Department of Mega-Engineering
Sarna News
The Department of Mega-Engineering (commonly abbreviated as "DoME") was an organization founded by the Terran Alliance focused primarily on terraforming. It continued its work under the Alliance's successor governments, reaching its zenith during the Star League.
Contents
History
Formation
Prior to the invention of the JumpShip, humanity faced the daunting prospect of being limited to the worlds in a single solar system. The Terran Alliance looked to Mars and Venus as potential solutions to the overcrowding of Terra, spent much of the 21st century studing the feasibility of transforming their homeworld's closest neighbors. These studies ultimately estimated that Mars could be terraformed in approximately 300 years, given unlimited funding and resources. Despite the daunting predictions of cost and time, the Alliance directed DoME to begin the terraforming of Mars, which they named Project Lowell, in 2110. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
Lowell
Just three years before terraforming work began on Mars, the TAS Pathfinder made its first successful jump. This threatened to undermine the entire project, as Earth-like worlds where a minimum of infrastructure was necessary for human habitation were far more common than initially believed. Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
Aphrodite
Not content to settle Mars, DoME tackled an even more daunting task as they tried to convert the hellish environment of Venus into a garden. Work on Project Aphrodite, the Venusian counterpart to Lowell, did not begin until the waning years of the 22nd century. This project would boast the grandest scope of any engineering project ever attempted. First spending decades scattering airborne algae to thin the heavy Venusian atmosphere, DoME then began bombarding the planet with hydrogen, first by redirecting comets toward the planet, but later with gas shipments from Titan. At the same time, a massive solar shade was placed in orbit sunward of Venus, reducing the amount of solar energy it absorbed while collecting excess energy for other projects. By 2203, Venus' conditions had been mitigated enough for exploration of the planet's surface. Twenty atmospheric processing plants were built on the surface to continue the work of mitigating the hothouse world, and perhaps most impressively, much of the atmosphere was repurposed as reaction mass, allowing DoME to accelerate Venus' rotation until its day was a mere 48 hours long.[1] Venus eventually became a breadbasket world for the system due to the unique properties of its soil, feeding the rest of the Sol system and exporting food to struggling colonies. Over 202 million people resided on Venus during the Star League's zenith.[2]
Later projects
With the great success of Lowell and Aphrodite, DoME's future was ensured, and it would survive the transformation of the Alliance into the Terran Hegemony. The lessons learned from terraforming Mars and Venus were applied to hundreds of worlds, allowing for a massive expansion of humanity. Processes like microbe seeding, comet bombardment and atmospheric processing allowed for the settlement of previously uninhabitable worlds, while the orbital habitats and manufacturing facilities used in the process of terraforming gave the colonists of new systems a jumping-off point for economic growth.[3]