WC Archive

Building an argument for a better world runs into a recurring problem: people like to imagine awful futures. Seriously. There are undoubtedly numerous explanations for this, ranging from Cassandra complexes ("I warned you, but you didn't listen!") to Terriblisma, the wonderful term Alex dredged up out of Renaissance Italy to describe the awe-filled feeling one gets from witnessing utter devastation. The unwillingness to imagine positive futures may be a wish to avoid hubris, or it may denote an underlying hope to be wrong, to encounter a good future as a pleasant surprise.

For most of the last decade, my job (in its various manifestations) has been the development of scenarios, plausible stories about the future. Usually, these scenarios were linked to a given organization's strategic concerns, whether that organization was as large as a global IT manufacturer or as small as a local school district. Sometimes, the scenarios were used to build out dramatic worlds for film, television, or games. Occasionally, the scenarios were simply an exercise in thinking through what the next five, ten, or fifty years might look like.

When people set out to think about the future, the first (and usually only) question they ask is "what if things go wrong?" This is by no means a bad question (in fact, it would be nice if it were asked more often). But focusing only on negative outcomes blinds one to the possibility of things going right. The possibility of victory. I'm not alone in this observation; Alex has spoken in the past of working with environmental groups, asking what their "win" scenario looked like, and getting nothing but blank looks in response.

This last week, news services and blogs were filled with reports about President Bush's plan to put bases on the Moon and on Mars. This "Leave No Planet Behind" plan is budgeted to cost over a trillion dollars over the coming years, although the initial boost to NASA's budget is around $750 million -- that is, less than 1% of the total proposed cost. There are quite a few critics of this idea, but, perhaps surprisingly, many of the sharpest barbs come from decidedly pro-science, pro-space sources. The consensus criticism seems to be that, as with many other of this administration's programs, the high-minded proposal will be matched with strangled funding and a lack of real attention or resources. In short, it's election-year hype.

This is short-sighted and painful, for many reasons. It distracts from real issues at home. It will gut NASA's science budget. But the big reason, for me, is that it continues to spin the issue of space exploration as a "conquest of space," pseudo-military, plant-the-flag effort. It's not.

Exploring space is Green.

Exploring space is a crucial component of our ongoing efforts to better understand -- and protect -- our home planet. The hallmarks of good, solid Green thinking are a focus on sustainability, a bias towards the accumulation of knowledge, and a preference for long-term thinking. These are also the principles that make for a good space program. These two realms are inextricably linked.

Over the past few decades, notions of environmental sustainability moved from a focus on cleaning up pollution to a focus on understanding (and, where needed, responding to) global environmental systems. Picking up litter and reducing smog are easy concepts to understand; the dynamics between climate cycles, insolation, CO2 emissions from natural and artificial sources, and solar cycles are a bit more complex. Simply put, we can't understand the details of how our environment functions without a better understanding of the larger environment in which our planet exists, along with additional examples of planetary development. Turning our backs on space exploration means cutting ourselves off from a wealth of potentially-critical knowledge about our planet and solar system.

A space program with a planetary focus would combine current research into Earth's climate and geography (much of which can only be done from orbit) with expanded research into how the rest of our solar system works. Plenty of big questions about our planetary neighbors remain unanswered. Venus, Earth and Mars all orbit within our Sun's "habitable belt," and there is some preliminary research suggesting that each may have started out with similar potential for life. Why did Venus fall victim to a runaway greenhouse effect, while Mars dried up? Why did Earth alone manage to get through its early uninhabitable "iceball" period? We can speculate, but on-site exploration will give us far better answers than will remote theorizing. If climate change is the potential disaster that many of us suspect it could be, these are not idle questions. The better we understand how similar planets work, the better we can understand our own planetology.

Ultimately, the Sun drives our climate. But what's the role of the solar cycle on Earth's climate system? Some Greens play down the effects of the Sun on climate change because it has become a convenient way for climate refuseniks to dismiss human sources of global warming. But we really don't fully understand the relationship between solar "weather" and Earth's weather. More research is desperately needed, and this means sending out more probes.

There are myriad connections between space research and Green issues. The discovery of life in the oceans under the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, for example, would be our first opportunity to learn more about how life functions on Earth by comparing it to life evolved under utterly disparate conditions. Proposals to send a robotic probe to drill through Europa's ice crust, however, remain unfunded.

For now, and likely for the next couple of decades, a Green space program would not mean sending people into space. Instead, it would emphasize the currently underfunded robotic-science part of NASA. The automated science missions have done remarkably well, considering how little money has been made available for them. The Mars Exploration Rover is the most spectacular recent example, but in over past months, automated probes gathered material from a comet, monitored solar weather, and dove into the crushing atmosphere of Jupiter. Such robotic missions cost much less than trying to send humans into space; prior to the Columbia disaster, a single shuttle launch cost around $500 million, nearly as much as the entire Mars Exploration Rover program. In the context of the larger American federal budget (and European budgets, for that matter), robotic space exploration is inexpensive -- and the information we get back, with the potential to help us better understand global environmental problems, is simply priceless.

That the Bush administration's current space proposal is wrong-headed, financially-disastrous, politically-motivated, and ultimately doomed should not lead those with Green inclinations to believe that all space efforts are so benighted. They're not. On the contrary, smart space efforts are an increasingly important tool in our ongoing work to understand and repair the Earth's environment. We discard it at our own peril.

(This essay was one of the pieces of the last, unpublished issue of Whole Earth Review. I initially wrote it in November of 2002, revised it in February of 2003, and lightly edited it today. The issue focused on the "singularity" -- a point in the near future where change happens so fast that pre-singularity people simply couldn't comprehend the lives of post-singularity people -- and this essay looked to ways to make such an event as safe and democratic as possible. Even if you set aside its references to a "singularity," however, I think the arguments it makes are still quite relevant to the issues we confront today. Warning: it's over 2600 words, a bit longer than our usual post length. --Jamais)

Open the Future

by Jamais Cascio

Among the numerous complaints about The Day After Tomorrow, by far the most justified was the criticism that a process which would take at least a decade or two to unfold (in the worst-case models) was shown taking place over the course of a few days. This was understandable, I suppose, from the perspective of movie-making -- it's hard to tell the story of a multi-decade ecosystem disaster in a summer action-movie. There are few opportunities for edge-of-the-seat excitement in that sort of story, few scenes of panicked crowds, walls of onrushing water, or last-minute heroism. The story of a gradual-but-inexorable environmental collapse would have much more to do with politics than with adventure.

Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, Forty Signs of Rain,tells just that story.

(Review continues in the extended entry.)

If you've been following the WorldChanging discussion taking place in the Inkwell conference on the Well, you'll have picked up on a troublingly recurring point: many good people have come to the conclusion that only a climate disaster will get us (meaning primarily, but not exclusively, Americans) to change our ways and to really address global warming.

The logic is simple, sad and compelling. We seem to find it difficult to change behaviors with apparent short-term benefits and dangerous-but-uncertain long-term consequences; only massive, traumatic events seem to make us re-evaluate our positions and shake us out of our complacency.

Technology Review reports that MIT Professor Leonard Guarente may have found the genetic factor that allows mice undergoing 'caloric restriction' to live up to 30% longer. It's long been known that cutting down food intake by about 1/3 can extend the lifespan of mammals by up to 50%. Professor Guarente has found that manipulating a single gene -- the SIRT1 gene -- can produce longer mice lives without caloric restriction. What's more, all mammals -- including humans -- have a similar gene.

A 30% longer healthy life -- another 25-30 years, say -- is intriguing, and is on the cusp of being worldchanging. As Alex has noted in the past, a population that regularly lives to (and beyond) the age of 100 forces us to confront questions about work, relationships, family and our society in general. But living to 100, even 140, may be just the tip of the iceberg. What happens when we figure out a way to live much longer lives? Read on for an exploration of this question.

John S. Quarterman contributed the following essay to WorldChanging. It makes a particularly interesting partner to Bruce Sterling's recent essay on the WSIS. Thank you for this, John!

     -Jamais

The Internet has become so embedded in society that both sides in the current U.S. presidential race cite web sites and all factions blog all the time. It isn't electrical utility grids or even air travel that is interconnecting the world as never before; it is communications systems, led by the Internet, which is rapidly subsuming many other communications systems. All the other infrastructures increasingly depend on the Internet. Even if it isn't actually causing a state change in the world, as in water to ice, the Internet has global reach and fast speed, producing on the one hand its great value via Metcalfe's Law (many users) and Reed's Law (many groups), and on the other its great risk of cascade failure, as well as its many smaller risks from phishing to cable cuts.

Can we prevent the next Tsunami 2004-type disaster?

We can't stop earthquakes from happening. We can't block or dispel tsunamis before they hit shore. What we can do is prevent the kind of loss of life seen this week.

Moreover, many of the steps we can take to mitigate the danger of tsunamis would also save lives in other disasters. The two key factors? Ones we return to time and again on WorldChanging: How do we gather information? How do we communicate it?

In this case, we do well with the former. It's in communicating that we fail. But solutions are possible -- worldchanging solutions.

The Kyoto Treaty becomes active today. Is the world saved yet?

No, but that's okay. It doesn't matter that (as critics from all sides never tire of pointing out) the treaty itself pushes for minimal reductions in CO₂ emissions -- 5% under 1990 levels -- and doesn't include rapidly-developing nations like China and India. In and of itself, the Kyoto treaty won't solve global warming or avert disastrous climate disruption. But that's not the point of Kyoto.

WorldChanging Ally Dale Carrico wrote an excellent essay on the value of nanotechnology as a method of helping the world's poorest regions. I'd been mulling the pieces that he refers to in his essay, but (as I told him in email), Dale articulates the position I'd take far more eloquently and completely than I would have been able to. I'd chalk this piece up as mandatory reading both for nanotechnology enthusiasts and those interested in global development issues. Dale has generously agreed to let us republish this essay in full here.

The original essay appeared on Dale's website, Amor Mundi.

The Future Starts Now: Technoprogressives Cannot Postpone the Redress of Poverty and Treatable Illness

Friend and ally Mike Treder, one of the directors of the technoprogressive Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, recently posted an editorial to the CRN blog about some of the ways in which advanced (but possibly developmentally proximate) nanotechnologies might be used eventually to ameliorate some of the devastating poverty in the developing world. He is absolutely right about this, and it is encouraging to find more people beginning to think about ways in which emerging technologies might be applied to urgent social and political problems that confront humanity.

His comments complement points made in a recent article (to which he links in his own post) by Charles Choi, which worries that “Nanotech May Not Reach [the] Poor.” Despite the fact that “the poor of the world, who make up nearly 80 percent of the global population, [stand to] benefit most from emerging nanotechnologies,” writes Choi, they are not likely in fact to reap them at all “unless nations commit the funding and [endorse the] policies necessary to spread those benefits.”

Treder paints a dramatic and painfully accurate picture of the scope of the global healthcare crisis:

Remember Asteroid 2004 MN4? Quite possibly not -- news about it was overshadowed by the late-December tsunami. 2004 MN4 is an Earth-orbit-crossing asteroid that, for several days in late December, appeared to be on target to hit the Earth in 2029. Early estimates of chances of impact grew higher as the orbital calculations improved, something that hadn't happened with previous asteroid early warnings; only after some slightly-panicked number crunching did astronomers figure out that 2004 MN4 wouldn't hit the Earth, but would instead come within 23,000 miles -- the astronomical equivalent of having a bullet whiz right past your ear.

We can all breathe a big sigh of relief, right? Well, not so fast. When something comes that close to a planet's gravity well, its path shifts. With our current observations about 2004 MN4, astronomers estimate that MN4 has a 1 in 23,000 chance of hitting the Earth in 2035 and a 1 in 14,000 chance of hitting in 2036. We'd be able to calculate precisely whether or not the asteroid will hit after it passes... but at that point, if we found that it would hit, six or seven years is simply not enough time to do anything about it. Hollywood notwithstanding, it really doesn't help to blow an asteroid up -- you just end up being hit by a larger number of chunks with the same energy. The real solution is pushing the rock off-course... but that would take longer than we'd have. And when 2004 MN4 hit, it would unleash nearly a gigaton of energy.

So Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart -- whom we've posted about before -- has a plan. Not to push the asteroid out of the way now, but to land a transponder on it:

Not a spy thriller, the Kaya Identity is the formula which projects the amount of atmospheric CO2 as a function of population, GDP per capita, watts per dollar, and CO2 per watt. It's pretty straightforward: our carbon output depends on how much power we use, how efficiently we use it, and how "dirty" the production is. Recall that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are just under 380 parts per million, and that the general consensus among climatologists is that (looking just at CO2), the climate is up for some serious problems once we hit the 440ppm level. With the Kaya Identity, we can calculate just what combination of factors would keep us below that level.

The math isn't hard -- it's just multiplication -- but charting it out over course of the next century can get a bit tedious. Fortunately, for a class in the Geosciences department at the University of Chicago, Professor David Archer put together a Kaya Calculator allowing you to plug in preferred figures for each element and see what results. For most factors, you don't have to give absolute numbers, just the amount of change every year. The calculator is set to show the results over the course of the 21st century, and displays a number of graphs detailing the figures. The most important of the resulting graphs is "Carbon-Free Energy Required for CO2 Stabilization" -- that is, how much of our overall energy production will have to be carbon-free in order to stabilize CO2 at a given portion by 2100.

With the default figures -- taken from the global trends of the last century -- we'd need over 17 terawatts of carbon-free power (out of the total produced) to stabilize at 450ppm in 2100. I've reproduced the graph showing these results above. Unfortunately, the chart doesn't indicate just what the total energy production would be; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can help here -- their average scenario for energy use in 2100 is roughly four times the present, or about 40-50 terawatts.

But that assumes we don't try to change things.

When Howard Zinn wrote A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present in 1980, the effect was electric. It was a history book that talked more about citizens than leaders, more about daily lives than state conflicts. While it wasn't the first time that scholars focused on something other than the official histories as told by the winners, it was nonetheless eye-opening for academics and students everywhere. It signaled the end for the "great man" theory of history.

But histories based on the words, records and thoughts of average citizens have faced a serious problem: a paucity of documentation. People tend not to think of their letters and notes as historical artifacts, and for decades, only professionals would carry cameras around with them in their daily lives. Even as historians came to recognize the value of the stories and reflections from every day citizens, the records of key events used by scholars were still largely taken from the reporters and officials charged with documenting and explaining the world.

This is no longer true.

Yesterday's bombings in London will undoubtedly have many repercussions in terms of politics, and economics, and war, but its greatest -- if most subtle -- effect may be the confirmation that we have entered an era where we are all historians.

The pace and course of global warming-induced climate disruption is such that, even with an aggressive global effort to cut greenhouse gas output starting today, temperatures will continue to rise for two or three decades. If the effect of rising temperatures hits a "tipping point" resulting in far-more-radical changes to the Earth's ecosystems than one might otherwise expect, we may be forced into using riskier, planetary-scale engineering projects to mitigate the changes and return us to "Earth-like" conditions. In Terraforming Earth, I looked at some of the proposals for large-scale reversals of temperature increases and CO2 buildup; In Terraforming Earth, Part II, I looked at the complexities of bioengineered adjustment instead of geoengineered mitigation.

But whether we end up taking the mitigation or the adjustment course, we will want -- need -- clear guidelines to help us make the right choices. Such guidelines would, for some, seem like common sense; indeed, their use would not be to tell us what to do, but as a consistent metric against which to test proposals. These principles would not tell us whether a given strategy would succeed or fail, but whether the strategy would be the right course of action.

As an explicit parallel to bioethics, these guidelines would be known as "geoethics."

I'm getting a shiver of deja vu these days when I read the peak oil-related websites. Some are boggling over the fact that "global warming" got more attention than "peak oil" in the discussions over the recently-passed Energy Bill in the US, while others are simply furious that the American public (and these websites seem predominantly American in focus) isn't taking peak oil sufficiently seriously. They're particularly bothered that mainstream discussion of the idea, when it happens, often pushes the peak date out by ten to twenty years (or more), making it seem like a distant crisis at worst.

When I read all of this, I realize that it's happened before.

Terraforming Earth is the effort to use large-scale engineering to affect geophysical processes in a way to avert radical changes to the environment -- that is, to make Earth "Earth-like" again. I touched on the idea first here, expanded on it here, and explored some of the more philosophical questions here. In all of these pieces, however, you'll note that this terraforming work is thought to be an option for some time down the road, after other solutions are exhausted. There's no argument in those three essays that we should start large scale engineering efforts now.

Today's email brought news that should make us think hard about how soon we might want to bring such efforts to bear.

Many of you sent me links to the article in today's Guardian UK newspaper (linking to a New Scientist article) outlining a "tipping point" in the Siberian arctic: the permafrost appears to be melting. This is happening due to a combination of natural arctic temperature cycles, global warming (Siberia is warming faster than any other place on Earth), and a feedback effect from melting snow -- the darker ground absorbs more heat, resulting in faster melting of adjacent permafrost. Siberian permafrost covers a million square kilometers of ground that's largely peat bog; the peat has been producing methane for centuries, but that methane has been trapped under the permafrost. With the permafrost melting, the methane would be released into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming by a substantial amount. How quickly the methane would be released remains an open question -- would it take years to release it all? Decades? A century or more? Clearly, this situation demands a great deal more study.

It's important to note that the source of this story is not a peer-reviewed, multiply-confirmed piece of research in Nature, Science or the PNAS. It's an article in New Scientist about a presentation from a group of researchers just back from Siberia. This doesn't mean that the findings are wrong, only that we should be skeptical until they've been confirmed. But that such permafrost melting would result in the release of abundant methane is not a new theory, and New Scientist notes that independent research points to methane "hot spots" already forming in the region.

For the moment, then, let's assume that the article is generally correct: the permafrost melt is getting faster, and the boggy ground beneath is releasing its pent-up methane. There are two important things to know about this situation: the amount of methane that would be released is projected to be in the multi-gigaton range -- one source says 70 billion tons, another says "several hundred" billion tons; and methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In essence, the release of (say) 100 billion tons of methane would be the functional heat-trapping equivalent of 2.1 trillion tons of CO2. To put that number into perspective, the total annual output of greenhouse gases from the US is about 7 billion tons of CO2 equivalent.

This is a big deal.

It did before, at least according to a growing number of scientists specializing in the evolution of the human brain.

When the hominid line split off from other apes about six million years ago, bipedalism and other physiological changes happened pretty quickly -- from the neck down. But it wasn't until about two-and-a-half million years ago that hominid brains started to really grow, from Homo habilis' ~500-600cc brains (chimps are a bit less than 400cc) to Homo sapiens' ~1400cc brains. The trigger for this cerebral explosion appears to be a period in which the global climate started going through a series of abrupt changes. Ice ages and warming periods flip-flopped, making it difficult for species relying upon particular environmental niches or conditions to survive. The species that did best were the ones able to evolve ways of dealing with rapid environmental changes; in the case of hominids, they got smarter.

We now face another round of climate disruptions, and this time it's happening far faster than the natural processes of past eras. Other environmental hazards abound, as well, threatening to make a bad situation worse. Will all of this lead, once again, to a new phase in human intelligence?

Although I recognize that the depletion of oil supplies is a serious problem, I haven't always been entirely supportive of the "peak oil" movement. There's a good bit of "apocaphilia" in many of the peak oilers, a fascination with the end of the world that goes well beyond terriblisma. I'm not saying that they look forward to things falling apart, the center not holding, and mere anarchy loosed upon the world, but some may well be looking forward to being able to say "I told you so."

More importantly, a good many of those who pay close attention to the peak oil theories are all too ready to discount any attempt at solutions, declaring flatly that it's too late, that no solutions will be sufficient, and that no amount of "techno-fix" or "idealism" will be able to handle the social trauma inflicted upon our civilization by the depletion of oil reserves. I count James Howard Kunstler in this group, as his Long Emergency (and ongoing blog, Clusterfuck Nation) seem to be terribly influential in the peak oil community. As we've explored here a bit, Kunstler has no time for people who want to fix the system, seeing only the cleansing hand of catastrophe as the only way we'll change our ways.

Obviously such a philosophy isn't well-received here at WorldChanging. Our core principle is that things are bad, possibly even worse than most recognize, but that there are many ways to make things less-bad -- and even, if we're clever, innovative, and insightful, ways even to make things better. Such a philosophy doesn't deny that things could go the way that Kunstler, et al, foresee, but argues that such a fate is not the only possibility. We can change the world, and for the better.

When researchers at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland sequenced the genome of the 1918 influenza strain and posted it on the web, they may well have saved the lives of millions.

For some readers, this may seem like a counter-intuitive proposition. After all, the 1918 flu killed up to 50 million people. And while the bioscience needed to re-engineer the 1918 strain is far more demanding than many might realize, remaking the virus is clearly possible: reseachers at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta used the viral sequence to do just that.

But those who decry this research and the publication of the genome as a "recipe for destruction" -- such as the erstwhile antagonists, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who put aside their differences to write an editorial in the New York Times making such an argument -- both underestimate the value of widespread knowledge of how this virus works in efforts to combat similar pandemics and overestimate our vulnerability to this particular virus. The most important result of the sequencing of the 1918 flu is the knowledge given the world in its preparations for the next major pandemic flu.

Scenario methodology is a powerful tool for thinking through the implications of strategic choices. Rather than tying the organization to a set "official future," scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. (How would our strategy work in this future? How about if things turn out this way?) We talk about scenarios with some frequency here, and several of us have worked (and continue to work) professionally in the discipline.

With its genealogy reaching back to Cold War think tanks and global oil multinationals, however, scenario planning tends to be primarily a tool for corporate and government planning; few non-profit groups or NGOs, let alone smaller communities, have the resources to assemble useful scenario projects or (more importantly) follow the results of the scenarios through the organization. Scenario planning pioneer Global Business Network has made a real effort to bring the scenario methodology to non-profits (disclosure: I worked at GBN and continue to do occasional projects for them), but we could take the process further: we can create open source scenarios. I don't just mean free or public scenarios; I mean opening up the whole process.

Let's see what this would entail.