One of the funny things about Handwavium as a potential environmental disaster is that it grows. You add (mostly) organic material to handwavium, you get more handwavium. There's no particularly established way to turn handwavium into not-handwavium. The really scary thing about handwavium - the thing that I'm sure has the environmentalists terrified - is that if you flush enough of it down the toilet, you're pretty likely to wind up with a strain that runs on sewage. Shortly after that, you'll get a colony of the stuff that isn't possible to get rid of without *extreme* measures, and shortly after *that*, you'll see almost every critter that lives down there sprouting a biomod. Handwavium pollution is potentially very scary indeed - and since it can only be created, not destroyed, the degenerate endstate is with every lifeform on the planet sporting a biomod, and everything on the planet being modified to one degree or another, along with a sea or two of the goop itself.
Given that the original investment might well have been a small spore-bearing pod or something, that would be a *remarkably* efficient way to xenoform a world. A plausible theory for the Overfan, no?
Given that the original investment might well have been a small spore-bearing pod or something, that would be a *remarkably* efficient way to xenoform a world. A plausible theory for the Overfan, no?