Ø You're assuming that the imperium is only looking for habitable planets with life on them to put roots down on if I'm following you. A planet could be a rock with an atmosphere and water and nothing more sophisticated than random strands of RNA. If the planet only has a 20,000 year habitable window that's a lot of time in human standards. Lets face it a few billion years back you could have chucked down a human colony on Mars and started farming there... Possibly. :)
Let me try this in a much shorter manner:
I am not assuming the Imperium is only looking for habitable planets with life on them.
I *am* assuming the Imperium is looking for planets with a useable atmosphere on them. And, by the Traveller world generation rules, they find *loads* of them. How did all of those atmosphere 4-9 worlds get their atmosphere? What generates that oxygen and keeps it in the atmosphere?
As a corollary, I am asking two questions:
1) How long would it take to change a world with a type 0 or 1 atmosphere into a type 4 or 5 atmosphere?
2) How long would it take to change a world with a type A atmosphere into a type 6 atmosphere?
I am obviously making a ton of assumptions on what it would take, and I could be completely, totally wrong. Answers to these two questions would pretty directly tell me how wrong I am.
Mike West
Let me try this in a much shorter manner:
I am not assuming the Imperium is only looking for habitable planets with life on them.
I *am* assuming the Imperium is looking for planets with a useable atmosphere on them. And, by the Traveller world generation rules, they find *loads* of them. How did all of those atmosphere 4-9 worlds get their atmosphere? What generates that oxygen and keeps it in the atmosphere?
As a corollary, I am asking two questions:
1) How long would it take to change a world with a type 0 or 1 atmosphere into a type 4 or 5 atmosphere?
2) How long would it take to change a world with a type A atmosphere into a type 6 atmosphere?
I am obviously making a ton of assumptions on what it would take, and I could be completely, totally wrong. Answers to these two questions would pretty directly tell me how wrong I am.
Mike West