Vida Enigmática

"Who speaks for Earth?"

Who speaks for Earth?

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A million people on Mars by 2060?

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Really? Why? Aren’t there enogh bloody people in existence already?

I like Elon Musk. I really do. But I think his whole mission to mars is totally misguided. I think the best way to invest in humanity’s future is… by creating longer-lasting protection for the last remaining wilderness areas. If that is what leading biologists say we should do, then that is what we should be doing!

I think he’d be better off buying up a huge chunk of forest somewhere and just… leaving it intact. No human intervention. Or, if he must ‘build’ a structure, design a bloody great hermetically sealed dome over the top of the canopy, and just lock people in there for five or more years. It’d be cheaper, better for this planet.

How many emissions do those rockets make? How many emissions do making the rocket parts make? It’s just totally a waste of time buggerising about terraforming mars when we already have a terraformed planet here with millions of more naturally occurring species on it.

Technology got us here in the first place, it won’t save us now. The only thing that can save us now is … not clearing any more new land, increasing the size of existing wilderness areas. And planting lots and lots of trees all trhoughout suburbia.

A word about forest efficiency

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Scientists are hard at working devising new ‘technologies’ that can strip carbon dioxide out of the air. There is even a prize for the most efficient inventions that can capture this carbon and put it to good use; twitter is abuzz with the hashtag #reimagineCO<sub>2</sub>. But you know, I already know that the most efficient, sustainable oxygen factory (that also happens to double as a carbon sink) is none other than a natural forest:

Imagine this robotic-like device that can adsorb CO2 molecules at the ppb level directly out of the Earth’s atmosphere through a process of reverse-osmosis and then transmorgify those carbon atoms into stiff and lightweight fractal-laminar-nano-composite material that is 100% biodegradeable, 100% compostable and 100% renewable! Once the carbon dioxide molecules are split into their atomic components, one of the only gaseous waste byproducts is diatomic oxygen²!! It gets better. It’s solar powered, of course!!! And believe it or not, but it uses *self-assembling technology*!!!! Really — this thing, it just unfolds itself to the final shape in front of your very eyes!!!!! Literally all you do is wait and let it do its thing!!!!!! And did I mention that it is self-repairing? Meaning it will heal its own damaged components!!!!!!! It’s that simple!!!!!!!! And it works!!!!!!!!!! It actually works!!!!!!!!!! This incredible machine, okay, will keep on going even if sections of it are completely hacked off!!!!!!!!!!! And it is like a 3D printer, so it will literally print practically unlimited copies of itself!!!!!!!!!!!! I am going to be the world’s first trillionaire!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have almost lost count of how many exclamation points I am using here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ²And if you’re paying atttention, even the fineprint is good—the only other byproducts are aromatic hydrocarbons that are shown to enhance mood levels in the general human population.

I might be wrong about this but I’m willing to bet that the more biodiverse a forest is, the more carbon it can absorb. Simply because a dense tropical rainforest has more biomass than a ‘monoculture’ crop (soil is another matter).

So. We already have the ‘technology’ in the form of trees. All we have to do is reverse the landclearing. That’s why when someone tells you the best advice they can give is to “plant a tree”, they are almost certainly correct.