Water
Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.
Source
Water
When Perseus' descendants ventured to colonize other planets, they quickly realized that neither precious metals, nor hydrocarbons, nor any other mineral resource, was the most precious good one could have in any colonized world, at the end of the day in space there are countless worlds with unimaginable quantities of any of them.
On the contrary, water was the most valued resource, not because it was scarce, because it can be found with relative ease, it was because it was indispensable for life, without it, a planet no matter how adequate it might be, with respect to the amount of radiation received, temperature, magnetic field among others, lacked conditions for its habitability.
At first, many of the colonized planets had surface temperatures below the freezing point, such as Cerberus and Bellerophon, but later, as the search for new destinations became less urgent, the selection of planets became more adjusted to the condition of having liquid water on their surface. But always, be it in an icy cap, in large oceans or the borderline case of planets or oceans, in which there was no land emerged, water was always a minimum indispensable requirement for a planet to be even taken into account for terraforming.
Even in some cases, when the planet to be terraformed presented almost ideal conditions for its habitability, but the water covered less than thirty percent of its surface, comets were transported to bombard it in a controlled way, until the portion of water was at least two thirds of the surface, even when this generated a regression in the terraformation process.
The great oceans were home to most of the organisms coming from the Earth, among them phytoplankton, the main generator of oxygen and one of the first organisms introduced on a planet in terraformation, to initiate the adaptation of the mixture of atmospheric gases and make them breathable for the rest of life forms.
Only if a planet possessed important and valuable mineral resources, such as iridium and palladium, in absurdly large quantities, even without possessing water, could it be considered for colonization, but only for mining purposes and its population would be itinerant, was the importance given to water by the descendants of Perseus.
Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, October 2019
Otros relatos de la serie La Era de Perseo / Other stories from the series The Age of Perseus
- El Averno / The Avern
- Camino a Dione / Road to Dione
- Las Noches de Palas / The Nights of Palas
- ¿Natural o Generado? / Natural or Generated?
- Los Cristalodermos de Quimera / The Crystaloderms of Chimera
- Una Casa para el Parlamento / A House for Parliament
- Alone
- Fifteen Thousand Years After Perseus
- Storm
- Water
I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar
Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time