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The JNF's terraforming projects have, in a sense, never stopped, even if intense and concerted human effort has tapered off in some areas since 1948.

And there is another hope too: that it broadcasts a message of how a billionaire might live his or her best life — without terraforming Mars, without Burning Man, without the attempts to stealth-run Harvard University.

For nearly two decades, the art form formerly known as television did nothing but grow, in wild and glorious abandon, as if it had been touched by a terraforming agent from “Doctor Who.”

Once a dead orb, the world has been engineered over millennia with vast amounts of high-tech human, robotic and organic effort — the “terraforming” of the title.

They become enamored of certain ideas — fixing African agriculture, resurrecting von Mises and Hayek, terraforming Mars, being the president — and can spend nearly unlimited sums in the pursuit of making them a reality.