Terraforming

Terraforming is the process—at this point, entirely hypothetical and theoretical—by which a planet or a moon could be altered so as to make it able to support life, possibly human life. Sometimes termed "planetary ecosynthesis" by environmental scientists and interplanetary astronomers, terraforming would involve using extreme modification technologies, most of which do not even exist yet save in theory, to change the atmosphere, the temperature, even the surface configurations of a planet or moon in order to convert it into an environment that would support the particular biological needs of human beings. Although the concept of terraforming originated in science fiction, it is now the subject of serious scientific speculation. Concerns over the growing and unchecked damage to the Earth’s ecosystem, seen by many scientists as irreversible, have led scientists to consider how terraforming might actually work, as humanity is seen more and more as needing to find a backup planet when, not if, Earth is no longer habitable.

Background

Jack Williamson, now considered one of the iconic figures in the first generation of science-fiction writers, coined the word "terraforming" in a 1942 short story in which two planets collide to form a new world that is, remarkably enough, hospitable to Earthlings. Williamson had been trained as a meteorologist in the Army and was keen to investigate how relatively minor atmospheric alterations to other planets might, theoretically, allow for colonization by Earth. Despite the apocalyptic implications of the premise, the concept of planetary environmental conversion was essentially optimistic and hopeful.

By the height of the Cold War a scant ten years later, however, the vision had considerably darkened. The threat of an imminent nuclear apocalypse inspired many of the most prominent writers in the genre—among them Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, and Arthur C. Clarke—to explore variations of terraforming that most often involved Mars, a planet similar to Earth.

Science fiction creators in the twenty-first century have continued in this tradition. Terraforming features in the cult-hit television show Firefly (2002–3), the 2008 video game Spore, the popular novel (2011–) and television (2015–) series The Expanse, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012), the multiplayer online game Destiny (2014) and its sequel (2017), and many other works across a variety of media.

The concept did not long remain solely the province of fiction. Given the gravity and tensions of world events in the 1960s and the cultural fascination with outer space that began with the much-ballyhooed "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, scientists began to theorize about exactly how such grand environmental alteration might actually be accomplished. In the early 1960s, for example, Cornell University astrophysicist Carl Sagan, at the time one of the most respected voices in space science, proposed seeding the atmosphere of Venus with algae to help counter the effects of the planet’s poisonous atmosphere as a first step toward making it hospitable for humans. There was also considerable interest in Mars, which appears to have once resembled Earth in critical ways and has been demonstrated to have trace amounts of water on its surface. Scientists agreed that any realistic attempt to radically alter environments totally hostile to human life would require not only a great amount of money and decades of research and effort but also an unprecedented level of cooperation among nations willing to work together for humanity’s future well-being.

Terraforming Today

If the sudden end of the Cold War in the late 1980s significantly tempered talk of terraforming, serious interest in it revived in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as dire predictions concerning the long-term impacts of global warming came to be measured not in centuries but decades. Talk in the scientific community again began to explore the potential for creating—or more specifically re-creating—a planet that would be able to facilitate the survival of humanity in the event of environmental catastrophe.

Attention was specifically directed not only to Venus and Mars but also to Earth’s moon and to several of the moons of both Jupiter and Saturn. The key, according to theory, was to alter the planet enough to allow plant life; once plants were thriving, oxygen would be produced and, in turn, new weather systems would begin to store a water supply. Venus was too hot, Mars too cold. Nevertheless, "terraform" became a verb—could Earth scientists terraform these bodies? Scientists posited scenarios of transformation that would, in theory, provide these distant bodies with a livable atmosphere and, in turn, the water that humanity required. Soon, scenarios that had been the province of speculative fiction—including warming a planet’s surface, coating it with plant life, lacing its surface with genetically altered microbial life, and erecting massive shells under which colonies might thrive—were subjects of serious scientific investigation.

Questions were immediately raised in some quarters about the ethics of such invasive technology, especially if there existed any form of life, even microbes, on the target planet. After all, humanity had evolved on one planet and had, in a relatively short period of time, all but wrecked its ecosystem. Why give such a species a new planet to ruin? Proponents of this ecocentric, or nature-centered, view say it is unethical for humans to interfere with any other system of life, no matter how elementary. NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay is one who advocates against human colonization of any planet with microbial life on it. On the other side of the argument are anthropocentrists such as aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin and British physicist Martyn J. Fogg, who argue that the effort to find a new home for humanity beyond Earth is itself an ethical imperative.

Ethical arguments aside, terraforming poses an enormous challenge in terms of resources and time. It exists largely as a scientific proposition, but a generation of environmental scientists, born under the existential threat of global warming, have begun to take far more seriously strategies for how humanity might extend itself to some distant and currently hostile planet.

Bibliography

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Beech, Martin. Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds. New York: Springer, 2009. Print.

Fogg, Martyn J. The Terraforming Information Pages. Author, Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Aug. 2016.

Knapton, Sarah. "Nasa Planning ‘Earth Independent’ Mars Colony by 2030s." Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 9 Oct. 2015. Web. 25 Aug. 2016.

Leovy, Conway. "The Big Idea: Terraforming Mars." National Geographic June 2010: 10. Print.

Pak, Chris. Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2016.

Schwartz, James S. J. "On the Moral Permissibility of Terraforming." Ethics & the Environment 18.2 (2013): 1–31. Print.

Wall, Mike. "Bad News for Terraforming: Mars’ Atmosphere Is Lost in Space." Space.com. Purch, 6 Nov. 2015. Web. 25 Aug. 2016.

Williams, Matt. "The Definitive Guide to Terraforming." Universe Today, 14 May 2017, www.universetoday.com/127311/guide-to-terraforming/. Accessed 31 May. 2018.