Story Bazaar

Recreating Life

It all began in Australia...

Well, "It" began in the U.S. state of Florida at the Cape Canaveral space complex---"It" being human space flight.

The It that began in Australia was the Recreating called Terraforming. It was a trial-run for the real thing on Mars---bring lush forests and grain-growing soils to the huge central deserts of Australia...

It's not like there wasn't Life already in Australia's deserts---the acacia, gum, and eucalyptus trees---shrubs, vines, fuchsia, and ferns---the hopping mouse, mastiff bat, short-beaked echidna, mulga parrot, singing honeyeater, kestrel, and the pygmy monitor lizard.

But, all that Life was neatly adapted to very dry conditions...

70 per cent of the Australian continent was receiving less than 20 inches of rain annually, which classed it as arid---first task, get special grasses growing to increase the ambient humidity---which succeeded in one way (altering Australia's desert); but, failed because it caused eco-changes in neighboring Indonesia (due to the South-East trade winds)---that, in turn, causing more eco-changes, like a planet-hopping scourge.

Of course, the planet's eco-system had been rendered quite unstable before the Australian experiment began...

While the Earth faced its greatest environmental crisis, the Aborigines in Australia brought stability, over time, to the deserts, through their own methods of land management. This helped the rest of the world to regain a bit of climatological equilibrium...

The other development of the Aborigines' planet-saving expertise was the invitation, many years later, to be the prime terraformers for Mars...

To watch those noble folk board the first shuttle to the MarsExpress in orbit---to watch them, through the on-board cameras, acclimate to zero G and adapt to space flight---to follow along and see them reach the Red Planet, land in their own shuttle near the previously landed survival huts and special vehicles...

To know that members of one of the oldest groups of our human family were risking it all to terraform and live on another world...

It took many decades; but, the efforts of this formerly oppressed people gave humanity another planet to call home...

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