What would it mean to abandon Earth wholesale? The proposition to throw one’s hands up and forfeit our planet is a seductive one — things are looking pretty irredeemably grim. As the world continues ...

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This story originally featured on the MIT Press Reader. Exploration, habitation, and resource extraction all carry a risk of inflicting environmental damage in space, just as they do here on Earth.

This is the century of terraforming. Terraforming (Earth-shaping) was popular in the science fiction of the last century. In his Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson produces a future history in which ...

Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO2 in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes.

The inexorable rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and the steady increase in global temperatures raise the frightening prospect of significant change in Earth’s climate. Indeed, the ...

“Invoking terraforming adds explanatory complexity without constraint,” said Robert G. Endres, a systems biologist at Imperial College London. But in his new research, he refuses to rule out the ...

Terraforming a planet and building better worlds is not as easy as it seems. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The subject of ...