Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Our current reliance on fossil fuels is an addiction in the precise
meaning of the word. If we suddenly stopped using coal, oil, and
gas there would be mass poverty and mass starvation; many peo-
ple would die—perhaps most of the human population. That is
because we have not developed the alternatives that currently exist
and have been proven to work (nuclear fission, renewables) nor yet
invented others (stable and controlled nuclear fusion). Hence, to live
from year to year we are hooked on carbon-based energy. If that
addiction is not controlled, the oceans will permanently change their
character (see Chapter 7).
It would be ironic, in that very human way, to discover a wealth of
strange and bizarre oceans out in the cosmos just as we are dismant-
ling the beautiful and unique oceans on our own doorstep. Those dis-
tant oceans are, for any foreseeable human prospects, entirely
unreachable. Many will be intricate and fascinating as regards their
physics and chemistry, but will be biologically dead. Of the living
ones that now seem likely to be out there, most will be dominated by
microbes—the condition of life in the Earth's oceans for more than
three-quarters of their history, after all. Few will have the kind of bio-
logical riches of Earthly seas. None of them will suit
us
as well as our
own oceans do.
So by all means let us lift an ever more penetrating gaze to the heav-
ens, and enlarge our vision of the many forms that oceans might take.
But we have, on our own planet, oceans that are special and unique—
and on which all of us ultimately depend. Their wealth and beauty will
disappear if we do nothing and simply carry on with business as usual.
Let us wish—and work—for the right kind of sea change.
