In this episode, we talk about Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Foundation and Earth, “Leaving Comporellon,” “Forbidden World,” and “Facing the Pack.”
I’ve largely stopped bothering with the spoiler warnings, but I will spoiler enough in this episode description to warrant one. If you want to discover things as you read and haven’t read these chapters yet, you know what to do.
Tau Ceti is the nearest “sun-like star” to Earth that isn’t in a multiple-star system and so it’s been a frequent locale in Science Fiction over the years. It was a natural choice for Asimov to place Aurora, the first of the Spacer Worlds, in the Tau Ceti system.
Since Asimov made that decision, we’ve discovered and cataloged thousands of exoplanets, that is, planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Several of them are in the Tau Ceti system and two, Tau Ceti d and e, are super-Earths that appear to be at the outer edges of Tau Ceti’s habitable zone. That seems to fit what we learn about Aurora in this book; it was a terraformed world that, without humans to maintain it, was slipping back into uninhabitability.
There is another, proposed, exoplanet orbiting Tau Ceti, called PxP-4. That one could be smack in the middle of the habitable zone.
In any event, it’s time to return to the Tau Ceti system and take a good look around. Also, there are dogs! So Let’s go!
Stars End: A Foundation Podcast 
Some of your questions about bio-settling a new area and how ecology would work might be found in McAlister & Wilson’s “Theory of Island Biogeography”. There are articles and reviews around, that might get you the gist of it. It’s been a while since I’ve read it. The “Wilson” is the recently deceased E O Wilson, the celebrated ant biologist and opponent of Stephen J Gould, who is, I think, also a part of this Foundation book but in the next section. The Galapagos is an example of interesting development. They are really, really difficult to colonize but also the islands themselves offer some barriers to inter-island colonization, hence a weird ecology.
It’s funny to think back on Asimov’s autobiography where he critiques his Foundation series for putting so much of the action off stage, & here lapsing back to it. Maybe the untimely death of his editor explains it. I’m also getting increasingly suspicious of Bliss. Something is off.
I’d forgotten that the Mycogenians were supposed to be Auroran descendants – I hadn’t read the robot novels when I read the Foundation prequels & that must not have meant anything to me. Thanks for reminding. It is interesting – presumably at the time of Hari Seldon, Aurora at least and probably all those Spacer planets & maybe even Earth were known in some capacity in Imperial records. I don’t remember. But by this time, 500 some years later, they are excised. By something.
You would think that after 20k years there would’ve been some interesting evolution in the dog, instead of reversion. Hmm. It’s not a lot of time … but….
I read a few chapters in “Our Angry Earth”. I have the sense the Gaia chapter at least is more Pohl-like than Asimov but presume at minimum his editorial revision. The Gaia described is the homeostatic – seeking system, not the multi-conscious organism of this book. Actually, they describe Gaia as homeorhetic – that’s the hand of Lynn Margulis showing, even if not acknowledged here. Book seems quite prescient but I don’t have time to read it right now, & probably preaching to the choir as well as dated. Wished I’d seen it back when.
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