Destiny
Space.com has an interesting article on terraforming called, "Terraforming: Human Destiny or Hubris?" It's a little pessimistic, I think. Not that I'm saying that in the next ten years, we could start making any large-scale alterations to any planetary environment, save the one we're already on. However, the one thing that will make it possible is replicating assemblers. Not necessarily nanotech, though that would make it easier. Once we have devices that can be sent as a seed into space, there to grow into automated factories for producing solar power plants and large engines for moving things, truly anything will be possible. And the way computer technology is going, it won't be long before that could happen. (Moore's law says that computer power will be approaching the lower bounds of human thought in a less than thirty years or so.)
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B,
B,
One element of this discussion I've not seen covered at length is the rules regarding planet-scale transformation. Specifically, I feel that we would need protocols to thoroughly establish that a given planet was truly uninhabited before we start dicking with it.
And I mean thoroughly. If so much as a slime-mold is found to be the dominant lifeform, and it lurks under the rocks, we ought to leave it the hell alone.
Interfering with living things is not my only concern either- what about interfering with things that could yet be? In other words, what if our interference in a planet's weather, say, causes changes that deny a lifeform from ever developing there, one that otherwise might have done so?
Just as much as terraforming and system-wide travel needs technology to make it all work, it should have an ethics to frame it as well.
GL, do you work for the EPA?
GL, do you work for the EPA? I don't want to have to fill out an environmental impact statement each time I terraform a planet...
B, why the hell not?
B, why the hell not? Seriously... there's a lot of wonder in the universe. Do you seriously not give a shit that alien life-- ALIEN FRICKING LIFE-- gets terraformed out of existence before we can have a chance to see it? GL's comment reads as militantly environmentalist, but it's another planet. Alien Life. And until that alien life becomes exactly as workaday as field mice are to us now, I don't see much wrong with performing some due diligence prior to transforming another planet in our image. In fact, even after alien life becomes as boring as field mice (or as irritating as tribbles), I'm not sure that swingin' our big dick around is automatically the best way to colonize the universe.
Remember, you can't spell "humane" without "human" . *ducks*
And by what authority would
And by what authority would an American regulatory body influence other planets?
And that raises another question: What are the legal questions at play in such an adventure?
Would someone on a Mars colony or mining asteroid be subject to the laws of his country of origin, of the UN, or other extra-national body participating in space commerce? Would a lawbreaker be subject to extradition, and if so, to where? Might future colonials prefer an updated form of extraterritoriality?
You can't spell "humane"
You can't spell "humane" without "man", either. You can spell it without "woman" though.
Protecting alien life, even the slime-mold vareity, is important. I think that terraforming is really a moot point, since it will be easier to develop asteroids into space habitats, which will have the very important advantage of not being at the bottom of huge gravity wells. More efficient use of mass, easier travel, more flexibility.
If we start terraforming planets, it will be an exercize on the order of building the pyramids, the cathedrals, or baseball parks. We'll do it because we can, not because we must. A more likely outcome would be to dismantle the planet so that it could be used more efficiently.
GL, as for the legal framework, the only extant law for celestial bodies is the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which is notably vague about all that. The phrase, "Common heritage of all mankind" is not a sound basis for an interplanetary legal framework.
Everything you suggest will happen. Some will be bound by earthside national laws, some will be part of international protocols - maybe successors of the WTO or GATT, some will be subject to corporate rules like the mining towns of the Appalachians, and there will be (likely early) attempts to establish extraterritoriality and new states with new legal codes.
It'll be crazy, because of travel times back to Earth, and because of the mutable and even transitory nature of real estate. The moon might get treated like Antarctica, or annexed piecemeal by earth states, but anything further out, and floating in space could be literally anything.