’s attraction; every discipline could contribute to the enterprise in one way or another, so it had broad-based support. The alchemists talked about physical and mechanical means to add heat to the system; the climatologists debated influencing the weather; the biosphere team talked about ecological systems theories to be tested. The bioengineers were already working on new microorganisms: shifting, clipping and recombining genes from algae, methanogens, cyanobacteria, and lichens, trying to come up with organisms that would survive on the present Martian surface, or under it. One day they invited Arkady to take a look at what they were doing, and Nadia went along with him.
They had some of their prototype GEMs in Mars jars, the largest of which was one of the old habitats in the trailer park. They had opened it up, shoveled regolith onto the floor, and sealed it again. They worked inside it by teleoperation, and viewed the results from the next trailer over, where instrument gauges took readings, and video screens showed what the various dishes were producing. Arkady looked at every screen closely, but there wasn’t that much to see: their old quarters, covered with plastic cubicles filled with red dirt, robot arms extending from their bases against the walls. There were visible growths on part of the soil, a bluish furze.
“That’s our champion so far,” Vlad said. “But still only slightly areophylic.” They were selecting for a number of extreme characteristics, including resistance to cold and dehydration and UV radiation, tolerance for salts, little need for oxygen, a habitat of rock or soil. No single Terran organism had all these traits, and those that had them individually were usually very slow growers, but the engineers had started what Vlad called a mix-and-match program, and recently they had come up with a variant of the cyanophyte that was sometimes called bluegreen algae. “It is not precisely thriving, but it does not die so fast, let us put it that way.” They had named it areophyte primares, its common name becoming Underhill algae. They wanted to make a field trial with it, and had prepared a proposal to send down to UNOMA.
Arkady left the trailer park excited by the visit, Nadia could see, and that night he said to the dinner group, “We should make the decision on our own, and if we decide in favor, act.”
Maya and Frank were outraged by this, and clearly most of the rest were uncomfortable as well. Maya insisted on a change of subject, and awkwardly the dinner conversation shifted. The next morning Maya and Frank came to Nadia, to talk about Arkady. The two leaders had already tried to reason with him, late the night before. “He laughs in our face!” Maya exclaimed. “It’s useless to try to reason with him!”
“What he proposes could be very dangerous,” Frank said. “If we explicitly disregard a directive from the U.N., they could conceivably come here and round us up and ship us home, and replace us with people who will pay attention to the law. I mean, biological contamination of this environment is simply illegal at this point, and we don’t have the right to ignore that. It’s international treaty. It’s how humanity in general wants to treat this