scrubbing the Earth’s atmosphere clean, and next Mars’?

(There’s a great book, by Dava Sobel, about the longitude, and a fantastic TV movie based on it, which I’ve reviewed, of course, since it’s so geeky.)

I don’t understand all the global-warming deniers who cry that those of us with our heads out of the sand, who are calling on the human race to change its ways so we can save the only environment we have for ourselves, are full of doom and gloom, want to crash the economy, and generally are a bunch of planetwide party poopers. There’s gonna be a ton of money to made in fixing global warming, from the ground up, from down-and-dirty work like building seawalls to high-tech stuff like alternative energy.

And atmosphere scrubbers. Look, we’re talking terraforming, right here on planet Earth. We have to terraform Earth back to the way it was before we started a global experiment in releasing all the carbon the planet’s been storing up for millions of years. This is the stuff of science fiction. (Like the longitude was -- clocks were like magic, man.) This is probably going to be a vital technology for getting us off this rock. If we’re going to terraform Mars, if it’s even going to be possible, then this is where it starts. Right here. Because of global warming. It’ll be ironic, if we survive as a species, if it turns out to be that cleaning up our own shit is what spurs our moves to other planets. If we can do it here, we can do it on Mars. We can do it on Venus.

Of course, whether it would be right to mess with the pristine environment of another planet is another discussion. (See Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series for some provocative ideas about the morality of altering alien atmospheres; and hey: it turns out Robinson has an essay you can download from Amazon about “terraforming Earth.”) And whether we can futz with our own environment even more without courting even greater disaster is another question, too. The potential for catastrophe in an atmosphere-scrubbing project seems like it’s not entirely remote -- kinda like how the men who made the first atomic bomb wondered whether they wouldn’t ignite the atmosphere.

That moment, the detonation of the first atom bomb and the worry about what it would do... that was, perhaps, the first instance of anyone thinking about planetary ethics, thinking about how something humans did would impact the planet as a whole. It didn’t stop the A-bomb makers, of course, but it was still a signal moment in human history: the instant invention of a new kind of philosophy. And that’s how we all need to start thinking, on a much bigger scale, and with far more awareness of the interconnected impacts of our actions, than we have before.

But doom-and-gloom? Sheesh, if we make it through this century as a global technological civilization, we may look back at this moment as one of the most exciting moments to be alive: We are transforming ourselves from the people of the United States or the people of China or the people of India into the people of Earth.

At least, I hope we are.

(Technorati tags: global warming, Virgin Earth, terraforming Earth, planetary ethics)