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This article on the Beeb is utterly fascinating and a part of Darwin's story of which I was completely unaware.
It's about Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic, and how Darwin - and his friend and colleague, Joseph Hooker - effectively undertook an early terraforming project, introducing plants to the barren island in order to make it more habitable for the Royal Navy by creating (through experimentation) a cloud forest ecosystem, thereby capturing rain and turning it into drinking water rather than have it evaporate.
And 160 years later, they have this weird but effective, robust ecosystem in place, cobbled together from various plants from various different ecosystems across the globe, which they think may yield lessons we can use if we ever decide to terraform Mars ::g::
That's a book I think I may be buying if it's ever written.
It's about Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic, and how Darwin - and his friend and colleague, Joseph Hooker - effectively undertook an early terraforming project, introducing plants to the barren island in order to make it more habitable for the Royal Navy by creating (through experimentation) a cloud forest ecosystem, thereby capturing rain and turning it into drinking water rather than have it evaporate.
And 160 years later, they have this weird but effective, robust ecosystem in place, cobbled together from various plants from various different ecosystems across the globe, which they think may yield lessons we can use if we ever decide to terraform Mars ::g::
That's a book I think I may be buying if it's ever written.