Inside the Boardroom with Alan Bagley - SETI Institute

Of course, a space program – while necessary
– wouldn’t have been sufficient to
forestall the dino’s incandescent demise. A
good defense would have required an active
astronomy effort to detect the incoming
rock. Physics was essential as well, for
otherwise how could they calculate the
asteroid’s orbit
This is an all-too-elaborate digression
on a wry joke, but there’s little doubt that
our brains, schooled in science, can insure
us against the sort of cosmic catastrophes
that might afflict us in the next few tens of
billions of years.
For example, imagine the sorts of things
we might do when faced with an impending
ice age. Such an event can begin rather
quickly (in decades), and would be disastrous
for Canada and Europe. But fending
off the Big Chill might not be impossible.
One approach would be to decrease Earth’s
albedo – which is not its lust for other planets,
but the fraction of incoming sunlight
that it reflects back into space. In other
words, we could arrange for our planet to
be less bright. A way of doing this would be
to use a fleet of aircraft to layer the ice fields
of the arctic with coal dust, so they became
warmer in the sun.
As an alternative to this gritty approach,
we might, by the end of this century, be capable
of building very large, orbiting solar
reflectors, aimed earthward to bring a little
more light into our lives. If we increased
the amount of sunlight hitting our planet
by 10% or so, we’d no doubt reverse any
cooling trend.
Another straightforward possibility
would be to bring back Freon, the coolant
that once circulated in our refrigerators and
air conditioners. It’s a great greenhouse gas
(which, of course, is why it was phased out),
so smashing up old fridges, and thereby
boosting the greenhouse effect, could keep
the world from growing cold. You could
also buy an extra SUV, which would do
much the same. Let’s face it: ice ages have
been scraping up the landscape for millions
of years. But with a bit of informed technology,
we can insure that the last ice age
will be, well, the last ice age.
Consider another imminent threat: a reversal
of Earth’s magnetic field. This would
eventually require a re-labeling of your
Boy Scout compass of course, but the real
problem is what happens during the interval,
halfway through the reversal, when our
planet has essentially no field. High energy
particles that zip through space would no
longer be either repelled or guided to the
poles (where they now produce nice auroras
for the entertainment of Eskimos and
Extreme Ultravoilet Imaging Telescope reveals solar flares from the sun.
elk). Instead, they would rain down everywhere,
inflicting cancers on us, and wreaking
similarly distasteful damage on other
life forms.
But – and this is true for many of the
cosmic disasters that offer to ruin your
whole millennium – this reversal would not
happen overnight. There would be years to
prepare. By staying indoors, and perhaps
adding more insulation to the attic, we
could avoid DNA doom for Homo sapiens.
A harder task would be protecting necessary
wildlife, but keep in mind that there
have been many magnetic reversals in the
past, showing that nature, even without our
help, can take care of its own – or at least,
evolve survivors.
Many of the dangers that will confront
your extremely great grandchildren involve
changes in the Sun. The gradual brightening
of Sol’s ignescent face will begin to interfere
with plant life in 100 million years
or so, but this problem, too, could be engineered
away. By that distant date, it should
be a fairly simple matter to erect orbiting
barriers to reduce the solar flux, or possibly
re-formulate our atmosphere to act as a
natural screen.
In a few billion years, the Sun will begin
to die, swelling up like a puffer fish. An
obvious counter move by our descendants
would be to simply decamp to a cooler
neighborhood, either farther out in the solar
system (think: engineered habitats), or
to another star system altogether. Either
would be a grandiose engineering project,
but this event is in a future so remote that it
would be silly to assume that neither could
be done. And in any case, migration would
probably be simpler than trying to “rejuvenate”
the Sun by changing the conditions in
its dying core – a fix that has occasionally
been suggested by those who like to consider
the possibility that someday we will not
only go to the stars, but interfere with their
personal lives.
There’s no doubt that the universe will
present us with difficult, and occasionally
lethal, events. That’s guaranteed to happen.
The dinos, despite their impressive
bulk and Naugahyde skin, ran head-first
into a cosmic catastrophe. Their bones are
now stacked up, labeled, and on display.
They were incapable of averting disaster.
The same could be true of any society
that doesn’t school its populace in science.
Therein lies a lesson.
Dr. Seth Shostak
Senior Astronomer
SETI Institute
Dr. Shostak has written several
hundred popular magazine and
Web articles on various topics in
astronomy, technology, film and
television.
Courtesy of SOHO/Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) consortium.
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