Paraterraforming - The worldhouse concept

This paper discusses 'paraterraforming' as a means of creating and maintaining habitable environments on other planets. The 'worldhouse' concept of paraterraforming can be formulated within the existing boundaries of technological knowledge and can provide a quasi-unconstrained global habitable environment at significantly lower levels of materials requirement and economic cost. Construction can proceed on a modular basis. A coarse-grained assessment of the possibilities of paraterraforming Mars is presented. It is suggested that the establishment of a fully habitable worldhouse environment on the planet Mercury would be a much less difficult undertaking than taerraforming Venus and could be economically important for the human exploitation of the solar system.