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Terraforming Earth

by

Michele Dutcher

In this month’s issue of Science News (Dec 2015) there is a bookshelf review of The Planet Remade by Oliver Morton.  The author advocates geoengineering Earth by: generating artificial volcanic eruptions; seeding colossal clouds that shade the planet; covering the oceans in immense algal blooms; and using solar sails. 

These 4 proposals are personally gratifying to me as a science fiction writer because they are specifically part of a sci-fi novel I published years ago called Outrunning the Storm.In my novel, the daily SOPs (standard operating procedures) of these four last ditch efforts to decrease global warming are executed by three super computers. Collectively they are named G.O.D. – the Global Orbiting Directive.

I set my novel at the end of the process where the planet’s temperature has been lowered to such a degree that G.O.D. is basically turning out the lights on the program and is now free to propel itself to other star systems, to explore the universe as much as it wants.

One place that I differ from Oliver Morton is in how to pay for the system.  He suggests charging space tourists to ride in the planes needed to seed the clouds with tiny disco balls.  I believe a program of this size will take much more funding than these rides can possibly generate. However, I do see the funding necessary come from the same group of people – the world’s upper one percent.

To me it is the obvious conclusion as this is the group who has profited the most from Earth’s industrialization and contamination and they alone have the necessary resources to initiate and maintain the program.

Think of it this way: let’s imagine there is a 10 x 10 grid making 100 boxes. There is a man living inside of each one of the boxes.  There are 100 dollar bills available to fund the grid, but instead of that money being evenly distributed, the guy in the top left hand corner has 50 dollars, the next 9 guys share $37.70; the next 40 guys share $11.30.  The 50 guys on the bottom have 2 pennies apiece. The top 1% who have half the global wealth are basically a world government unto themselves.

Unfortunately, the political nations of Earth are beginning to see concrete effects of the world’s global temperature change.  Here in the USA, for instance, a decade long drought hit California – one of our nation’s primary bread baskets.  The only way this food producing area was able to continue to harvest crops was by sucking up all the deep water in natural aquifers hundreds of feet below the surface. It will take a century to refill those aquifers – IF there are no more droughts.  But, of course, there will be more droughts – decade long droughts followed by mass migrations of people looking for clean fresh water. These migrations will easily equal and surpass the dust bowl migrations of the 1930s leading to political upheaval as millions starve.

Even if we could blink our eyes and magically produce a G.O.D. program today, it would take half a century to slow down and repair the damage already done to our planet’s environment.

So who is to front the money to Save the Earth? Not the 90 percent on the bottom who are controlled by the nations they live in, whose comparatively tiny gross national products are going to continue to shrink due to the effects of global drought.

I vote for the guy in the upper left hand corner who actually has the resources to pay for these programs - the guy with $50.  Not only would he be saving humanity from extinction but the rest of Earth’s creatures as well. The one percent may be saying to itself, ‘We’ll build cities like giant terrariums, like the city in Logan’s Run – and we’ll wait it out, living in luxury while the Earth heals itself.' However, if Global Warming continues unabated and humanity is decreased to numbers seen during the last ice age, this planet won’t return to an Eden-like garden.  Instead it will become something closer to the desert planet in Dune.  The owner of the factory needs to pay to have it updated before the factory catches on fire.

It couldn’t happen you say? Cast your eyes towards Mars, a planet that once had oceans of liquid water and is now an icy rock after losing its atmosphere. That is where our planet is heading – barren desolation – except we are closer to our star, Sol so our surface is going to dry up in the heat, at least at first.

In exchange for saving the planet, we could offer these families control of a newly formed worldwide government. We could name them The Council and admit that without their funds, civilization is a goner.

As Science Fiction writers we all love to put our characters in apocalyptic landscapes, but in reality a healthy Earth is a better prospect for our stories because if the humans are gone, there won’t be anyone left to read our stories.

Is the idea of terraforming Earth merely Science Fiction? – I hope not.

(1), co2 400 ppm, (2)CO2 is a green house gas, (3)were stored, (4)@180 ppm not 18

The last glacial period saw CO2 @18 ppm. NASA reports and Life's Engines by Paul G. Falkowski

Show me the data otherwise.

Look up Exxon's earlier research on climate and carbon.

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