ENGINEERING EARTH • PART I
Mahalo nui loa to filmmaker John Boswell for the sharing script
• STOP WATCHING when they nuke the ocean floor!
• We’ll watch that later, in Part 2
What happened in 1815 that affected the whole Earth?
How much more powerful can supervolcanoes be compared to Mount Tambora?
What is the NASA engineer's plan to steal energy from supervolcanoes?
What gas would scientists spray in the stratosphere to cool Earth?
How much warming can one ounce of sulfur dioxide offset?
What is the main danger of spraying sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere?
What would the space shield be made of?
What is the Great Green Wall Initiative?
How much carbon can one mechanical tree capture compared to real trees?
How much CO2 have humans added to the oceans?
INTRO
What will Earth look like in 1 million years?
How far will humanity go to remake the planet?
To survive into the future, we have to think big. We have to become planetary engineers.
SUPERVOLCANOES
In 1815, a mysterious veil of dust began to spread over the Earth.
The culprit was a remote East Asian volcano: Mount Tambora.
It was the largest eruption in modern history, spewing out 80 cubic kilometers of debris and taking up to 100,000 lives.
But even this was just a fraction of what Earth is capable of.
Supervolcanos, like the ancient eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia, can unleash fifty times the power and thirty times the amount of debris.
An eruption of this scale today would be catastrophic, with some estimating that the volcanic winter could claim up to a billion lives.
The volcanic winter from such an eruption would be catastrophic – potentially claiming up to one billion lives.
There are about 20 active supervolcanoes on Earth today -- sleeping beasts that present an even greater threat than asteroid strikes.
Instead of waiting for them to explode, what if we could steal their energy, and use it for ourselves?
One NASA engineer has a proposal for exactly that.
The idea is to drill a series of boreholes several kilometers deep around the outside of the magma chamber.
Cold water would then be injected down into the rock, become superheated, then get pumped back to the surface to carry the heat away, gradually cooling the magma.
The location of the boreholes will be critical: drilling too close to the chamber itself would risk triggering an accidental eruption.
But if done right, the superheated water removed from below would provide a continuous source of renewable energy.
And over tens of thousands of years, the energy removed may eventually be enough to cool the chamber completely.
To fully protect civilization, we will have to neutralize not just every existing supervolcano… but all future ones.
Magma plumes from Earth’s mantle are continually bubbling to the surface. These plumes will continue to trigger supervolcanic eruptions as often as every 50,000 years.
• The Hawaiian islands were formed over a “hot spot” powered by a magma plume.
Learning to harness these forces could mean the difference between catastrophic collapse and the long-term survival of humanity.
But it’s not just supervolcanoes we will have to manage. From the lithosphere to the atmosphere, each of earth’s layers are prone to shocks that can threaten civilization and life itself.
Our job is to protect and manage these layers with the power of technology -- to build a safer, more livable planet, where life and humans can thrive together for millions of years.
And creating a safer planet starts with creating a safer climate.
GEOENGINEERING
In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo ejected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, reflecting sunlight around the world, and causing global temperatures to fall up to half a degree celsius for nearly two years. The cooler temperatures even slowed the pace of sea level rise for the next decade.
With global temperatures and climate catastrophes on the rise, this event inspired a bold idea: artificial volcanic eruptions.
Like putting sunscreen on the earth, spraying sulfur dioxide high in the stratosphere would reflect sunlight and temporarily cool the planet.
A single ounce of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere can offset the warming effects of several tons of carbon dioxide for a year.
Dusting the sky would have an immediate effect, buying us time to decarbonize the global economy.
But there’s a catch.
The exact effects may be unpredictable and uneven. Weather patterns could become erratic and threaten food supplies. With so much at stake, the fight for control over Earth’s climate could even escalate into armed conflict.
If we want to avoid experimenting on the atmosphere directly, there is a bolder way to try.
SPACE SHIELDS
A team at MIT has developed a concept for a giant solar shield out in space, thousands of kilometers across. Placed where the gravitational pull from the Sun and Earth balance out, it could reduce sunlight by 1.8% – just enough to bring temperatures down to pre-industrial levels.
The shield would be made of silicon bubbles, inflating out in space to ease their transport… and deflating if the solution needed to be reversed.
To block enough sun, this solar shield would have to be absolutely massive – about the size of Brazil.
Others have proposed systems of space mirrors to precisely redirect sunlight, which could be used to increase solar radiation if temperatures drop too low in the future.
The engineering challenges are daunting. But these methods could give us safer, more precise control over Earth’s temperature.
Despite the allure of high tech solutions, we can also use more natural means to maintain a steady climate.
BIOSPHERE
Large-scale ecosystem engineering can go a long way in securing the stability of Earth’s systems.
In 2007, The United Nations launched the Great Green Wall Initiative – a huge effort to plant a 5,000-mile belt of trees across the entire African Continent. This vast new forest will not only suck up a quarter billion tons of carbon, but also combat desertification and increase food security.
Managing our planet effectively will require forging deep alliances with the biosphere. That includes preservation of natural carbon sinks like the amazon rainforest, which are a critical ecological counterweight to human activity.
But in some cases, that may also mean bioengineering new forms of life itself.
By tweaking the machinery of photosynthesis, scientists have recently created plants that grow up to 40% larger than their natural counterparts, hinting at a future of radically enriched crops and plant life.
They have also begun to engineer algae that convert sunlight into clean-burning hydrogen fuel … and microbes that have been reprogrammed to generate electricity from mud and wastewater.
But most dramatically, we are now on the path to creating a hybrid woolly mammoth, by tweaking the genes of asian elephants.
These creatures could be reintroduced to the arctic, where they would help keep the permafrost frozen and prevent billions of tons of C02 from leaking into the air.
Genetic engineering could become our most potent tool for managing the planet – maintaining ecological balance and making the biosphere more diverse and resilient.
The wonders of the future may not be built with concrete or circuits, but with cells.
And we can do more than just design new life – we can copy life’s designs, and make them our own.
BIOMIMICRY
These are mechanical trees.
They mimic the real thing by soaking up carbon onto special plates that act like leaves… once captured, the carbon can be buried or recycled, and the cycle repeats.
A single one of these machines can sequester as much carbon as a thousand living trees.
Vast forests of artificial trees could be deployed in inhospitable regions, and with 100 million of them, we could offset our entire carbon emissions.
But to truly erase our emissions, we also need to look beyond the atmosphere, to the oceans, where we have added 642 billion metric tons of C02.
To reverse this, one researcher has proposed a solution so outrageous it sounds like a supervillain plot: to nuke the ocean floor.
Planetary engineers - Scientists who work to change and improve entire planets
Supervolcanoes - Extremely large volcanoes that can cause worldwide damage
Debris - Broken pieces of rock, ash, and other materials thrown out by volcanoes
Catastrophic - Causing great damage or suffering
Volcanic winter - A period of cold weather caused by volcanic ash blocking sunlight
Magma chamber - Underground space filled with melted rock
Boreholes - Deep holes drilled into the ground
Superheated - Made extremely hot
Renewable energy - Energy that comes from sources that won't run out
Neutralize - To make something harmless
Mantle - The hot layer of rock inside Earth
Lithosphere - Earth's outer rocky layer
Atmosphere - The layer of gases around Earth
Stratosphere - A high layer of Earth's atmosphere
Sulfur dioxide - A gas that can reflect sunlight
Decarbonize - To reduce the amount of carbon being released
Gravitational pull - The force that pulls objects toward each other
Pre-industrial - Before factories and machines were common
Ecosystem - A community of living things and their environment
Desertification - When land becomes desert
Carbon sinks - Places that absorb and store carbon from the air
Photosynthesis - How plants make food using sunlight
Permafrost - Ground that stays frozen all year
Genetic engineering - Changing the genes of living things
Biomimicry - Copying designs from nature
Sequester - To capture and store something
► COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
— please answer with complete sentences
What happened in 1815 that affected the whole Earth?
How much more powerful can supervolcanoes be compared to Mount Tambora?
What is the NASA engineer's plan to steal energy from supervolcanoes?
What gas would scientists spray in the stratosphere to cool Earth?
How much warming can one ounce of sulfur dioxide offset?
What is the main danger of spraying sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere?
What would the space shield be made of?
What is the Great Green Wall Initiative?
How much carbon can one mechanical tree capture compared to real trees?
How much CO2 have humans added to the oceans?
► From EITHER/OR ► BOTH/AND
► FROM Right/Wrong ► Creative Combination
THESIS — Argue the case that, for the human race to survive, we must engineer the Earth.
ANT-THESIS — Argue the case that engineering the Earth is far too dangerous.
SYN-THESIS — How might you bring these two perspectives together?
