---
title: "Terraforming (of Earth)"
description: "Antikythera's word for anthropogenic transformation at planetary scale, in two registers."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/terraforming-of-earth"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/terraforming-of-earth"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Terraforming (of Earth)

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/terraforming-of-earth), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Antikythera's word for anthropogenic transformation at planetary scale, in two registers. Descriptive: the research statement says the Anthropocene was occurring long before it was deduced — agriculture, industry and scattered radioactive elements amounted to an "accidental terraforming. It was not the plan" — and that humans "terraformed the planet in the image of their industry for centuries before truly comprehending the scale of these effects" (*agency preceded subjectivity*). *The Stack* uses the word for the Cloud's metabolic digestion of the Earth's mineral cavities; the Noocene glossary says the evolution of complex intelligence "has terraformed Earth." Programmatic: since the response to anthropogenic climate change must itself be anthropogenic, the task is to make terraforming deliberate — the artificial reclaimed as *designed* rather than fake — the project of Bratton's Strelka program and 2021 Noema essay (ecological automation, geoengineering, computation rotated toward viability, synthetic intelligence). Relates to *Viable Planetarity* and *Anthropoforming*.

## Appears in

- [Planetary Sapience Symposium](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/planetarysapience) (2025-11-21)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [Planetary Sapience](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-planetary-sapience) (2021-06-17)
- [The Stack](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/the-stack) (2016-02-19)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._