Planetary engineering

Planetary engineering is the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global environments of a planet. Its objectives usually involve increasing the habitability of other worlds or mitigating decreases in habitability to Earth.

Perhaps the best-known type of planetary engineering is terraforming, by which a planet's surface conditions are altered to be more like those of Earth. Planetary engineering is largely the realm of science fiction at present, although recent climate change on Earth shows that human technology can cause change on a global scale.