  Our planet is experiencing an accelerated process of change associated to a
variety of anthropogenic phenomena. The future of this transformation is
uncertain, but there is general agreement about its negative unfolding that
might threaten our own survival. Furthermore, the pace of the expected changes
is likely to be abrupt: catastrophic shifts might be the most likely outcome of
this ongoing, apparently slow process. Although different strategies for
geo-engineering the planet have been advanced, none seem likely to safely
revert the large-scale problems associated to carbon dioxide accumulation or
ecosystem degradation. An alternative possibility considered here is inspired
in the rapidly growing potential for engineering living systems. It would
involve designing synthetic organisms capable of reproducing and expanding to
large geographic scales with the goal of achieving a long-term or a transient
restoration of ecosystem-level homeostasis. Such a regional or even
planetary-scale engineering would have to deal with the complexity of our
biosphere. It will require not only a proper design of organisms but also
understanding their place within ecological networks and their evolvability.
This is a likely future scenario that will require integration of ideas coming
from currently weakly connected domains, including synthetic biology,
ecological and genome engineering, evolutionary theory, climate science,
biogeography and invasion ecology, among others.
