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IF YOU could build an Earth-like planet, what would you leave out of the design specs? That is the question I asked a handful of mildly amused scientists as I began to write my latest novel, .

It is the story of a group of construction experts who are working for a shady interplanetary real estate development company. Their mandate is to create a branded Pleistocene experience like that on palaeolithic Earth 15,000 years ago, for people in Homo sapiens bodies who crave that authentic Earth je ne sais quoi.

The thing is, if you are developing an Earth that is basically for tourists and Pleistocene fetishists, you would probably cut a few corners. You might make it just a little less dangerous than the original. But I wasn鈥檛 sure what you would edit out, so I called up , a planetary scientist at the University of Washington and author of the intriguingly titled book .

I asked Catling what the ideal terraform-ready planet would be, assuming you wanted it to start out lifeless and turn into an Earth. To his credit, he seemed unfazed by my question. Once I had convinced him not to put it in orbit around a red dwarf (his preferred star), he said maybe it could be a planet around a yellow star whose atmosphere had been eroded by a catastrophic impact. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 within the realm of possibility,鈥� he allowed.

My next burning question was how quickly an Earth-like atmosphere could be built. Put another way: how many generations of poor terraformers would live and die before they could breathe that sweet, sweet 21 per cent oxygen air?

Catling conceded that maybe you could get there in 10,000 years, as long as you had access to all kinds of technologies that don鈥檛 exist yet. No problem 鈥� the novel takes place 60,000 years in the future, so we can assume all sorts of and are there to make this work.

Next, I got into how the terraformed planet鈥檚 crust would work. , a geophysicist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, assured me that nobody with a choice in the matter would ever build a civilisation on a planet with plate tectonics.

She would know: she has devoted her life to studying how plate tectonics work. Our planet鈥檚 crust is broken into plates that are constantly moving around on top of a layer of magma, creating unpredictable quakes and tsunamis, plus the occasional unexpected volcano.

Still, having watched what happens when engineers get excited, I could imagine them installing a system to cause plate tectonics 鈥� and then, at the last minute, the marketing people telling them not to activate it. Ghosh helped me devise a planet-spanning device that could jump-start plate tectonics. Luckily for all those real estate buyers, this machine has been completely shut down and could never possibly harm anyone. Yep. Everything is totally safe.

To bring this planet to life, though, I needed ecosystems that were a reasonable facsimile of Pleistocene Earth habitats. But how would a real estate corporation build ecosystems so that they could be maintained with the least amount of effort?

Obviously, they would design every living thing to be part of a worldwide surveillance network. So my planet is packed with tiny, biodegradable sensors that can live inside cells or cling to a speck of dust 鈥� and all of them are networked. , a materials scientist at Duke University in North Carolina, described to me how sensors could be made from paper and other materials that would fully integrate into biological systems.

Every part of my planet can actually 鈥渢alk鈥� to the terraformers building it. Grass can describe the nitrogen content of soil and the soil itself can describe erosion processes. Some of my characters can connect to the planet鈥檚 sensor network, allowing them to feel the wind in the trees or sense when an ecosystem is producing too much carbon.

Non-human animals can also speak. Characters who are moose, cats, cows and naked mole rats have their own opinions about what they would like the planet to become. The sensor network ultimately lets everyone understand, innately, their relationship to the environment. When an ecosystem is out of balance, they feel it in their bodies.

For me, writing science fiction is about explaining where real-life science and technology might plausibly take us, then planting a wish inside it. Maybe, one day, our planets will tell us how they want to be treated. My wish is for us to make a bargain with them, where we agree to sustain each other鈥檚 lives.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com