When we go to other planets and decide to make a colony on those planets we will need to be totally self-sustaining. In other words we will need to grow our own food and make our own oxygen and make sure there is water. We will also need power for heating as well. To do all this we may have to do some Terra Forming, yet some say; Dont you mean Terra Farming?

Recently a gentleman in an online forum think tank stated: It is terra farming! It is not "forming", but "farming"! His reasoning was that we would be farming to grow food and this he further stated that;

This is the art of cultivating a barren planet to try to make it support life. As an example, suppose in 50 yrs human beings succeed in going to Jupiter. But unfortunately, we find out that there is no life on that planet. We can decide to introduce life on it by terra farming it, that is transplanting earthly vegetation, livestock and human population over there! By so doing, we'll terra-farm Jupiter.

Actually the word has come to be used as Terra-Forming, although you could be right with regards to the origin of the word. NASA uses it this way:

http://www.cascadia.ctc.edu/facultyweb/instructors/jvanleer/mars/terra.html

And generally the world appears in NASA Literature as one word; terraforming although the Microsoft Word Spell check does not recognize it as such:

http://www.astrobio.net/news/article1030.html

http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=74

(oh, incidentally this group has a killer online newsletter if anyone is interested in such)

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=13917

Maybe I should email; Bill Gates on this as he is very into such technologies and has interests in all the technologies surrounding space and the super computers which will help get us there.

Now then of course I have heard of Terra Farming and it has been used also;

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/LCC/

Although as Sir Arthur C. Clarke has used it both ways in various books of his, it appears that you could have terra forming, without terra farming. For instance if you built an eco-system to produce oxygen without planting food type crops, so he has brought up a very interesting point indeed. Thank you for that. Do you have ideas or thoughts on Space Colonies and the future? We would like to discuss this with you. Think on it.