ABSTRACT
During the 1940s, under the pseudonym of Will Stewart, Jack Williamson published a series of fictional stories describing a process for attaching atmospheres to planets in order to make them capable of sustaining life. Terraforming’, the term he coined for this activity was first picked up by other science fiction writers. Like pre-terraformed Mars for humans, cyberspace is currently a lonely, dangerous, and relatively impoverished place for software agents. Progress in some of these limitations necessarily awaits the results of ongoing research in traditional approaches to agent autonomy, collaborativity, adaptivity, and mobility. A modest terraforming effort would enable not only intelligent agents but also the agent-equilvalent of dogs, insects, and chickens to survive and thrive in cyberspace. Terraforming cyberspace involves more than regulation of computing resources and protection of agent state.
