Theorists have been imagining a fully artificialized—that is, domesticated and urbanized—planet since the 1700s. This was a kernel ambition of the Enlightenment—to reach a state of planetary mastery in which all of the globe’s flows of matter and energy would be dammed and harnessed by systems of human design and purpose. It was only in the mid-1800s, however, that our ambitions started moving further afield. By the early 1900s, people had begun imagining a fully artificialized universe.
