Apparently, vacuum doesn’t faze the stuff.
Let’s see here, this lends a little more weight to the panspermia concept, might make terraforming Mars a wee bit easier, and reminds me of one of the books in The Starchild Trilogy where plant covered asteroids are discovered.
Kim Stanley Robinson addressed this in his Mars trilogy.
I’m currently reading Roger MacBride Allen’s Solace trilogy and it tells the tale of a Mars where a terraforming project went horribly awry rendering the planet effectively dead.
How could anybody tell the difference?
The terraforming went pretty good for a while. Then the breakdown of the terraforming “matrix” happened. A bizarre form of mold literally blanketed the planet and destroyed the ecosphere. The planet is currently under quarantine. Any ship that lands is not allowed to leave. Any attempts to do so will activate the weapons platforms on Deimos and Phobos and the ship will get blasted to bits.
The failure of the terraforming project is the basis of the entire story. All terraformed planets face the same fate (albeit not necessarily by mold).
So, I guess in the future they’ve lost the formula for Lysol and forgotten that copper kills mold?
The problem got out of hand very quickly. No sooner than they fixed one problem would three or four more problems pop up. They’d kill one form of mold, only to have other. more dangerous ones take its place. An element in the story is that the man who “invented” the terraforming procedure knew it was flawed, but his ego wouldn’t let him stop.
Was his name “David Marcus” by any chance?
No, but that would have been funny. The guy’s name was Oskar DeSilvo. He didn’t cheat when he started the terraformimg projects, but he suppressed vital information that, had it been made public, would have scuttled the projects. Because of his arrogance, dozens of planets and billions of people face a certain unpleasant doom. I’ve just started the third book and he and the people who have searched for him over years and space are making a last ditch effort to fix everything.