Re: Too many planets
In the sense of what is portrayed in SE4, an ice planet is not just a terrestrial artic zone where it is like the polar regions of Earth only planet-wide. We could colonize that without a dome NOW, if we had a space ship to get there (unless you count an Eskimo igloo as a dome). That is just a rock planet with real bad conditions, in SE4 terms. An ice planet, where all planets are subdivided in rock or gas giant or ice, is a planet with tempertures near absolute 0, where substances like oxygen, CO2, hydrogen, etc... that are gases on Earth are liquids or maybe even solids. To colonize that WITH a dome will require some pretty serious tech, but is feasible. Without a dome, though, you couldn't even breath.
A gas giant has surface gravity many times what a human could tolerate, much less move around in, and atmospheric pressures like sea pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Just to colonize with a dome would take very advanced gravity control.
To change either an ice planet or a gas giant sufficiently to allow life as we know it to survive outside a dome would mean, in SE4 terms, changing it into a rock planet. That might be possible, but the cost would be much higher than atmosphere conVersion.
To genetically engineer humans sufficiently to make them capable of living without a dome in either the ice or gas giant environments would be to make them no longer life as we know it. You are talking about much more fundamental changes than just putting on gills so they can breath water, or fur & blubber so they can run with the polar bears, or beefing them up so they can live on a planet that has maybe 1.5 G gravity. By the time you got done doing it, they would not be human anymore, or able to live on Rock planets anymore either.
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