Enoki
SOC-14 1K
A rough rule of thumb for costs would be the following as a percentage of the world's GDP:
No serious economic impact = 3 to 7%
Some economic impact = 15 to 20%
Major economic impact = 30%+
I doubt most economies could go much beyond 30% GDP into terraforming as that would almost certainly result in the decline of overall capacity in the long run.
The population and technology rules take care of the differences in those. Less population and less technology equal less GDP. That in turn means the time invested to get the same result increases and the end cost is roughly the same, just taking longer to get there.
As a concrete example, look at our planet. Prior to about 1970 or so, there were virtually no pollution controls on anything. In roughly 50 years we've made major strides in cleaning up many forms of pollution, particularly air and water.
So, it would be reasonable to say that we've altered the atmosphere by one value (from tainted to untainted... more or less) in that time. Please, don't nitpick that, it's just a rough example. That's using only a few percent of the world's GDP.
If on the other hand, you have a world willing to use a "wartime" amount of GDP (20 to 30%) to terraform, they would be able to make changes pretty rapidly, at least at first. Down the road, the law of diminishing returns would kick in and make things more and more difficult and costly to do. We see the same thing with pollution controls here today.
No serious economic impact = 3 to 7%
Some economic impact = 15 to 20%
Major economic impact = 30%+
I doubt most economies could go much beyond 30% GDP into terraforming as that would almost certainly result in the decline of overall capacity in the long run.
The population and technology rules take care of the differences in those. Less population and less technology equal less GDP. That in turn means the time invested to get the same result increases and the end cost is roughly the same, just taking longer to get there.
As a concrete example, look at our planet. Prior to about 1970 or so, there were virtually no pollution controls on anything. In roughly 50 years we've made major strides in cleaning up many forms of pollution, particularly air and water.
So, it would be reasonable to say that we've altered the atmosphere by one value (from tainted to untainted... more or less) in that time. Please, don't nitpick that, it's just a rough example. That's using only a few percent of the world's GDP.
If on the other hand, you have a world willing to use a "wartime" amount of GDP (20 to 30%) to terraform, they would be able to make changes pretty rapidly, at least at first. Down the road, the law of diminishing returns would kick in and make things more and more difficult and costly to do. We see the same thing with pollution controls here today.