The colony of New Earth was located on the planet of the same name orbiting Lalande 21185.
New Earth was discovered in 2528 when the wormhole probes of the Dandelion Project reached Lalande 21185. The world has a diameter of about 9000 kilometres (70% that of Earth), and a mass about three-tenths of an Earth mass. It orbits in the habitable zone of the Lalande 21185 system. The planet was the most Earthlike planet discovered up to that time, and it attracted attention as a potential site for a colony.
However, it was not an ideal world to colonise. The world is tidelocked to its star, the world lacked water, and Lalande 21185 is a flare star.
Despite these shortcomings, the world was approved for terraforming. Terraforming commenced in 2537 with the selection and diversion of the comets that provided the needed water, and was declared completed in 2598. The world was the first planet to be terraformed, and the lack of experience led to some crucial mistakes being made. The major mistake was to allow insufficient time for the terraforming to take hold, and also to take into account the great amount of erosion that would initially occur when a waterless world is given an ocean for the first time.
The world was settled in 2610 with a few thousand settlers from several countries. The settlers established villages in various locations on the planet.
The first years of the colony were hard. The meagre soils contained a lot of salts that made the soils inhospitable to earth plants, and these salts needed to be removed before the soils could support terrestrial plant life. Even after the salts were removed from the soil, the salts would frequently return after being washed back into the soil from nearby areas that had not been cleansed in this way. The colonists eventually found that cultivating crops on the tops of hills was the most effective way of growing crops because the soils would remain salt-free.
Eventually, the settlers overcame the hardships of the early years and prospered, and became a prominent example of the adapability of humanity to alien environments.
The shortcomings of the terraforming became apparent when in 2660 heavy rain caused a mudslide near the main town of DeLalande, killing more than a thousand people. Some people chose to remain at the town, but others in areas prone to mudslides chose to relocate to safer areas of the planet.
In 2685 a large stellar flare on the local sun caused widespread radiation-based illnesses such as radiation sickness and sunburn. It became apparent that the world did not have a sufficient ozone layer in the atmosphere to protect the life on the world from such effects. The radiation illnesses also affected the crops and livestock, and emergency food aid from Earth was needed to avoid a planetwide famine.
In 2715 another stellar flare that was even larger than the flare of 2685 caused a similar degree of devastation. Famine was averted this time because sufficient stores of food were available to see the people through the crop failures and livestock deaths.
The following year, heavy rain again caused mudslides near the two largest settlements, in which over three hundred people and many head of cattle died.
Debate over the fate of the colony soon began on Earth and New Earth, as it was clear that the world was not able to be a self-sufficient colony until the environment of the planet was more stable. Soon it was decided to abandon the colony “for the time being” and resettle back in the Solar System.
The world was abandoned in 2718 when the remaining colonists were shipped as refugees back to Earth. Many of these colonists were resettled on Mars, where some of their descendants still live. After the discovery of more hospitable worlds elsewhere, New Earth was not considered for resettlement. The world still has life descended from the abandoned crops and livestock.
