Why Were Original Pern Colonists Unable to Effectively Combat Thread?

Question

In the Chronicles of Pern series, the people of Pern were threatened for centuries by periodic attacks from Thread, a devastating alien organism that consumed all organic material. The dragonriders were able to combat Thread by searing it midair with their dragons' fiery breath. However, records show that early in the colonization of Pern, before the dragons were genetically engineered, the settlers were unable to stop the predations of Thread.

What abilities, resources, or knowledge did the original colonists lack that prevented them from effectively fighting Thread? Was it simply the lack of flying dragons, or were there other factors involved? Surely with all their high technology, ingenuity and will to survive, the settlers must have attempted some means to counter the Thread attacks using the resources available to them at that time. What held them back until the dragons came?

Answer 1

The answer to this is the subject of the entire novel Dragonsdawn, but, to summarize: Pern was a new colony far away from the other worlds. Part of the colony charter meant that Pern was meant to be a world with little or no heavy industry, and so the colonists brought a very limited amount of technology with them. Before dragons they DID use some mechanized aircraft to fight Thread, but soon realized that that their would soon run out of spare parts for the craft they did have.

Answer 2

Surely with all their high technology, ingenuity and will to survive, the settlers must have attempted some means to counter the Thread attacks using the resources available to them at that time.

They did. Initially they used flying vehicles with flamethrower, but when they colonized Pern they had planned for a low-tech agrarian society. They had planned to phase out the vehicles, and thus hadn't established industrial production of the fuel, and the heavy use was blowing through their limited stores - it wasn't a sustainable solution.

Even if they wanted to, Pern didn't have the metal resources needed for industrialization, so instead they turned to bioengineering to counter the Thread threat, to create a sustainable population of creatures to defend themselves with, based on a local species already evolved to combat Thread, but much larger than they had been.

You ask why the settlers couldn't develop a way to combat Thread without dragons, but dragons were their solution to combating Thread.

Answer 3

It’s a matter of scale. A small colony didn’t have the resources to mount a war against a never ending invasion on a global scale. The first wave of thread destroyed many resources and killed many people. They had already deconstructed their ships for tools and homes and there weren’t natural resources available, mines for metals and fuels, to create a war scale industry. Bioweapons were their only option. And as explained, the bioweapon: Dragons & Grubs would take a few generations to develop. A handful of test tube Dragons and grubs takes years to reproduce in large numbers. Meanwhile the Thread was decimating the population faster than they could handle. Also as explained, moving north, from their original landing site and carving out the Werys (caves) was a better plan to protect the survivors than fighting a loosing battle on the southern continent. That’s why they couldn't fight, even with their advanced technology. And their advanced technology was lost pretty quickly when key people were killed, equipment destroyed and fuels exhausted. The colony charter was a low tech agrarian society not an industrial war factory.