A Theoretical exercise on Global warming.
The Context.
I got into a Wiki trap today. I was wondering whether there was an age of insects, where giant insects dominated the Earth. This led me to the geologic time scale. As I was reading through the history of the Earth, I took note of the carbon levels and heat of the Earth. Apparently, atmospheric carbon levels use to be 5 times the levels they are now.
But. But. What about global warming and carbon emissions?
That’s what I thought about too! Well, following the comets, various volcanic events, etc., the Earth went into some really serious cooling along with tectonic plate movement and shit. The dinosaurs died out because of the comet and shit, the insects froze, and the small mammals managed to survive. Infact! This was actually really great for mammals. Mammals got dat sick-nasty internal gestation period, warm blood, hair! We can fuckin’ dominate other creatures in the cold. And so began the mammalian dominance.
Right, mammals dominate the Earth. so what?
Well, during this whole time, we’ve been living in this strange cold period that had been much colder than other times in Earth’s history. Then the Earth was kinda like, “I’m done with this climate phase. I’m going back to being warm. I don’t even know why I did that. Maybe it was the comet + volcanic ash creating some dense cloud encasing me in a greenhouse effect, effectively blocking the sun. Or maybe I just wanted to fuck up some dinosaurs. I’m moody like that.” With enough expansion of your perspective of time and personification of inanimate objects, the Earth can seem like a volatile prick.
So the furry mammals had to deal with an Earth that is warming up. Then along come some advanced primates (this is believed to have happened somewhere between 6 days after the beginning of creation, a few million years ago, and ~10k years ago). They get together and say, “You know, Earth? We’re going to help you out. We’re going to really help you get back to your old carbon levels where there were only plants. Like pre-animals! That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Sure it will flood our cities because we built civilizations too close to bodies of water to handle our own Earth warming.”
Which is where we are heading towards now!
Anyway, here’s my plan.
The Plan.
So we are heating the earth, melting our ice caps, killing our polar bears, #yolo. Well this doesn’t have to be the end of the world (Literally!). If we just do modeling of where the oceans will grow into, canal that shit into the arid land, farm that newly revitalized land, ???, profit. We would also need to start making stuff flood proof, ‘cause there’s going to be a lot of water. And of course, we’d need to completely reconstruct all our cities to be Venice-esque... except not sink and fall into the ocean.
This plan is impossible. Mainly because we can’t really get any public works going these days. Also, we’d have to accept that a lot of animals would go extinct, a lot of landmarks would be destroyed, and a lot of ecosystems and habitats would completely changed. It would also take a lot of work. But long-term, it would probably allow for great human prosperity. Just sayin’.
One thing that’s pretty nice about the Earth is that the important stuff about it, like the existence of water, it’s size and gravity, it’s distance from the sun, and warm, iron core, are generally unaffected by humans. We could probably mess up a lot of shit, and the Earth would just respond, “Meh.”
