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places for frozen elements. Elements necessary for terraforming the planet.
    “Clive, activate cloaking, please.” He didn’t want anyone to sneak up on him while he was busy with the search.
    As he orbited, he began his scan of the poles. He found, beneath both poles, large deposits of frozen CO 2. Dry ice. Mostly subterranean, but with a largish percentage above ground.
    “Well,” he laughed, “I guess I can cancel that dry ice order.”
    “Done,” said Clive.
    “Thanks.” He continued scanning. The large amounts of dry ice on the planet opened other avenues of development for him. He brought up the game’s wiki page, the header page for terraforming.
    The primary method used to create an atmosphere was to generate a large volume of greenhouse gasses. One of the ways that his terraforming kit could do that was to breed and seed large, unbelievably large, numbers of methanogens; microorganisms in the domain Archaea - the same domain as the chemolithotrophs happily living in his ship’s ore ‘smelter’. Like its cousin, the methanogen seemed intelligently designed just for human space exploration.
    The methanogens, Methanothermobacter wolfeii, Methanosarcina barkeri - Duncan, his eyes glazing, skipped past the list of various species - consumed CO 2 and excreted methane. They are anaerobic - that is they don’t require oxygen - they don’t require organic nutrients, and they don’t photosynthesize so they can live underground; they’re the ideal tool for unlocking the global warming potential of frozen CO 2 at the poles by turning it into methane gas.
    The terraforming kit, which Duncan would place near one of the poles as soon as he determined which had the greater ‘stash’ of dry ice, would breed the bacteria and, through drones, seed various areas around the poles with the carbon munching beasties.
    Once the planet began to warm, the frozen CO 2 , both at the poles and spread in smaller quantities throughout the soil all over the planet, would sublimate - go from a solid directly into a gas - and increase the warming effect; carbon dioxide, like methane, was a greenhouse gas.
    After the greenhouse gasses had raised the temperature of the planet, even by only a few degrees, the atmospheric pressure would increase, increasing the ‘efficiency’ of the greenhouse gas generation which would, in turn increase the atmospheric pressure. Those two processes would feed each other enough that Duncan could begin introducing other gasses.
    Ammonia, for example, could probably be mined in sufficient quantities in the outer part of the system and brought to the planet. Another greenhouse gas, it was also mostly nitrogen in weight. The nitrogen would act as a ‘buffer gas’ in the burgeoning atmosphere, adding to the pressure of the system and acting to control the rate of combustion of oxygen.
    Nitrogen was the most common element in the Earth’s atmosphere; it’s what kept the entire atmosphere’s supply of oxygen from being consumed in a single exothermic orgy every time a flame source was introduced. And adding oxygen was the next step after that in the terraformation process, so a buffer gas was a prerequisite.
    Next the terraforming kit’s ecopoiesis modules would kick in. Small canisters containing extremophile photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria would be seeded, as global conditions were met. These modules, solar powered biodomes, would settle on and drill themselves partway into the planet’s surface. The microbes would then feed on the local soil and elements and expel oxygen into the atmosphere. Part of Duncan’s responsibility would be to ensure that the kit was fed with the resources required to build the uncountable number of modules needed.
    In addition to the smaller biodomes that the terraforming kit created and spread, Duncan could purchase larger, inhabitable, biodomes that would not only dramatically increase the oxygen output for his entire, planetwide, system, they would also attract