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Re:American chestnut trees are “technically extinct” by annnnd on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @07:13AM (#13480770)
On a different tangent: do you think thus created nature will be beautiful to us? Will it be beautiful to people who are born there?

I wonder why the trees are beautiful to us.. Maybe because we are used to them and connect nice memories to the image of trees?

Re:American chestnut trees are “technically extinct” by nickparker on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @07:50PM (#13487783)
I don't think we'll create anything radically different enough to not be beautiful.

Modifying what already exists is usually easier than creating something from nothing, and I would expect that to apply for engineering new organisms.

If you mean will the ecosystems be beautiful to us, as in, will a forest in a space station really be a forest, or more of a gaudy tourist attraction and/or a sterile research environment, I'm hopeful that we'll choose to include some allowance for beauty in our planning.

Kim Stanley Robertson's Mars trilogy touches on these themes a lot, and I'm also drawing to some degree from the Culture series' vision of orbitals. We're clearly centuries (at least) from being able to build orbitals, but I think far smaller ring structures - and even more likely mere two-body tether set ups - may be just decades ahead.