[JumpCrisscross]

> If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort

The Earth hasn't always been hospitale to humans, much less technological civilisation. Chances are, we'll have to do similar "maintenance" at home, too. (Easiest to grasp: deflecting asteroids.)

> I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch

This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g. One of the most useful set of experiments we could be doing right now, in terms of colonisation, is putting lots of rats and whatnot in tiny space stations and letting their life cycles play out.

[elcritch]

Great, and rats will become super adapted to space. Then they'll become endemic to any space habitats humanity builds. Terraforming planets sounds more plausible than not ending up with rats and cockroaches.

[JumpCrisscross]

> and rats will become super adapted to space

That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too. I suspect, unfortunately, we'd have to iron out some kinks first [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8675004/

[littlestymaar]

> That would be great! It would strongly imply humans, over cycles of reproducing in space, would too.

Animals in their natural habitat and humans (especially with modern healthcare) are responding very differently to environmental pressure: we would need to accept a high infant and child mortality rate to be able to evolve.

And the humans having a much longer lifetime and a much smaller amount of descendant means that even without technology we would evolve orders of magnitude slower than rats.

[eru]

Rats can be pretty tasty.

And: if rats can survive somewhere, it's a pretty small step to make it survivable for humans.

[djmips]

So we'll need responsible stewardship over Earth's Habitability? No problem!

[JumpCrisscross]

> we'll need responsible stewardship over Earth's Habitability

This is just a semantic punt to "stewardship". (Why is habitability capitalised?)

[djmips]

typo. Also I'm being sarcastic.

[eru]

> This comes down to how biology works in zero and partial g.

Why? Just spin the thing.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why? Just spin the thing

Sure. Let's put rats in centrifuges in space and see if they can reproduce successfully. Maybe there is a coriolis boundary. Maybe something weird happens.

[eru]

If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine.

But yeah, sticking rats in a centrifuge is probably a better first step than starting with humans.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you make your centrifuge big enough, it's fine

We don't know this! We don't know how (or even if) an embryo develops under the Coriolis force, or with a gravity gradient.

[eru]

If you make it big enough, there's no discernible gradient and not much of a Coriolis force.