While we were up on the Farm, I tracked down Alesya to ask if there was any way to decontaminate all the soil and rock being hauled into orbit.
She said I was asking her for the impossible.
Of course raw Element was going to be raised from the surface, along with veins of every other metal.
There's no existing technology to remove xenotoxins from that volume of material, at least not in the timeframe we're dealing with.
That got me thinking about using meks to clean up our biomes over the long haul.
We really had no idea how long it was going to take for our colony ship to find a habitable world-it could end up jumping around the galaxy for millennia.
Decontamination would be a huge job, calling for herds of machines roaming the ship's interior.
Before I knew it, I was sketching a tek version of the giant Pleistocene horses we'd seen striding across one of the Farm’s pastures...