“Original Non-Fiction” finalist for the Canopus Award for Excellence in Interstellar Writing, http://canopus.100yss.org/?p=402...

Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering James Rodger Fleming Science, and Society Program Colby College, Maine 04901 USA

Can humanity survive on Earth into the indefinite future without taking control of the climate system and biosphere, or perhaps one day engaging in solar ? If we seek to colonize other planets, will we need to live sequestered from harsh environments in little residential capsules and venture out only in spacesuits, or should we practice terraformation to make the environment of other planets more Earthlike? In either case, we will need to master bio-geo- to generate fresh air, water, and food. Would it be better then to engineer planets for or to engineer humans and perhaps cyborgs to withstand harsh environments? Since prediction of new technological developments or inventions has proven to be notoriously inaccurate, what insights can we derive from the history of planetary manipulation proposals and fantasies?

In 2248, according to writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Icehenge,1 heroine Emma Weil’s “five-hundred-year project is the of Mars,” while starship captain Eric Swann’s “is the colonization of a planet in another system.” “What’s the big difference?” asked Swann; “About ten or twenty light years,” replied Emma (22). One of the biggest challenges facing the starship was generating fresh air, fresh water, and food for the crew while recycling wastes with near 100 percent efficiency. The starship is a traveling biosphere, and engineers have to balance the photosynthetic coefficient for algae and the respiratory coefficient for the humans and animals to prevent too much build-up in either CO2 or oxygen: “Light feeds algae. Algae feed plants and fish. Plants feed animals and humans and create oxygen and water. Animals feed humans, and humans and animals create wastes, which sustain microorganisms that mineralize the wastes (to an extent), making it possible to plow them back into the soil” (adapted from p. 29). Eighty percent efficiency in this system was good enough for a three-year voyage; 99 percent perhaps for 100-years, but perfect 2 closure in any system, even a planet, is not technically possible. Major problems include mineral deficiencies, the incomplete recycling of wastes, and minute losses of water that would coat the interior of the ship and pool in cracks and crevices. The starship would have to recharge its systems somehow. Even by 2610, or some 600 fictional years from today, Mars remains a hostile environment for humans, and author Robinson envisions humans safely venturing only as far as Pluto, while the fate of the starship, which had left the solar system remains unknown. The pace is much quicker, unrealistically so, in Robinson’s later more popular writings, Red, Green, and Blue Mars, where it takes less than two generations, beginning in 2026, for the granddaughter of the first Martian colonist to depart from a fully terraformed solar system in an interstellar vessel headed to another star system twenty light-years away. Such is science fiction, but what about its more proximate cousin science fantasy? Fantasy often informs reality (and vice versa). NASA managers know this well, as do Trekkies. The best science fiction authors typically build from the current state of a field to construct futuristic scenarios that reveal and explore the condition. Scientists as well often venture into flights of fancy. Although not widely documented, the fantasy–reality axis is a prominent aspect of the history of science and technology. The chief distinction is that the fiction writers provide a moral core and compass.

Science fiction and science fantasy meet in such classic works as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a two-billion year “history” of the future in which the human species and its many successors escape the dying Earth and colonize other worlds, until the remnants of humanity are extinguished when the Sun becomes a supernova. Near the end the last men, living on Neptune, design an artificial human dust, “capable of being carried forward on the sun's radiation, hardy enough to endure the conditions of a trans- galactic voyage of many millions of years, and yet intricate enough to bear the potentiality of life and of spiritual development.” This, for Stapledon, is humanity’s final legacy. Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky (1950), concerns the terraformation of Jupiter’s Ganymede by frontier homesteaders who depart an Earth that is 3 overcrowded and near ecological exhaustion. The colonizing farmers face a super harsh environment of thin air and biting cold. Not only do the hardscrabble space pioneers have to nurture their crops in such conditions, they have to create their own soil from crushed rock. The Greening of Mars (1984) by James Lovelock and Michael Allaby brings contemporary environmental and social issues into story telling about planetary transformation.2 Writing before the Montreal Protocol was enacted or the Cold War ended, the authors anticipated using banned chlorofluorocarbon gases to warm the Martian climate, transporting them there with surplus US and Soviet missiles, and paying for the whole operation with funds from the “peace dividend.” The colony was populated by “homeless” people who had sold all their Earthly assets in exchange for Martian real estate futures, valuable only in proportion to the progress of terraformation.

Two ersatz starship missions have already been launched on Planet Earth, but not by NASA or any other space-faring nation. Some twenty years ago a crew of eight attempted a shakedown cruise of some 16 months, but the life support systems failed miserably and the mission had to be aborted prematurely. Oxygen levels in the craft, which began at a robust 21 percent, systematically decreased to about 14 percent causing members of the crew to suffer from high-altitude sickness, sleep apnea, and extreme fatigue. Other life support systems also went erratic. CO2 levels fluctuated on a daily basis by as much as 600 parts per million (ppm), with much greater seasonal variation. 3 Wintertime CO2 levels soared as high as 4,500 ppm, or close to a lethal concentration. Although the ship was huge, enclosing 3.5 acres, it was not huge enough, and fluctuating plant photosynthesis alternating with system respiration threatened to overwhelm the carbon dioxide scrubbers. With the human crew suffering mightily, most of the mammals and birds brought on board dead, and insect pests such as ants and cockroaches flourishing, the mission came to a screeching halt. After scrubbing and tuning the life-support systems, a second mission was launched a year later with a crew of seven, but it too crashed, this time within six months, due to a severe management dispute, a munity which involved monkey-wrenching the craft, and the early departure of two crew members. By now it should be clear that we are discussing the foibles of Biosphere 2 in the Arizona desert, not an actual starship. 4

There was no propulsion system and the craft was surrounded by the friendly biosphere of Earth, not the vacuum of outer space. The closed-system research days of Biosphere 2 ended under the management of Columbia University (1995-2003). For several years the facility was the site of a planned residential development with tours being offered to the public. Now it is managed by the University of Arizona, which uses its the soaring glass vivarium for experiments on dryland grass species. The interesting technical, human, and managerial lessons of Biosphere 2 are legion, and are fully worthy of study.4 For our purposes the lessons of the two missions launched in the 1990s indicate that we need to learn how to run a small artificial biosphere successfully before we can ever hope to terraform a planet or geoengineer our own. We have a lot to learn in the next 100 years.

In his book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (1995) Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical aspects of “orchestrated planetary change.” He defined “planetary engineering” as the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet and “terraforming” as the process of enhancing the capacity of a planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth—one that would be fully habitable for human beings. “Astroengineering,” or modifying the properties of the Sun or a star, by intervening in its opacity, nuclear reactions, mass loss, chemical mixing, or other properties, is admittedly hyper speculative now, but who can say in the future? Fogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used someday to implant life on other planets and how geoengineering might be used to ameliorate (or perhaps exacerbate) the currently “corrosive process” of global change on the Earth. He presented order-of-magnitude calculations and the results of some simple computer modeling to assess the plausibility of various planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it “rash to proclaim” impossible any scheme that does not “obviously violate the laws of physics.” Yet Fogg focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unaddressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical. According to Fogg, geoengineering is not simply, or even primarily, a technical problem because people, their politics, and their infrastructures get in the way. That is, it involves 5 the implications and dangers of attempting to tamper with an immensely complex biosphere on an inhabited planet. Closer to home, the editors of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary recently proposed to define geoengineering (n.) as “the modification of the global environment or the climate in order to counter or ameliorate .” To assign a specific goal to geoengineering, however, does not make sense, since, first of all, the discipline does not yet exist; it is at best “geoscientific speculation.” Second, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by the good that might result from it, such as the counteraction or amelioration of climate change. The Urban Dictionary definition drops the statement of purpose and simply defines geoengineering as “the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering.” Of course any manipulation techniques deployed on such a grandiose scale, like any engineering practice, could be used for both good and ill — or they may result in huge unintended consequences — a planetary Oops!

Returning to geoengineering “scientific fiction,” Jules Verne wrote a notable, but not widely-read book in 1889, Sans Dessus Dessous, appearing simultaneously in English as The Purchase of the North Pole. Here Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club, which had shot astronauts to the moon in an earlier novel, has a new, application for their cannon. For 2 cents an acre, a group of American investors acquires rights to the vast, incredibly lucrative but seemingly inaccessible coal and mineral deposits under the North Pole. To mine the region, they propose to melt the polar ice. Initially, the project captures the public imagination, as the backers promise that their scheme will improve the climate everywhere. They find it relatively easy to convince the public of the idea that the tilt of the Earth’s axis should be reduced from 25.5 degrees to zero. This would remove the contrasts between summer and winter seasons, reduce the extreme stresses of heat and cold, improve health, calm the power of storms, and make the Earth more like a terrestrial Eden, in which every day is mild and spring-like. The investors intend to shoot the Earth off its axis by building and firing the 6 world’s largest cannon. Initial public enthusiasm gives way to fears that if these retired Civil War artillerymen (modern-day Titans) have their way and build a kind of Archimedean lever, the tidal waves generated by the explosion will kill millions of people. In secrecy and haste, the protagonists proceed with their plan, building the huge cannon in the side of Mount Kilimanjaro. The scheme fails only when an error in calculation renders the massive shot ineffective. Verne concludes, “The world’s inhabitants could thus sleep in peace. To modify the conditions of the Earth’s movement is beyond the power of man.” Or is it? Perhaps he spoke too soon.

There is at least one case in which geoengineering was actually practiced.5 On May 1, 1958, at the National Academy of Sciences, University of Iowa physicist James A. Van Allen announced that Geiger counters aboard the JPL Explorer 1 and Explorer 3 satellites had picked up high readings at certain points in their orbits, indicating that powerful radiation belts (later known as the Van Allen belts) surround Earth. This was the first major scientific discovery of the space age. Ironically, and on that very same day, Van Allen joined Operation Argus—the US military’s top-secret project to detonate atomic bombs in space, with the goal of generating an artificial radiation belt and disrupting the ionosphere. This was planetary-scale engineering—or “geoengineering.” “Space is radioactive,” noted Van Allen’s colleague Erie Ray. The military wanted to make space even more radioactive by nuclear, and later, thermonuclear detonations that, in time of war could disrupt enemy radio communications from half a world away and damage or destroy enemy satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles. In late August and early September 1958 a specially equipped naval convoy launched and detonated three 1.7-kiloton atomic bombs in near space above the South Atlantic Ocean to “seed” the ionosphere with high energy nuclear particles and radioactive debris. Van Allen’s Explorer 4 satellite, launched a month earlier, carried lead-shielded Geiger counters designed to withstand the blasts and document the tests. The Soviet Union went on to detonate four small space-bombs in 1961, and then three larger ones during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. One of the tests, conducted over Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, started a fire that burned down a power plant and destroyed electrical and telephone lines. The largest and highest U.S. test 7 was the 1.4-megaton Starfish Prime H-bomb detonation at an altitude of 400 km over Johnston Island, which disrupted the natural Van Allen belts, destroyed several communication satellites, and damaged about 300 streetlights in Hawaii, almost 1,500 km away. This led British radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, along with the International Astronomical Union, to protest that, “No government has the right to change the environment in any significant way without prior international study and agreement.” Van Allen, who had eagerly participated in the tests, and was thus one of the world’s first geoengineers, later regretted his involvement.

Today, climate engineers wishing to cool the planet several degrees are speculating on how to tinker with its geophysical systems. Their vague ideas include injecting sulfate aerosols or high-tech nanoparticles into earth’s stratosphere or adding iron to the oceans to generate massive algal blooms to sequester carbon dioxide — this, with little or no idea of the consequences. Thus, in Baconian terms, a modicum of understanding should immediately be leveraged, some geoengineers believe, to gain power over and control of nature for “useful” purposes, even if this involves, as in the case of Van Allen, disrupting the phenomenon. It is important to note that the concept of geoengineering the climate is not new. Scientific proposals for large-scale weather and climate control date to the 1830s and include ideas over the many decades to increase, not decrease, temperatures (particularly in the Arctic), and to increase rainfall on a regional basis. Examples are presented in table 1 below.6 Table 1: Historical examples of climate related geo-engineering

Date Who Proposal

1839 James Espy Lighting giant fires all along the Appalachian American scientist Mountains to enhance rain and clear the air of miasmas.

1877 Nathaniel Shaler, Re-routing the Pacific’s warm Kuroshio Current American scientist through the Bering Strait to raise Arctic temperatures by around 15°C.

1912 Carroll Livingston Building a 200-mile jetty into the Atlantic Ocean to Riker, American divert the warm Gulf Stream over the colder Labrador 8

Date Who Proposal

engineer, and William M. current to change the climate of North America’s Calder, U.S. Senator Atlantic Coast. Calder introduced a bill to study its feasibility

1929 Herman Oberth, German- Building giant mirrors on a space station to focus the Hungarian physicist and Sun’s radiation on the Earth’s surface, making the far engineer North habitable and freeing ice from sea-lanes near Siberian harbors.

1945 Julian Huxley, British Exploding atomic bombs over polar regions to raise the biologist and author temperature of the Arctic Ocean and warm the northern temperate zones.

1957 P.M. Borisov, Soviet Damming the Bering Strait to divert Atlantic waters engineer into the Pacific and melt the Arctic sea ice.

1958 M. Gorodsky, Soviet Launching a ring of metallic potassium particles into engineer and Earth’s polar orbit to diffuse light reaching Earth and Valentin Cherenkov, thereby thaw permafrost in Russia, Canada, and Alaska Soviet meteorologist and melt polar ice

1960s Mikhal Budyko and M. Creating a dust screen in the stratosphere to offset Ye. Shvets, Soviet global warming from the waste heat of cities. climatologists

1965 US Presidential Science Increasing Earth’s albedo by dispersing buoyant Advisory Committee reflective particles over large areas of the tropical sea

1977 Cesare Marchetti, Italian Disposing CO2 in the deep ocean, via the physicist Mediterranean outflow; he called this geoengineering

1990 John Martin, US marine Adding iron to the ocean to enhance atmospheric CO2 biologist drawdown by stimulating algae blooms

1992 US National Academy of Evaluated, among other techniques, the cost of shooting Sciences dust into the stratosphere to increase Earth’s albedo

2006 Paul Crutzen, Dutch Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere using cannon or atmospheric chemist and airplanes. Considered by some a “contribution” to Nobel Laureate public policy; by others reminiscent of “a modest 9

Date Who Proposal

proposal” by Jonathan Swift to end hunger in Ireland.

The philosopher J.D. Bernal wrote about interplanetary colonization, planetary manipulation, and the post-human condition in his visionary parable of 1929 “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.” Writing in the genre of a modern day Francis Bacon describing Solomon’s House in The New Atlantis, Bernal imagined the colonization of space in hollow engineered spheres some 10 miles in diameter that harness all available sunlight and starlight for their propulsion and maintenance: The outer shell would be hard, transparent and thin. Its chief function would be to prevent the escape of gases from the interior, to preserve the rigidity of the structure, and to allow the free access of radiant energy. Immediately underneath this epidermis would be the apparatus for utilizing this energy either in the form of a network carrying a chlorophyll-like fluid capable of re-synthesizing carbohydrate bodies from carbon dioxide… [Further down] would lie the controlling mechanisms of the globe. These mechanisms would primarily maintain the general metabolism, that is, they would regulate the atmosphere and climate both as to composition and movements. They would elaborate the necessary food products and distribute mechanical energy where it was required. They would also deal with all waste matters, reconverting them with the use of energy into a consumable form; for it must be remembered that the globe takes the place of the whole earth and not of any part of it, and in the earth nothing can afford to be permanently wasted. In this layer, too, would be the workshops and laboratories concerned with the improvement of the globe and arrangements for its growth. Looking beyond the craft itself to its ultimate source of energy, Bernal wrote, “the stars cannot be allowed to continue to in their old way, but will be turned into efficient heat engines.”7 Bernal envisioned humans too being fundamentally altered in the future: “Sooner or later the useless parts of the body must be given more modern functions or dispensed 10 with altogether, and in their place we must incorporate in the effective body the mechanisms of the new functions. Surgery and biochemistry are sciences still too young to predict exactly how this will happen…” He wrote about wiring human brains to mechanical devices and human brains to other brains, concluding that “Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.” In the end, humanity might become “completely etherealized,” and attain cosmic consciousness. Being a good Marxist, Bernal attempted a synthesis of the physical, physiological and psychological elements of future human evolution. The colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are only the first two of many steps including the conquest of temporality, the process of “dehumanization” steering us away from carnality towards scientific research, experimentation, and control of the universe, with the happy and prosperous, but oblivious majority of humanity “enjoying their bodies, exercising the arts, patronizing the religions,” and leaving the machine behind, while being ruled by the ten percent or so of the population that are engineers and scientists. Such a possible bifurcation in the human species would constitute the ultimate “two cultures” with the humanizers aiming for a “fully-balanced humanity,” and the ruling mechanizers, “groping unsteadily beyond” as pioneers of the post-human condition, their curiosity trumping their humanity, with horrible oversteps and accidents likely, yet nevertheless “on their way to the stars.” Whether done by a future NASA-like technocratic entity or private enterprise, Bernal concluded, “Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world” — a world in which the quantity and quality of population is controlled by authority, increasingly unable to judge what the experiments were about, but nevertheless sufficiently educated in science to value the process and honor their scientific rulers. From one point of view the scientists would emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind [both figuratively and literally]. The better organized beings will be obliged in self-defense to reduce the numbers of the others, until they are no longer seriously inconvenienced by them. If, as we may well suppose, the colonization of space will have taken place or be taking place while these changes 11

are occurring, it may offer a very convenient solution. Mankind— the old mankind—would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment. This scenario speaks in chilling terms to space colonization, terraformation, and the post- human future. Or might it just be that we are currently the ones that are not aware we are being managed?

The noted aeronautical engineer Theodore von Karman once observed that “scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that has never been.” This quote has an ominous ring, however, when it comes to terraforming, geoengineering, and the other issues raised by Bernal, since some “worlds” perhaps should never be. Still, engineering, whether geo-, planetary, or astro-, involves human affairs, so, in our march from knowledge to action — from understanding to prediction and control — we will need to consider both the technical and the human elements, the engineering and the philosophical dimensions. 12

Notes

1 Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge (London, Voyager, 1984, 1997).

2 John Hickman, “Space colonization in three histories of the future,” The Space Review

(Nov. 29, 2010), http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1732/1

3 J.P. Severinghaus, W.S. Broecker, W.F. Dempster, T. MacCallum, and M. Wahlen,

“Oxygen Loss in Biosphere 2,” EOS: Trans. Amer. Geophys. Union 75 (1994): 33, 35-37.

4 Sabine Höhler, “The Environment as a Life Support System: The case of Biosphere 2,”

History and Technology 26 (2010): 39–58.

5 James Rodger Fleming, “Iowa Enters the Space Age: James Van Allen, Earth’s

Radiation Belts, and Experiments to Disrupt Them,” The Annals of Iowa 70 (2011): 301-24

6 Table 1 is adapted from Government Accountability Office, “:

Technical Status, Future Directions, and Potential Responses,” GAO-11-71 (2011), http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-11-71, pp. 6-7. Details of all of these geoengineering proposals can be found in James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The checkered history of weather and climate control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)..

7 J.D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three

Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929), http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/index.htm