Probably soon. We have both a carrot and a stick that will lead us on towards industrial terraforming within the next couple of decades.
The stick: if nation A figures out industrial terraforming, and nation B does not, nation B will be overpowered and lose sovereignty, whatever the borders may say. It is not possible to sustain an independent civilization in the face of a power generation gulf multiple orders of magnitude in size. China has already started to the tune of ~1GW / day; to the extent you value your freedom and capacity for self-determination, you may be interested in getting started on this continent as well.
The carrot: there is an enormous amount of value to be created in harnessing a planet's power.
This chunk of the US southwest is about 800,000 km2, and the solar energy hitting the ground per square meter per year is about 2,000 kWh. If we assume only 10% of that is captured to electricity, it's 20TW of power sitting there waiting to be used. As the saying goes, you can do a lot with 20 terawatts.
This patch in the interior of Australia has several times the electrical capacity and is also mostly empty. Together these could power the world several times over. I will let you make your own estimates for the dollar values.
Remember as well that there is more to life than the planet you were born on! Mars has a surface area about equal to all the dry landmass of Earth, composed of the same metal oxides we know and love. This is the next massive growth opportunity for any entity that has figured out terraforming, even larger than the kWh figures let on. Mars is the next frontier of our civilization and our species, it will birth new technologies and societies that exceed our imaginations, and not a single stone of its foundations have been set.
Terraform or die, then. You can have the world and more, or you can lose it, it is mostly a question of will. Do you want to win or not?
I cannot resist a final point. Many of us grew up in the era of "born too late to explore the seas, born too early to explore the stars" memes. This period is crashing to a close with the advent of terraforming. The conquest of this planet and the next will be the biggest thing in our species' history since writing, and the process that will bring it about is really not dry, dull, or dreary at all. It is not confined to office buildings and coffee shops, it cannot be managed through a laptop, it has not an ounce of reasonableness about it. It is intensely exciting and adventurous work. In order to complete the task set before us, our generation will have to venture into enormous deserts and tame them, build new industries in the most remote and wild corners of our planet, launch massive fleets of starships. We are going act as geological agents and rebuild several continents; we are going to melt and smelt the rock and shape it to our will.
It will be a highly energetic process. You will certainly get a chance to stretch your legs. At any rate I think it will definitively put to rest this tired notion that modernity is boring. For that matter - "modernity"? We don't even know modernity! It hasn't happened yet! We are living in the deep past, the ancient and dimly flickering era before the planets came alive and humanity put new stars in the sky.
So do you want to win or not?