Terraforming is the deliberate making of a planet habitable. We're already terraforming Earth, blindly, and the question I care about is whether we can do it well.
How the word moved
In October 2025 I put it bluntly: we're terraformers whether we admit it or not. In May 2026 it became my constructivist method for habitability, the planetary sibling of AI for the mind and synthetic biology for the cell. In other words, if you want to understand habitability, try making it.
By July 2026 I'd pushed it back in time, because life has always terraformed the Earth. Cyanobacteria were the OG epistrators.
In my words
"then terraforming is the synthesis of the planet"
from The Planetarity Syllabus. Habitability, Part I: Framing the Issue, 5 May 2026
"life is not just something that happens on a planet; life is something that happens to a planet."
from The Planetarity Syllabus. Habitability, Part I: Framing the Issue, 5 May 2026
"Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are terraformers."
from Bhumics: Planetarity as Philosophical Engineering (PAPE), Part 1, 23 Oct 2025
Related
- Related habitability - Terraforming is how habitability gets studied and made.
- Related philosophical engineering - Terraforming is philosophical engineering at planetary scale.
- Related Gaia - Lovelock and Margulis gave me life and planet terraforming each other.
- Related epistrator - Cyanobacteria were the first epistrators.
- Related Mahayanics - If we terraform, it has to be with care for all beings.
Still open
I call terraforming Mars potentially a violently evil act and still use terraforming as my model method. I haven't squared that yet.