The harsh truth about terraforming

I enjoyed reading Charles Day’s column on the subject of terraforming in the July 2021 issue of Physics Today (page 8). I was only a year old in 1942, so I missed seeing Jack Williamson’s story that introduced the term when it was published. I also missed it in the mid 1950s when I read many of the back issues of Astounding Science-Fiction.

My first introduction to the concept was from reading Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951, although I don’t believe he actually used the term “terraforming.” He describes selectively breeding native plants that extract oxygen from the Martian soil to release it into the atmosphere—a precursor of the biological approach in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy—and turning Phobos into a second sun to warm the planet.

On a more serious note, it seems to me that the very concept of terraforming represents a striking display of human hubris. Today we are struggling to safeguard the health of Earth’s critical ecosystems from the unintended consequences of the artificial environment we have built. Given our limited success so far and significant chance of failure, the idea that we could create a viable, self-sustaining environment on another planet anytime soon seems pretty far-fetched. The reality is that a planetary ecosystem is many orders of magnitude more complex than what we are currently able to deal with. The time will likely come when our capabilities will have reached that level, but for the moment, terraforming appears destined to remain in the realm of science fiction and, apparently, board games.