“The inventor of the term terraforming was Jack Williamson, in a series of stories he wrote in the early 1940s which were collected under the title of Seetee Ship in 1951 (the word’s first appearance was, I’m told, in Collision Ship in 1942, though I’ve not been able to verify this; Seetee is a phonetic transcription of CT, standing for contraterrene, another compound of terra that was once another word for antimatter).

Terraforming is now in much the same class as controlled nuclear fusion, as an idea which has not yet been brought to practicality, but about which there is a mass of research material. The scale of the project is such that fusion is likely to win by a big margin, but experts seem to feel that the fundamental problems are largely solved. It has yet to be decided whether it would be mankind’s biggest adventure yet, an insupportable waste of scarce resources, or the unforgivable rape of another world.”

- Michael Quinion, 1997