Blue Planet Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 70 DAYS

Blue Planet Day was celebrated as a recommitment of the world to fighting death by imminent extinction. WICO personnel were enlisted to participate in briefings to the public and activities at their local facilities and field offices, with a focus on “the world of tomorrow”: what life will be like over the next fifty years as the global strategy is implemented.

Maura and I stayed in Colorado to assist at the Boulder field office, which coordinates research with universities and government agencies throughout the state, including collection of data at one of WICO’s test sites in the mountains southwest of Denver. We were joined by Maura’s parents and a distant cousin who live in Colorado Springs and, to my surprise, helped found the test site.

Sally was present at all of the events, using her enormous bandwidth to give lectures and answer questions for all of the visitors. She shared details of the global strategy, whose completed parts have already been disseminated to national governments for review. A multimedia presentation produced by the Education group was made available for download and played in theater spaces at each of the facilities.

Most people I talked to were interested in progress made toward limiting self-sustained ecological impacts, especially those in polar regions and the oceans that threaten to further destabilize the climate. A scale model of the WDP group’s pad technology for removing carbon dioxide from oceans was a big hit, along with a hall of dioramas showing how a suburban neighborhood might look after each decade of transformation into an end-state community dependent more on natural systems than artificial ones.

Mark Luke and Ronald Wingate hosted a panel discussion about how the expected changes to the world economy would affect private industry. Most questions centered on the progress of their Evolution over Devolution (ED) collaboration and its plans for the immediate future. Still committed to creating an artificial supply chain that can replace natural systems, Luke said that use of biotechnology is now ED’s top priority, aimed at adapting human life to a radically different resource base within five years to avoid the worst-case extinction scenario. Wingate argued that substantial economic reward is still possible with a mix of renewable energy and community-scale pollution cleanup technologies that can augment the WDP group’s efforts.

A three-hour meeting at WICO headquarters in London was beamed live to meeting rooms all over the world and recorded for later playback. It began with a keynote address by Secretary General Decatur, and included speeches introduced by Ambassador Lazlo, who herself presented an overview of STRIDE’s organization, operation, and progress, as well as a fifteen-minute description of our Quality Assurance team’s work. Maura wasn’t bothered by not being asked to represent us, telling me that she had been given explicit instructions to focus on the work, a new phase of which she and I will be starting tomorrow, right here in our home state.

Reality Check

“Blue Planet Day” is, of course, the simulated world’s version of our Earth Day.

People, technologies and organizations mentioned here have been mentioned in earlier posts, and some elements of the story are related to other fiction I have written.

Unknowns

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 97 DAYS

This morning I met via teleconference some of the people involved in development and test of technologies for removing widely dispersed toxic air, water, and soil pollutants (WDPs). Their effort has been in progress at dozens of sites around the world since the beginning of the biosphere assessment.

Notably, twenty-three of the sites focus on filtering carbon dioxide out of the water and rapidly converting it into rock formations that will be stable for more than a millennium. The formations have the added benefits of providing shelter for sea life deprived of it by the dissolution of coral, and enclosing areas of melting permafrost so released methane doesn’t leak into the ocean.

“We are almost at a scale that is self-sustaining,” project team leader Asem Aziz told me and Riddick. “The test environment extends thirty kilometers from our atoll in region seventy-three, containing shallow and deep habitats that have been thoroughly studied.” He referred to a three-dimensional map of the area on a split screen as he talked, which alternately showed geological, chemical, and temperature gradients. “Contiguous formations are called ‘pads,’ and each pad is accompanied by sensors that are used to regulate the processing and characteristics of both the pad and its local environment.”

 Riddick asked about the speed of deployment and how it would track with the current strategy timeline. He answered, “The acceleration phase will take a decade, and deceleration to the stable phase will occur during the last five years along with decommissioning of the technology, barring any unknowns.”

That last phrase bothered me, since planning for the unexpected figured prominently in the rules that shaped the strategy. “Have you considered what those unknowns might be in general terms, especially as they relate to risks?”

His body language told me that he was insulted by the question. I interpreted it as a good sign.

“We see two major categories of risk contributions whose full membership we do not know. One is the response of microbial life to the pads, and the other is geological events such as new thermal vents or volcanic activity in the vicinity of the pads. Either category could degrade or reverse the progress made, or worse.”

Riddick did that strange thing with her eyes that I noted when we first met. “The spatial and temporal scales are large enough that the risk is significant and requires further evaluation. Our geophysical modelers and biologists can provide input to help you characterize those sources and suggest low-impact shielding approaches that might still be used.”

“How did you know about the risks to the pads?” I asked Riddick in her office after the meeting.

“I can’t help learning,” she said. “That’s valuable when you’re projecting a future that is defined by the unknown.”

What an odd thing to say, I thought later: Projecting afuture.

Reality Check

The undersea technology is totally made up, along with the risks, but based on my limited knowledge and experience they seem reasonable.