Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
allowed so many species to adapt to a range of climates from hothouse
periods to snowball earth.
We need to be careful to distinguish unmanaged systems from un-
manageable ones. Hurricanes are currently unmanaged in part because
they are unmanageable. But in the future, as technologies improve,
countries might attempt to weaken hurricanes or defl ect them to less
damaging tracks. Indeed, Microsoft chief Bill Gates actually fi led a pat-
ent application in 2008 for a technique to reduce hurricane intensity.
Similarly, sea-level rise, which is one of the best-established results of
climate change, might conceivably be managed by cloud seeding or even
by some fantastic device that pumps water back onto the top of Antarc-
tica. In the extreme, some have proposed “geoengineering” approaches
that would offset global warming by increasing the refl ectivity of the
earth. The potential of such approaches is explored in Part III. One of
the major advantages of human technologies is their ability to control
microenvironments. Humans increasingly manage farming through
the use of fertilizers and irrigation, forests through recycling wood and
other forest products, and fi sheries through new fi sh-farming techniques.
One group has even made a hamburger in a factory. Many people dislike
farmed fi sh, underground shopping malls, and genetically modifi ed or-
ganisms, but these technologies should be viewed in part as a reaction
to the riskiness of unmanaged systems.
The most consequential example of managing human affairs is the
rise of modern medicine. As late as two centuries ago, illness and death
were often thought to be visited upon people by evil spirits or the gods.
If a child died at an early age, there were others waiting to sit at the ta-
ble. Today, health care is the largest single sector of the American econ-
omy, constituting 16 percent of total U.S. output. While most of our
bodies are natural in the sense that they are driven by complex biologi-
cal mechanisms, we may fi nd that our future bodies are increasingly
made up of manufactured parts. All this sounds like some science fi c-
tion fantasy. But if you imagine how the modern world would look to a
time traveler from 1,000 years ago, you can get an intuitive feel of how
strange human societies are likely to appear a century from now.
