The Thorny Ethics of Making Alien Planets Habitable
Exploration, habitation, and resource extraction all carry a risk of inflicting environmental damage in space, just as they do here on Earth. But some futurists and space settlement enthusiasts have proposed an even more drastic alteration of the space environment: the transformation of the surface of a planet or moon into a more Earth-like environment via a process known as terraforming.
The atmospheric chemistry, pressure, and temperature inside an artificial space habitat is, by design, Earth-like enough to be habitable by humans, but it requires enclosure by pressurized walls and constant maintenance. Terraforming would affect the entire surface of a planet, rather than just a smaller “indoor” region, and by planetary scientist Christopher McKay’s , the environment of a terraformed planet “must be stable over long time scales and must require no,
