Parting the Land from the Waters…

There’s a couple of cool posts on terraforming appeared in io9 recently, telling me all sorts of things I did not know.

Part I: “How to Wreck A Planet in 3000 Years”:

… The term “terraforming” was invented by author Jack Williamson in his 1942 short story “Collision Orbit,” published in Astounding Science Fiction. In the intervening decades, its literal meaning (“Earth forming”) has shifted. It still commonly refers to the speculative act of altering non-Earth planets to make them habitable by humans. But anything that drastically changes geography to suit human interests can be called terraforming, even if it happens here on Earth. If only we all had the same interests…

Part II: “The Law of Unintended Consequences”:

Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn’t always work out as planned…
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The earliest artificial islands are Neolithic in origin. Scots were building crannógs 5,000 years ago. These small islands were built up with timber, stone and earth until a stable, round structure suitable for building a house upon was formed. 20th and 21st-century artificial islands are much larger. They can be tourist destinations (Montreal’s Île Notre-Dame), urban neighborhoods (San Francisco’s Treasure Island), industrial centers (Seattle’s Harbor Island), or even entire provinces (Flevoland in the Netherlands)…

(Before the CEO took advantage of 9/11 security theatre to shut it down, there was an observatory on the 60th floor of the Hancock Tower, the tallest building in Boston. One of the exhibits was an old-fashioned tabletop diorama showing how Boston looked at the time of the Revolutionary War… and in the center of the much-larger Boston Harbor, there was a tiny lucite brick about the size of a matchbox. That brick, of course, represented the Hancock Tower. A certain percentage of visitors would predictably freak out when the canned voice droning on about Paul Revere and Evacuation Day did the big reveal.)

Best of all, to my biology-biased mind, is the post on “How Salmonella Terraforms Your Intestines“: “The bowels are a difficult place to live. It’s damp and crowded and the landlord keeps trying to kick you out. Find out how salmonella uses the body’s immune response to transform the inside of your body into someplace liveable….” You’re gonna have to click through to read the Firefly joke in context.