No, this isn't Earth or an artistic rendering of some far away exoplanet. It's Mars — but a hypothetical version of the Red Planet after it's undergone a rather radical facelift.

Over the years, scientists have found evidence revealing that an ocean may have covered parts of the Red Planet billions of years ago. Others suggest that a future terraformed Mars could be lush with oceans and vegetation. In either scenario, what would Mars look like as a planet alive with water and life? By combining …

The people in Landes, in the pre-1900s, had a problem. Their land was swampy and uneven, and they were too poor and too remote for anyone to bother putting in roads. They had to get around someway, and they way they figured out their situation gives me hope for whimsy on other planets.

As a future terraforming species, we take it for granted that Mars will be our first megaproject. But while transforming the Red Planet into something more hospitable for life seems the most logical — if not easiest — first step towards colonizing the solar system, it may actually make more sense to tackle our sister…

If you walk by even the simplest garden, you'll see plants that were transported there from other continents. If you walk by a field or an orchard, you'll definitely see foreign plants brought close to help people survive or just enjoy themselves. It seems simple now, but the ability to do this easily changed nearly…

We're all revved up for the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars today, but that doesn't stop us from dreaming about a more distant future, when Mars is terraformed and turns from a red planet into a blue one. This short film Terraform imagines hundreds of years of geohacking to make Mars habitable for plant and…

NASA's latest Mars rover, Curiosity, is currently its way to Mars, on a mission to explore whether life could exist there. If we're going to colonize Mars — and some scientists say we must — it's likely that we'll start by terraforming. Terraforming, or planetary engineering, is the process of altering the climate of…

This past weekend marked the opening of the American Museum of Natural History's brilliant new exhibition, Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration. As part of our ongoing Hardcore Science Interview series, io9 spoke with the show's curator, AMNH astrophysicist Michael Shara, about the exhibit.

Could we be colonizing Mars in your lifetime? Three different non-fiction books offered different scenarios — including bombarding Mars with "greenhouse gases" and using it as a kind of quasi-penal colony. John Hickman, author of Reopening the Space Frontier, explains.

Our efforts to intentionally alter our home planet have been unpredictable at best. Can we terraform other planets without making the same mistakes? Should we?