According to Time Magazine, the 17th best invention of 2009 is: “The Planetary Skin.”
“What happens to Earth when a forest is razed or energy use soars? We don’t know because environmental data are collected by isolated sources, making it impossible to see the whole picture. With the theory that you can’t manage what you can’t measure, NASA and Cisco have teamed up to develop Planetary Skin, a global “nervous system” that will integrate land-, sea-, air-, and space-based sensors, helping the public and private sectors make decisions to prevent and adapt to climate change. The pilot project–a prototype is due by 2010–will track how much carbon is held by rain forests and where.”
This is the type of effort I would like to see on a river-basin scale.
In a review of the science in the movie “Avatar” on aintitcool.com, an astronomer/astrophysicist makes the following point:
“From a visual perspective, Avatar’s Pandora is breathtaking. While most movies have only hinted at the exotic nature of their worlds with an establishing matte painting or two, here Cameron takes us on an elaborage three-dimensional tour through various habitats from the treetops to the forest floor. He’s created a whole ecosystem, from semi-intelligent trees to giant land and air creatures. Most seem inter-related via symbiotic relationships. In fact, Cameron has taken the Gaia hypothesis, that the biosphere of the Earth is itself a kind of living entity, and sexed it up — the biosphere of Pandora is essentially a god, and it’s networked! Creatures can plug into each other via what amounts to USB hair and fiber optic roots. While some of these ideas are not without their faults, Cameron gets points for creativity — this is true science fiction, not space opera.
According to a brief technical note in NG (Feb 2010, p. 30-33)):
“Could we “terraform” Mars–that is, transform its frozen, thin-aired surface into something more friendly and Earthlike? Should we? The first question has a clear answer: Yes, we probably could. Spacecraft, including the ones now exploring Mars, have found evidence that it was warm in its youth, with rivers draining into vast seas. And right here on Earth, we’ve learned how to warm a planet: just add greenhouses gases to its atmosphere. Much of the carbon dioxide that once warmed Mars is probably still there, in frozen dirt and polar ice caps, and so is the water. All the planet needs to recapture its salad days is a gardener with a big budget.
Most of the work in terraforming, says NASA planetary scientist Chris McKay, would be done by life itself. “You don’t build Mars,” McKay says. “You just warm it up and throw some seeds.” Perfluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases, could be synthesized from elements in Martian dirt and air and blown into the atmosphere; by warming the planet, they would release the frozen CO2, which would amplify the warming and boost atmospheric pressure to the point where liquid water could flow. Meanwhile, say botanist James Graham of the University of Wisconsin, human colonists could seed the red rock with a succession of ecosystems–first bacteria and lichens, which survive in Antarctica, later mosses, and after a millenium or so, redwoods. Coaxing breathable oxygen levels out of these forest, though could take many millennia.
Enthusiasts such as Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, still dream of Martian cities: Zubrin, an engineer, believes civilization cannot thrive without limitless expansion. Only research outposts seem plausible to McKay. “We’re going to live on Mars the way we live in Antartica,” he says. “There are no elementary schools in Antartica.” But he thinks the lessons learned in terraforming Mars–a horrifying prospect to some–would help us manage our limited Earth better.
There is time to debate the point; Mars is in no immediate danger. A White House–appointed panel recently recommended going to the moon or an asteroid first–and pointed out the space agency lacks the budget to go anywhere. It didn’t estimate the cost of gardening a dead planet.”
The following quote was taken from an advertizement for the 5-volume “The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young.” The add is found on the inside back cover of the December 2009 Sunstone:
“Believing the earth to be a living soul, the LDS president said the ocean tides reflected the “breathing of the earth.” Young further taught that God was at one time human: “As he was, so we are now. As he is now, so we shall become.”
According to a recent article in Time (February 8, 2010) about the movie Avatar by Richard Corliss:
” . . . Journeying to the year 2154, moviegoers everywhere have embraced the film–surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in moving pictures–as a total sensory and sensuous, sensual experience. The planet Pandora is a wonder world of flora and fauna: a rainforest (where it rarely rains) of gigantic trees and phosphorescent plants, of flying steeds, panther dogs and hammerhead dinosaurs. Audiences are just beguiled by Pandora’s humanish tribe, the Na’vi–the lean, 10-ft-tall, blue striped people with yellow eyes. They are what humans might have been if they had evolved in harmony with, not in opposition to, the Edenic environment that gave them birth.”
In a very primitive sense, James Cameron has created his own world.
According to the Book “The World Without Us” (page 168):
In the 1960s, British atmospheric scientist, chemist, and marine biologist James Lovelock proposed his Gaia hypothesis, which describes the Earth as behaving like a super-organism, its soil, atmostphere, and oceans composing a cirulatory system regulated by its resident flora and fauna. He now fears that the living planet is suffering a high fever, and that we are the virus. He suggests we compile a user’s manual of vital human knowledge (on durable paper, he adds) for survivors who may sit out the next millennium huddled in the polar region, the last habitable places in a super-heated world, until the ocean recycles enough carbon to resotre a semblance of equilibrium.”