Page 248 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Fogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used some-
day 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 vari-
ous planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it “rash to proclaim” impos-
sible any scheme that does not “obviously violate the laws of physics.” Yet Fogg
focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unad-
dressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical. Accord-
ing to Fogg, geoengineering is not simply, or even primarily, a technical prob-
lem because people, their politics, and their infrastructures get in the way. That
is, it involves the implications and dangers of attempting to tamper with an
immensely complex biosphere on an inhabited planet.
The epigraph of Fogg’s book cites Hungarian-born engineer and physicist
Theodore von Kármán to the effect 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, since some “worlds” perhaps
should never be. Fogg traced inspiration for the field to olaf Stapleton’s Last
and First Men (1930), Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky (1950), and James
Lovelock and Michael Allaby’s The Greening of Mars (1984). In his “concise
history of terraforming,” Fogg mentioned the work of naturalists John Ray
(English, seventeenth century) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buf-
fon (French, eighteenth century), who looked on the Earth as unfinished,
with man taking the role of a junior partner in creation, taming the wilder-
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ness as part of a historical progression toward “perfection.” From there, Fogg
dropped the names of George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), an American dip-
lomat and naturalist who wrote about replanting forests, channeling rivers,
and reclaiming deserts in Man and Nature (1864); Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–
1945), the Russian mineralogist and geochemist who popularized the notion
of the interconnectedness of the “biosphere”; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881–1955), the French cleric and philosopher who placed the “noosphere,”
the realm of human thought, in evolutionary succession to the geosphere and
the biosphere.
Such expansive antecedents belie recent attempts to restrict the definition of
geoengineering to the purposeful and large-scale alteration of the shortwave side
of the Earth’s energy budget with the intent of affecting climate. In the litera-
ture of planetary terraformation, geoengineering is much, much more than that.
It comprises macro-scale projects to control not only the supposed relatively
simple and straightforward interaction of albedo and temperature but also much

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