"A rose-red city half as old as time."

It wouldn’t be right, the first night on Mars, to make a loud noise, to introduce a strange, silly bright thing like a stove. It would be a kind of imported blasphemy. There’d be time for that later; time to throw condensed-​milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone gray Martian sea bottoms; time for banana peels and picnic papers in the fluted, delicate ruins of the old Martian valley towns. Plenty of time for that. And he gave a small inward shiver at the thought.

Ray Bradbury, And The Moon Be Still As Bright

Hey, let’s terraform Mars.

Yes, I know, all we’ve done is look around via remote, we really haven’t seen the property in person yet, but what the heck, let’s assume that we’ll like it and that we’ll want to take it.  (And after all, I think we all take into account that the realtor’s photos are going to exaggerate things a little bit, make the yard look larger than it really is, that sort of thing.)

We start with a quick trip out to the Oort Cloud* – okay, not THAT quick, it’s about a light year – where we can start grabbing water ice planetoids and throwing them at Mars.  Given that we’re talking about an extended program of what is essentially bombing Mars with meteors, we really want to get this out of the way before we establish any bases on the planet.  Think of it as painting the new house before you move in, it’s just so much more convenient without any furniture.

Bombarding the planet with ice starts to help with the two major shortcomings of Mars:  liquid water and oxygen.  Mars does have a certain amount of water, but it’s mostly tied up in the polar ice caps (the southern ice cap is made up of frozen carbon dioxide – more commonly known as dry ice – but it’s generally accepted that the CO2 covers large deposits of water ice.)  Dropping big ice cubes from orbit starts to fill Mars’ minimal atmosphere with water vapour as well as throwing up a lot of dust, with the goal of jumpstarting the greenhouse effect:  the water vapour and dust create a barrier of clouds that should stop the heat created by the impacts from dissipating into space.

And the other thing you get from clouds?  Rain...

Or will it snow?  After all, the current weather report from the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) forecasts a high of -29 C and a low of -114 C, which sounds to me more like snow weather.  On the other hand, the greenhouse effect may raise the temperature enough for water to remain water.

Let's assume that we're going to get rain - and as a result, mud.  There are a few odd components in Martian soil (there's been a lot of discussion about the discovery of perchlorates in some samples) and, unlike terrestrial dirt, there's no real organic component.  Regardless, the presence of nutrients such as sodium, potassium and chloride would suggest that it will be possible to grow plants on Mars.

Water, as always, will seek its own level, even in the reduced gravity of Mars, and the misnamed Martian canals will become rivers that will ultimately create ponds, lakes and oceans.  Depending on the manner in which the components of the Martian soil leach into the water, it may or may not be possible to import sea life as part of the biosphere.

It will undoubtedly be necessary to introduce simple elements such as primitive mosses and lichens which will be able to survive on their own before moving up the evolutionary ladder to grasses, insects and so on.  As more plant life is introduced, we will see the oxygen level increase, but it will be a slow process. Electrolyzing asteroid water into hydrogen and oxygen will help speed things up, although that would require a substantial industrial footprint in order to be effective - all of which would need to come from Earth.

This is all very glib, but there’s an unasked question in all of this:  is this something we should do?  Rorschach images of giant faces aside, there’s no evidence of any sort of advanced life on Mars.  There may or may not be some kind of life at the bacterial level, but there’s certainly been absolutely no sign of anything advanced enough for colonists to take home as pets.  But does that make Mars a blank slate for us to write on?  Or, more accurately, a palimpsest, where we’re writing over the faded words already in place?

Whatever unique lessons we may be able to learn from Mars, we will not be able to learn them by turning the Red Planet into a clone of our own.  There may come a day where it's necessary for whatever reason to undertake the process that I've described above, but as with processes such as strip mining and hydraulic frakking, we will need to take the time to consider all the possible consequences before taking action.  After all, it's not like we'll be able to put everything back to the way it was if we make a mistake.

- Sid

* If you had to Google™ "Oort Cloud", hand in your geek card.

Or maybe it's because I used to watch the Leafs.

Really, this is another one of those "you know you're a geek when" postings.  It's the last day of the Sochi Winter Olympics, and I'm watching the Men's Hockey finals*.  Canada is up two points over Sweden, ten minutes to go, and I find myself thinking, "Great, kid - don't get cocky!"

- Sid

 * Anyone who knows me well read that and said, "You're doing what?" Okay, I slept poorly, woke up early, and hey, everyone else in the country is watching it...

UPDATED:  Final 3-0, Team Canada.

World Building.

Although The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been available since the end of 2011, I didn't bother picking up a copy of the game until the end of last year*.  And even then, I didn't start playing it right away - after all, I'd already played Fallout 3, which was also produced by the game developers at Bethesda, and as such I assumed it would just be a fantasy version of the same game.

Which is in many ways correct, but in saying that I do an enormous injustice to Skyrim and the unique, detailed environment that it offers to its players.  Fallout 3's blasted nuclear landscape was impressive, but Skyrim is astonishing in its evocation of the real world.

Driftwood, fallen hollow trees that have started to rot and grow moss, flickering torches, stumps from cutting timber, cloudy days, skiffs of dry snow blowing off the cobbled roads, textured slabs of stone in a city square, the Northern Lights flaring against the night sky, the shadow of a circling hawk rippling over the ground below, ferns at the side of the roadway, that peculiar greyish colour that snow gets when it's been trodden down into a path, the white noise of a waterfall as you pass by, the glint of light on the rippling surface of a lake, tattered banners fluttering against stone columns, grass swaying in the wind, worn grey logs in a makeshift bridge, curtains of rain sweeping across the heather, and on and on and on.

I did over 250 screen grabs for this posting - at which point I told myself to settle down - but that number is indicative of the sheer variety of the world that the game designers have created.  The template I use for this blog doesn't support galleries or tables, so I built something in HTML that would let me post some kind of representative sample of those hundreds of images in an attempt to illustrate just how amazing and varied the environment actually is.

If you take the time to click on any of the thumbnails for the full size image, remember that these views of the Nordic province of Skyrim are all taken from within the game as I played it - this is the actual environment that the player experiences as they battle dragons and complete quests in the process of discovering their destiny as one of the Dovahkiin - the Dragonborn. My character** has walked all these paths, climbed these hills, crossed these rivers, entered these houses.

I have to admit that it's not perfect. Skyrim spans hundreds of virtual miles, and when you're filling that much territory, something has to give or else players would need the sort of computing power that the Enterprise uses for the holodeck just in order to get the game to run. A close look at the trees and stones reveals that they're actually not that detailed, and there's apparently some Nord equivalent of IKEA™ that supplies furniture in bulk to the inhabitants of Skyrim, based on the similarities of beds and tables and chairs and so on. 

But ultimately, none of that matters when you're playing the game - it's a seamless, incredible illusion.

Of course, when you have that much going on in a program, mistakes do happen, as per my discovery of the rear half of a horse sticking out of the battlements of a captured fort.  At least I hope it's a mistake - either that or the game is making a very pointed comment about my gameplay.

Steam™, the online game hosting and management system from Valve which has changed the face of desktop gaming since its introduction in 2002, informs me that so far I've spent 99 hours wandering the varied landscape of Skyrim.  When you think about it, that's an impressive endorsement of the value of the game.  Skyrim cost me $29.99, which is more or less twice the cost of a two-hour 3-D movie, and it's provided me with almost 100 hours of entertainment - and I'm not finished. That's a pretty good return on investment for thirty bucks.

- Sid

*If you want to buy a computer game at half-price, all you have to do is wait about six months.  Not only do you save money, but other people get to test it, deal with the bugs, and let you know whether or not it's actually worth buying.

** My character is named Yendis, which has about the right sound for a fantasy game, and has been a convenient go-to for my fantasy alter egos since I was about ten.

P.S. Oh, and this is Lydia.

Lydia was assigned to me as a housecarl by the Jarl of Whiterun near the start of the game, and although I've had numerous chances to change companions over the course of events, I've developed a certain affections for Lydia, or Lyds, as I call her.

On one hand, Lyds has saved my life on innumerable occasions; on the other hand, if you're looking for someone to jump in front of you at the exact moment that you fire an arrow, charge ahead and attack a giant when you've decided to take the long way round and avoid a fight, or just stand in a doorway and keep you from getting out of a tent for ten minutes while you try to figure out how to get her to move, Lyds is your girl.