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.
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.