I’m working on a prequel series to my Waking Late trilogy. It’s much closer in time to the original settlement of Nwwwlf, and has thus forced me to think about terraforming and how one would bring Earth’s flora, fauna, and microbial infrastructure to a new world to make it a new Earth. That was the original plan for the hapless ancestors of my Waking Late characters, who thought they were heading for a terraformed Earth clone. Instead, they are stuck on the wrong planet, one with its own ecology, and only one valley made Earth-friendly. The way I figure it, a couple thousand years from now we’ll have terraforming enterprises that seek out strange new worlds of barren rock and turn them into copies of Mother Terra. The planets with their own life will be saved for study by people in SCAPE suits.
Alas, if you take your starship through a wormhole the wrong way, you can get lost, and the Valerie Hall gets good and lost. Fortunately, this being fiction, the Val finds a semi-hospitable planet and ruthlessly terraforms a small piece of the new world, in violation of all principles of scientific preservation, planetary protection, and the current notion that all life is static. The crew of the Valerie Hall and the emigrants from the WesHem and Mars settle an area the size of the Chiang Mai valley in Thailand — or at least my memory of it — and turn it green.
Many years ago I heard Elon Musk talk at a conference. He had just started SpaceX, and explained that he created his launch company because he’d wanted to send a little greenhouse with a flower to Mars. The expense was daunting, even for him, and he figured that he could bring the price of launch down. He did. He did that and more — flyback boosters, Teslas to Mars, vertical landings, all good.
But I don’t think he meant the flower as a first step in the blossoming of Mars. If memory serves, he meant it as a sign of hope. I have to admit, I found the flyback boosters a better sign of hope myself, but that’s neither here nor there. If we set aside how these giant terraforming companies would get a barren rock ready for terraforming in the first place — particularly because I can’t begin to get my head around making air and will save that for another story — I have started to fret about what one would bring from Earth.
I am not an expert gardener. I like gardening, and I know how to water plants and that they need organic matter. It’s been a long learning curve for me. My husband and I bought our first house when I was twenty-nine. It had a nice backyard that was covered in ivy. I bought some gardening books to read about how to garden. Like Elon Musk, I wanted flowers, although I wanted them in my back yard, not on Mars. After I finished my reading, it became clear to me that I needed to amend the soil — which is clay in Maryland, and not such great stuff — and then plant shrubs for structure and only get around to the flowers after all that other stuff was done. So I planted flowers.
In my defense, I was lazy and wrong. Admittedly, that’s not much of a defense, but let me explain. I was lazy because after meeting up with the roots of the ivy and hacking my way through the clay I found I had cleared very little after hours of labor. This was dispiriting and made me embrace my inner slug. I had two issues with planting shrubs. First, they were more expensive than bulbs. Second, they wouldn’t look good for years and years, at which point I’d be middle-aged and old and clearly unable to appreciate beauty any longer. This turned out to be wrong, and — spoiler alert — I still appreciate beauty even though I’m now (ahem) arguably middle-aged.
I muddled along like this for a while, eventually planting shrubs, and then finally, after we’d been in the house over ten years, I started working on amending the soil.
As for beauty, despite my advanced age, I have recently planted a dozen mountain laurels. We put down a thick layer of compost and I water them daily. They are finicky creatures. They are native Marylanders who do well in the woods, but have trouble in gardens and yards. I’m hoping the overgrown, brambled, weedy mess that we smothered in the very back of our yard provides the right kind of soil. It is the working theory.
I’m wondering whether to start feeding them compost tea or mycorrhizae fungus. I want them to live. There’s a good argument that although the mycorrhizae fungus pellets are cool and awesome, and the fungus itself spreads for miles underground feeding nutrients to plant roots and exchanging phosporous for carbon and performing other rollicking functions, that the compost tea can give the mountain laurels all that and more.
This has got me thinking about how to bring primordial soup to another planet. These cost-conscious terraformers are not going to pack a starship full of compost tea. That’s a ton of weight, which could be better taken up by freezing paying settlers and placing them in stasis stacked neatly atop each other. How about soil? Would you carry a bunch of dirt? That’s got to be heavy. Earthworms? I am quite excited when I see earthworms in the garden. I don’t try to pet them or anything, but I do appreciate them. Could they, too, survive cryogenic storage, or that staple of interstellar travel–stasis? More importantly, do the bacteria in the guts of people or worms survive? How much primordial soup can a starship carry? And can it be dehydrated? For plot purposes, I want the answer to be yes.
Although I have just written many paragraphs explaining how I got to where I am on this question, I’ve realized I’m pretty much nowhere. And I don’t know how to get somewhere. I’ve read up on planetary protection, the principle under which NASA and other space agencies make sure they don’t bring Earth bacteria to other planets and muddy the scientific waters, so to speak. Obviously, this is antithetical to my heretical terraforming plans and not a good resource for how to bring Earth bacteria elsewhere.
I was thinking I’d have to buy some books. So far, I’ve found this book, but it covers such a wide array of topics I worry that the discussion on terraforming might be more general than I need. If anyone has read it, please let me know. Or, even better, I welcome suggestions on reading. Otherwise, I’ll be spending time grazing in the web.
NB: Martha’s Sons isn’t about terraforming, but terraforming appears and provides a backdrop to the infrastructure. Also, it matters in the third book, which I’m working on now.
Mountain laurel photo credit:
by 
Not sure this will be helpful, but here goes:
My first Heinlein, in fourth grade, was Farmer in the Sky. Yes, it mostly concerns the adventures of the protagonist. Yes, it’s kinda old. But the environment of the tale is the colonization and terraforming of Ganymede.
Oddly, I found myself really fascinated by the descriptions of how the native soil was prepared, and how the colonists needed to use the very limited quantity of earth sourced material (somewhat addressing the issue of how much stuff can you boost to your destination) to grow and spread in order to make their farms.
I imagine most other kids got bored with those sections of the book. For reasons I don’t understand, I thought it was cool. Maybe I just liked the machines that chewed up the rock into a fine powder. And you just know that RAH, true to form, did a good bit of thinking on the subject, although we have no doubt learned so much more since then.
Regardless, I certainly don’t grow anything now, and even hate cutting the lawn.
I very much look forward to the new series, as I enjoyed the last one immensely, particularly the final installment, which had lots of muskets (Me like muskets. Muskets are goooood. A pain in the buttocks, but still pretty neat).
I’m so glad you liked the muskets. I was a big fan of the Spenser rifles myself, by the end.
Thank you also for the reminder about the Heinlein. I went to my shelves to look for it and was shocked not to find it. It does explain why I can’t remember re-reading it. The other shocking news is that Farmer in the Sky doesn’t seem to be on kindle. It’s on audio, but not on Kindle. What’s up with that?
I’m sure Heinlein did a good bit of thinking on the subject, and I will track this down. Thanks for mentioning it.