What if we got to the point were we had all the technology to change a planets' environment as our own, breathable air, needed pressure, low radiation...gravity we can handle. Well what if at that stage we sent in other species other then our own to colonize the planet in hopes that they develop evolutionary there and perhaps in hundred thousand years will be smart to explore space and be like we are? :bugeye: I always believed that species diversity is the key to achieving balance in life and maximizing chances of life to exist. Say we found a water planet....or even better moon Encelados with its underwater ocean and instead of going there ourselves, sent in the dolphins...we would set up robots to care for the moon to make sure it was not destroyed by us or any impacts, meanwhile we would wait for a natural development of dolphins intelligence. They are already as smart as the chimpanzees...perhaps even smarter. Perhaps here on Earth the environment did not let them fully evolve...but on oceans of Encelados it would allow them to evolve.
The idea of terraforming Venus is quite old now. It could be done in a few centuries by sending rockets full of extremophiles there to convert the CO2 into O2. Intelligence comes from necessity and challenging environments. Dolphins are about as far along as they are going to get, unless they develop hands. Even if there are water oceans under the surface of some of the moons of the gas giants, we might have to genetically engineer the dolphins to have natural anti-freeze in their blood.
Kaneda...Venus is way too hot to have extremophiles there...even the most extreme cannot survive blazing 500C and above on Venus. Dolphins...I disagree with you that hands are essential to intelligence development...perhaps they can develop telekinesis.
One of Larry Niven's first novels was about that. (I think it was World of Ptavvs but I can't find my copy.) Several billion years ago the people of the galactic civilization made a practice of seeding lifeless planets with a simple lifeform. It's never described in detail but they expect it to slowly take over the planet and eventually become a giant granary to supply them with food. Unfortunately their civilization is destroyed by a cause we never learn. On one of those planets the evolution of the primitive lifeform continued unabated for far longer than it was supposed to... well you can guess which planet that was.
Ian M. Banks had an even cooler idea, that other alien races would kidnap creatures from their planet, give them technology and stuff, then install them somewhere else, so that when the original people made it to space, they wouldn't be the most advanced of their kind.... And dolphins could not survive on Enceladus, not in their current state anyway... If you were going to populate any world in the solar system with life, you would probably want to do it on Europa.
A newly terraformed planet might be filled with one or more species of animal, like dolphins, dogs, chimps, african grey parrots, and/or octopuses, which have been genetically tweaked or modified in some other way so that they are likely to develop intelligence in the future. Then just let them get on with it to see what emerges. This sort of experimentalism might seem cruel to us, but to an advanced (human?) civilisation it might be a prime form of entertainment.
Or even better, just find a way to travel 5 or more billion light years that will not exceed the space-crafts capabilities, and go live there (on a planet not so dissimilar to earth), because any terra-tranformation would require more energy than what we can even sustain on Earth alone now, as it is going.
Neanderthals anyone??? Their the best option afther cooking something up ourself witch we know would probably end up like some dark angel fighting machines and have increadebly short live spans because of all the extra muscels and etc we would put in it. Neanderthals should be geneticly possible (not now but before we set a food on mars) Waiting for intiligence to develop on it's own is like waiting to make your money until you win the lottery. Furtheron I vote for paraterraforming let a phobos massed asteroid rich in nitrogen and carbon hit mars and you'l probably could tweak single celled life to live there
We do learn it, in fact in that very book. Slave races revolted, and after Slavers [the people you are referring to] wiped out all of them, their own civilization collapsed as it could not function without slaves.
Wasn't there a nearly sucessful revolt among the slave species that was only stopped when one of the members of the dominant species used a doomsday device which ordered all sentient life in the known galaxy to commit suicide? I don't think so. I think the suicide command killed all sentient life, including the slavers.
Yes, that's it. Niven never made that clear. Short story "The Handicapped" hints that grogs are degenerate descendants of Slavers, but it is only a hint.
