Quoted By:
Because of the previous Supreme Ruler's decision to <span class="mu-s">use Xin as a bio-product producing world</span>, the planet's fragile ecosystem has been almost depleted. Maktana III explains further.
"Xin was never naturally able to support life. Only as a result of many years from the terraforming project, pink bacteria, and Blue-Hazaar labor over generations were able to get the planet to a point where it became habitable. While the planet was in the exact habitable zone and had liquid water- it still didn't have the biosphere to develop life. Over the past few centuries- work has been done to supply this planet with nutrients and a microbe ecosystem to support more complex life. The constant labor of the Hazaari sustained it. However, over the past 25 years, after it became stable, the planet has been used for bio-products. Industrial levels of textiles, food production, medicine, genetic research materials, plants designed to process base-level phosphates, harvesting for bio-cubes to seed planetary installations, things like that. The great purge of Blue-Hazaar greatly enriched the soil of this planet with billions of corpses. But all of that nutrient and organic mass has since been all but depleted. The planet only has had life for a scant few hundred years in total- a fraction of the time of most habitable worlds. Yes, the Blue-Hazaar genocide seeded the fields and valleys with calories and nitrogen, but all of our other habitable worlds have billions of years worth of extinction events to enrich the soils and limestones. Other habitable planets have hundreds of millions of species in a complex web of life- the extinction of one is a footnote. Xin has a few dozen species specially designed for it- if any went extinct it would be a disaster."
<span class="mu-b">"What does this mean for Xin? Are you safe to be on the surface right now?"</span>
"Oh no, my Lord, there is no immediate problem. All biospheres are inherently very stable- with checks and balances found in the living things. If the plants begin to die off, less oxygen will be produced as waste, so more of the oxygen-consuming microbes will die off, releasing massive amounts of CO2, thus boosting plant growth, and so on. But this planet is now entering a <span class="mu-s">death spiral</span>. The planet's atmosphere will no longer be breathable in 50 years, requiring face masks just to be outside. In another 100 years past that, the planet will require a pressurized suit, just like the barren rock it began as. We will have lost our first great scientific project."
<span class="mu-b">"...Surely, this can be fixed."</span>
"It can. But you won't like the trade offs.."
>Prioritize a Scientific Solution to Xin (Suspend Science Research one year)
>Leave Xin fallow (Economic downturn)
>Carry on as is (Xin begins its death spiral)
