Early this morning about two and a half hours before my alarm went off and thirty minutes after my teething son woke me up I had a thought. Just as an upfront disclaimer, I do tend to have these kinds of thoughts when I’m REALLY tired so it may just be that.
Planetary Climate Change is critical to our survival as a species. Not the climate change that is happening here on earth, that is bad and we are being slow and stupid in dealing with it. No, what I mean is the concept of climate change and the realization that not only do we have an impact on climate change we must as a species harness and direct it intentionally.
This takes into account a few givens. Our population will keep growing. The growth rates may shift but growth will continue. This will severely impact our planet's ability to sustain our species over the next one to two hundred years if we don’t figure it out now. Space exploration is a reality and we will eventually live on other planets. There are plans to live on Mars in the next 50-100 years and we are actively seeking out, and finding, earth like planets beyond our solar system. There is no way to relocate the entire earth population to another planet and that means we absolutely have to gain some control over our impact on the planetary climate of earth.
Using Mars as the example here, how the hell are we going to live on Mars without changing the climate in a dramatic way? I’m not talking scientists in sealed up labs studying rocks for the next thousand years. I’m talking about living. Communities, relationships, children (yes even teething ones) and all the parts of being human that come with those things will not survive on Mars without drastic, planetary climate change. So what does that mean? How can we even begin to consider putting people on the surface of a planet without first being able to change the climate of that planet to suit human, life? The simple answer is that we can’t, and we aren’t. Lot’s of scientists have ideas and plans for this but it’s not enough. We can and must figure out ways to do this bigger, better and faster….much, much faster.
Initially it is terrifying to think that humans can and are changing the climate. There are those that still deny that this is even a reality and there may always be those people...idiots, those idiots, sorry. Then comes the push to stop changing climate because at this point we are absolutely not in control of the impact we are having and those impacts are all really bad. Eventually, and I hope this part doesn’t take us too long to figure out, we will start to work on the process of designing systems and tools to intentionally change the climate to suit our needs. Those systems and tools can then be used to aggressively bring other planetary climates into that range in order to facilitate human life on those planets on a much shorter timeline than currently possible.
That is the part that is critical to the survival of our species.