Colonizing Mars would be a gargantuan task made infinitely easier if humans had the ability to terraform the planet. Turning the fourth rock from the Sun into a convincing facsimile of our own Earth is a tempting idea, and one that’s been considered seriously: billionaires talk about it, NASA’s exploring the notion, and it’s the far-future backdrop of many great sci-fi stories.

Heck, it’s even a board game.

But while the dreams of human terraformation remain only fiction and speculation, a new paper published on the pre-print server arXiv wonders if advanced alien civilizations already came up with this bright idea, and most importantly, have put it into practice.

Who's to say Earth isn't the result of such alien terraforming?

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