planetary engineering n.

Planetary engineering is expensive, Bob…especially when the equipment would have to be brought so far. It would have been nearly impossible for any one to develop such a remote asteroid secretly.

The greatest technical achievements of the next few centuries may well be in the field of what could be called ‘planetary engineering’—the reshaping of other worlds to suit human needs.

Even the planetary engineering resulting in the creation of this world took approximately seven days, using your present system of time measure.

He…brought out a book…. ‘This is one of the authorities on planetary engineering.’

Planetary engineering on such an enormous scale, in such a short time, had never been attempted, not even on Mars…. Katrin and Davout had argued for a more elegant approach to Rhea’s problems, a reliance on organic systems to modify the planet’s extreme weather instead of assaulting Rhea with macro-tech and engineering. Theirs was the approach that finally won the support of the majority of the terraforming team.

Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude less than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima.