--- On Sat, 2/20/10, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:

> Just a quick thought: Bio-Tech has
> rules for genetic engineering 
> labs and also clone growth tanks. If the atmospheric
> composition 
> and pressure are roughly right, either because of earlier
> stages
> of terraforming or because they started out that way (like
> nasty
> aliens 'terraforming' Earth), would it make sense to deploy
> one
> big ship to establish a sustainable ecology?

Well that would sort of depend on how long you want to wait for your 
terraforming to take hold.

> 
> Enough forced growth tanks could turn out herds of
> herbivores to
> feed minimal breeding populations of carnivores, so the
> genetic 
> engineers don't have to come back later to add carnivores.
> 
> To make this work, the terraformers would need hundreds of
> labs
> and millions of hexes worth of growth tanks. That costs
> trillions
> of $, and it it requires a large ship.

Yes, or several smaller ones.

If all you want to do is give yourself a beginning atmosphere, you could 
theoretically do this with just the microflora/fauna decreasing the size of the 
tanks you need.

If you are going for anything larger then you have to either have plants or 
plant them for the herbivores. However they have to become established before 
you place herbivores there. You also need a fungal population to get rid of the 
old plant growth and start turning it into soil.

Alternately if you are talking a place which has edible plant life all you 
really need is a few rats and a few rabbits. ;)
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