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    To change a whole planet — its air, its temperature, its water — until human beings could live there without a spacesuit. The idea is to make somewhere else more like Earth. People talk about terraforming Mars: the atmosphere, warming it up, melting the ice so there is liquid water. It is a verb: 'to terraform Mars', 'a terraformed moon', 'the terraforming of Venus'. The -ing form, 'terraforming', works as a noun and is the form you will see most. This word was born in science fiction — an American writer coined it in 1942 — and it still lives mostly there: novels, films, and strategy games where you slowly turn a red planet green. But scientists now use it seriously too, usually to argue about whether it is possible at all, and how many centuries it would take. People also borrow it as a joke or an for making a place fit you: 'they've terraformed the whole neighbourhood into a shopping district'. That is a stretched use, and it always sounds a little playful. One warning for anyone in tech: Terraform, with a capital T, is also the name of a well-known software tool for setting up servers. Completely unrelated to planets, and if you search the word online, that is mostly what you will find.

    地球化改造(把行星改造成適合人類居住)。科幻小說、電影跟遊戲裡常見,中文也說「行星地球化」。附帶一提:科技圈講的 Terraform(大寫)是一套架設伺服器的軟體工具,跟行星無關。

    例句逐字對照、搭配詞、易混淆字

    這一義的完整解析還沒打開。訂閱後可以看到例句怎麼拆、常跟哪些字一起出現, 以及容易跟它搞混的字。

    看看訂閱內容

組成Terra(拉丁文「大地」,也是科幻作品裡「地球」的名字)+ -form(「使成為……的形狀」)。字面就是「把它做成地球的樣子」。這個字是美國科幻作家 Jack Williamson 在一九四二年的小說 Collision Orbit 裡造出來的。

同家族的字

  • terrainfrom the same Latin terra, 'earth, land'
  • territoryfrom the same Latin terra
  • transformshares -form, 'shape' — to change the shape of

原始詞典資料1 筆記錄

以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。

terraformverb/ˈtɛɹəfɔː(ɹ)m/

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    literaturemediapublishingTo transform the atmosphere (or biosphere) of another planet into one having the characteristics of Earth.

    • He had been the original claimant of Obania, forty years ago; and Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock, only two kilometers through—by sinking a shaft to its heart for the paragravity installation, generating oxygen and water from mineral oxides, releasing absorptive gases to trap the feeble heat of the far-off Sun.

資料來源:英文維基詞典 English WiktionaryCC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。