Returning from Poul Anderson's 1950s San Francisco to SM Stirling's and David Drake's colonized planet, Bellevue, we find more evidence of the mixed ecology. A mountain forest contains:
"...reddish-brown native whipstick and featherfrond..." (p. 379)
- alongside imported beech and fir.
Lower down, there are "russet grass," olives, cork-oak, coconut, sisal plantations, cotton, indigo, sugar and rice. Is the "russet grass" native or Terrestrial?
Further on, we read that:
"...tall reddish-tawny three-leafed native grass rippled, under the twisted little cork-oaks and silver-leafed olives men had brought here a millennium and a half ago." (p. 388)
We remember Poul Anderson's mixed ecologies and many local equivalents of grass. Will there really be any extra-solar planets that can accomodate human colonists and Terrestrial organisms as easily as this?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I suspect the "russet grass" is the same as the "...reddish-tawny three-leafed native grass."
As for the question you ended this blog piece with, I would answer, yes. Because if an extra-Solar planet is terrestroid enough, why shouldn't humans be able to live there, as well as many Earth organisms?
I've already found out from Robert Zubrin's THE CASE FOR SPACE of how WATER, in frozen form, a world as seemingly unpromising as Mars has! Given water and the other resources to be found on Mars, human beings CAN live there. And even to eventually terraform the Red Planet.
Sean
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