Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To transform (a landscape) on another planet into one having the characteristics of landscapes on Earth.
Wiktionary
- v. science fiction To transform the atmosphere (or biosphere) of another planet into one having the characteristics of Earth
- v. Earthscape
Etymologies
- Latin terra, earth; see terrace + form. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Why don't we 'terraform' the Sahara desert before Mars?”
“The Mars Society says that the Earth is a rotting, dying, stinking planet and that we must move our civilization to Mars and that Congress must appropriate funds to "terraform" Mars.”
“Personally, I think it is easier, cheaper, and ultimately much more profitable to "terraform" asteroids and comets by hollowing them out and spinning them for gravity.”
“And, if anything, I can easily imagine some variant of these techniques being eventually used to "terraform" (i.e. make more Earth-like) Mars and other currently inhospitable planets-think”
“Saying we need to rush back to the caves and saying we need to "terraform" the earth are different sides of the same coin: both are profound retreats from the responsibilities of our day, and both ignore the amazing opportunities we still have available to us to create a sustainable society.”
“Vollmann's second strand examines Californians 'use of technology to literally "terraform" their environment, just as contemporary science-fiction writers were imagining the transformation of other planets.”
“Once established on the planet, one of the society's suggested plans is to then 'terraform' Mars, to replace and replenish its atmosphere and return it to the more life-friendly environment it once was billions of years ago.”
“It seems that a dying alien race sent out an arkship, looking for the perfect world to terraform and resurrect the aliens.”
“If you were gonna terraform Mars and send animals to colonize the planet, would you send Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Dad, or the virile teenagers old enough to survive but young enough to populate the colony?”
“In a sense, the Neolithic Revolution marked the beginning of an effort to cheat nature by outsmarting her, a game that required every more sophisticated technologies, first to increase crop yields and then to give us more and more free time to "terraform" our environment in ways that made our life more comfortable.”
The Huffington Post: Arthur Rosenfeld: Must Humans Go the Way of the Dinosaurs?
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘terraform’.
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science fact or fiction
pretty open-ended here—terms, ideas, lingo, technologies and phenomena (real or postulated) that are, were, should be or could be used in speculative fiction
tachyon, mecha, dropship, wetware, meatspace, nanobot, cloned meat, asteroid mining, hyperdrive, wormhole, parallel universe, distributed intel... and 464 more...
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Potpourri
eponymous, aa, pulchritude, gizmo, macabre, sui generis, solecism, solipsism, eldritch, samizdat, queue, obsequious and 469 more...
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AbraxasZugzwang's Words
atavism, abraxas, sisyphean, frust, fetus-in-fetu, arhythmically, queef, epidemiology, abecedarian, troglodyte, chiaroscuro, philology and 631 more...
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Concepts And Words I'm Apparently The...
not that i'm expecting a prize or something. just made up this list because, apparently, there's a plethora of obscure stuff in here. we live through strange moments and in time, maybe, a pattern o...
social tectonics, gas giant formation, libidinal haze, stellar metallicity, galactic habitabl..., anisotropy, photoautotrophic, photoautotrophic, quantum angular m..., spinoff, locus ceruleus, postsynaptic and 53 more...
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rduke's Words
misguggle, ken, sere, etiolated, gelid, digladiate, popinjay, bathykolpian, conglaciation, hyperborean, callipygian, vagile and 1253 more...
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words I plan to misuse
suspension feeders, paradoxical undre..., comorbidity, vomitorium, tidal bore, adult supervision, particular attention, narcissistic supply, iconostasis, hypothetical impe..., alteregoism, tactile elevations and 36 more...
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word set 5
sapidity, devolved, mincingly, zootechnics, eschatology, tribulations, peccadillo, anorgasmia, hermaphrodite, serial monogamy, freethinker, sorceress and 83 more...
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Interesting or Weird
Tweets
Looking for tweets for terraform.
bilby "And there are NASA folk who dream of the day such devices will be in their toolkits. Not for tinkering with the Earth's atmosphere, but for re-engineering Mars'. By creating the mother of all greenhouse effects, the frozen red planet would be transformed into a relatively balmy, 15OC second Earth. This field of research, known as planetary engineering - or terraforming, if you're a science fiction buff - is of course in its infancy."
- Graham Phillips, How pollution might just save the planet, theage.com.au, 11 Oct 2009. Oct 11, 2009