cralkhi wrote:Graydon wrote:Do we know spider-crabs are Safeholdian? The terrestrial spider-crab is considered a delicacy, so it's just possible they're one of the added species.
Yes. OAR Glossary describes it as "a native species of sea life, considerably larger than any terrestrial crab".
Which is fairly alarming given how big king crabs and Japanese spider crabs get.
It also says that it's not really a crustacean but more like a many-legged seagoing slug. Sounds appetizing!
OK then. (Yikes.)
It's amazing what people will eat when they're hungry enough. You know the Pratchett theory of delicacies? Nobody with lots to eat tries oysters, snails, lobsters, boiling bird's nests, making soup out of fish heads, etc. so most delicacies arise from people who were at some time starving.
cralki wrote:[did Shan-wei's crews alter dragons?]
They'd have to figure out the native DNA-equivalent to be able to engineer anything at all, including the moss.
And their tech may very well have been able to reliably predict what an alteration would do without need for trial and error.
Figuring out the native DNA -- how it's coded and transcribed -- doesn't get you anything about what it means, though, and meaning is nigh-certainly going to be this complex mess because that's how descent-with-modification works. It's very unlikely they can skip the trial-and-error step entirely, a lot of questions of expression are environmental, DNA doesn't and there are strong reasons to expect the Safeholdian equivalent doesn't, work as prescriptive rules, it's going to be a bunch of constraints on responses to the environment. It's pretty much impossible to simulate that, you have to do the actual experiments. (Rather like you stop being able to predict billiard ball bounces after low integer numbers of bounces; too much lurking chaos in the real system.)
cralkhi wrote:The dragons just seem suspiciously good/useful to me. And given that we know Shan-wei and co. were messing around...
It's possible that their metabolism is just naturally more efficient, though.
The dragons are suspiciously good/useful, but then so are potatoes. Dragons might well have occurred mostly naturally.
cralkhi wrote:[getting a reliable domesticate]
For us, yeah, but I think that's something that we could be able to do in ~20 years - much less 400ish - if we actually put effort into studying how to do it. The Soviet 'silver fox' experiments suggest domestication may not be as complex as one might think.
Silver fox results go by generations; they were at generation twenty to get ~1/3 actually domestic (or at least, dog-equivalent) behaviour. That would take a long time with dragons! When you're starting with a creature you don't know very much about simply because you haven't been observing it for very long.
cralki wrote:Graydon wrote:The whole "reliably human habitat in about a hundred years" thing is extremely impressive, I don't want to postulate that the terraforming crew did more than the minimum necessary because that minimum is already vast.
It's not clear to me exactly what they altered. If all they really did was introduce Earth species and tweak them a bit to fit, it's impressive, but not necessarily very far beyond what we could do if we put some effort into it.*
Well, consider trees; there are maple trees, various fruit trees, etc. In a hundred years, you haven't even gone through one generation for some tree species. Certainly a terran-style forest hasn't undergone one complete successional cycle. You don't really know these things are going to reproduce OK locally, that you got everything right so there isn't going to be an outbreak of insect pests or a collapse in the apple population due to a mis-timing with the pollinator life cycle. (Or that the horribly flammable native understory persists as roots, and somewhere around year twenty,
foom!)
This is way beyond what we could do; not only are ecologies massive collections of moving parts, the parts all modify themselves and each other.
cralki wrote:*Biotech is IMO mostly being kept from taking off the way computer-tech did because it is so hard to market altered crops etc. [snip]
Well, there are three big problems with biotech.
Politically, it gets used as a way to establish control and extract rents forever; farmers are understandably less than pleased about that. (Farm productivity has about tripled since 1950. Farm incomes, in constant dollars, are flat or slightly down. Farmers have the odd notion that this is not accidental.)
It gets used to do really stupid things, often in context of trying to extract those rents; "Roundup-Ready" lasts for about twenty years before the genes start leaking into the weed population, at which point the business model collapses in a welter of bad outcomes. (Much tougher, including physically tougher, weeds are not a net win! Neither is having dumped herbicide everywhere for a couple decades.)
Biology means things change themselves. This is much worse than computer code, where at least if something in the code is horrible someone put it there. Biology, not so much, and you're not specifying outcomes, you're constraining developmental processes that interact with the organism's whole environment in often surprising ways and certainly in very complex ways. There's no way you fully understand how that works when you make the genetic changes.
So, sure, immensely useful tech, but people have to use it right, just like anything else, and using it right is hard because it's inherently interactive with a whole huge poorly understood set of environmental interactions.
