Playing With / Terraform

Basic Trope: Changing a hostile Single-Biome Planet into a habitable earth-like one.

• Straight: An uninhabitable planet is turned into a second earth through massive amounts of blood, sweat, and tears.
• Exaggerated:
  • A rocky, craggy planet that's pretty much devoid of any sort of life and can easily be mistaken for a meteor or a moon is turned into a jungle or water planet, teeming with life overnight.
  • World-Healing Wave
  • A nebula is artificially concentrated into a solar system, carefully constructed to have the maximum number of habitable worlds.
• Downplayed:
  • The atmosphere is just on the safe side of "breathable", but you'd still want your space suit. It's cheerfully explained that anyone not protected would freeze before they suffocated, and "The atmosphere's getting thicker each day! Any century now..."
  • Alternatively, the atmosphere isn't breathable, but the temperature, pressure etc. are good enough for a human to go outside with just an oxygen mask. This is more likely to show up in real-life terraforming proposals than in fiction.
  • Arbor Day has just as much cultural significance as Christmas does on certain worlds.
  • A mountain is raised or lowered, or a valley filled in.
• Justified:
  • A network of fusion reactors are built to fuse the nitrogen in the atmosphere into oxygen, and bio-engineered plants are seeded that produce oxygen by converting the carbon dioxide through respiration, and spreads quickly, like Kudzu does; may be a Multipurpose Monocultured Crop. Processor drones are released to condition the soil. Oceans are created by melting the polar ice caps and/or dropping comets. Once the planet has the same atmospheric composition that earth does, the fusion reactors are recalibrated to produce power instead of air and some of the bio-engineered plants cleared off and converted into fertilizer for farmland. The conditioning drones are recollected and refurbished for later use. That being said, the planet needs to be within certain parameters before the work can begin- 1-G gravity, inside the star's Habitable Band, soil quality, has an electromagnetic field, etcetera (some of these requirements may be relaxed, depending on the portrayal).
  • Earth is dying; without a planet to escape to, mankind is doomed with it, so humanity begins a massive effort to build a new home.
• Inverted:
  • Earth is turned into an uninhabitable wasteland by an alien race trying to reproduce their homeworld's environment.
  • The colonists are adapted to the planet, rather than the other way around. This is formally known as pantropy.
  • A lush, green (or blue) paradise is converted into a world-wide factory, mine, or farm.
• Subverted: The planet is made habitable, but only so it can grow massive amounts of crops very quickly. By the time a century's gone by, it's an unlivable desert again.
• Double Subverted: ...Until the colonists decide that would make all they've invested in terraforming the planet mean nothing, and decide to take good care of their new home.
• Parodied:
  • The planet is made livable by spraying it with grass seeds from orbit.
  • A desolated area is reclaimed by importing butterflies and bunny rabbits.
• Zig Zagged: ???
• Averted: Turning a rockball of a planet into an earth-like one is too energy, resource, and time consuming, so it's simply left barren while the survey fleet looks for planets that are already earth-like.
• Enforced: ???
• Lampshaded: Have a nice day, and keep Building Better Worlds
• Invoked: A small oxygen garden is planted in the barren world's soil, For Science! and little else.
• Exploited: Terraforming-for-You Inc.
• Defied: "With our current level of technology, converting Mars into a habitable planet would take a billion years. It's easier and cheaper to just not bother."
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???
• Deconstructed:
  • The planet to be terraformed already has intelligent life on it, and the process naturally makes it unlivable for the native species, causing them to go extinct. If the intelligent life is sentient, then the terraforming process becomes an act of genocide.
  • Terraforming is a massive undertaking that takes eons to produce a habitable planet from a rockball.
  • Because of that, the paperwork required for radical environmental conversion of a planet with a potential to develop its own biosphere takes so much the planet will become populated by itself.
• Reconstructed:
  • New technologies become available that accelerates the work considerably.
  • The terraforming process is redesigned to produce a planet habitable for humans and the natives.
  • Terraforming is limited to planets which are verified to have no life on it, so that no living species gets screwed over by the expansion of possible places to live by others.
• Implied: The story is set on a livable, warm, watery, green Mars, and a character mentions it didn't use to be so livable.