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To edit a planet - Part #2

marine cloud brightening | desert reflectors | cool roof | sunshield Marine cloud brightening - explained in the article above Desert reflectors - basically covering deserts with...

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To edit a planet - Part #2

http://summur.ai/lFYVY

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ScholarsCup

To edit a planet - Part #2

marine cloud brightening | desert reflectors | cool roof | sunshield

Marine cloud brightening - explained in the article above

Desert reflectors - basically covering deserts with reflective sheetings. This can not only increase the earth’s albedo and reflect light back to space, but also be an anti-desertification

tool. calculations suggest that covering an area of a little more than 60,000 square kilometres with reflective sheet, at a cost of some $280 billion, would be adequate to offset the heat balance and lead to a net cooling without any need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, they caution that it would be necessary to control the area covered very carefully to prevent overcooling and to continue with efforts to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It

wouldn't be easy to actually place all of the reflectors, and just as hard to reverse it.

Cool roof - building roofs with typically bright colors, often made with materials that have high solar reflectance, so it is able to reflect the sun’s light back to space, and also keep the building cool. When the weather is warm, a conventional roof is the hottest place in a building. The two benefits are the direct reflecting, which won’t cause drastic change, and also the elimination of the need for energy to cool the building. Studies show that it reduces energy needed by up to 15%. It helps to eliminate the effect called the urban heat island. Basically, the temperature in developed urban areas tend to be higher by 2-5 degrees than in surrounding areas, because of the ground covered with dark pavements and buildings. There is also a version called the green roof, in which greenery is grown on top of the building. It is very easy to reverse, and the termination effects will be minimal, there will be very little externalities and costs. Also, the idea is fairly easy to explain.

Sunshield - sunshield, or space sunshade, is a sort of block that diverts the energy of the sun, reducing the earth’s insulation. Basically space mirrors. It is quite a literal way to manage solar radiation. It isn’t very practical, though. Over time, reflecting the light would cause the sunshield to fall out of orbit. If it is heavier, it can stay in orbit, but we don’t exactly want to launch extremely heavy objects to space. There is a point in space where the earth’s gravitational point cancels out called the L1 lagrangian point, in which it will always stay in orbit relating to the sun and the earth,so theoretically it could be placed there. See the article above for further explanation. The solution will be extremely costly, and hard to reverse. The externalities and termination effects are unpredictable.

stratospheric aerosols | Mt. Pinatubo | Arctic methane release

Stratospheric aerosols - see the summary above for stratospheric aerosol injections.

Mt. Pinatubo - aka the “Pinatubo strategy”. This mountain, located in the philippines, is an active volcano that last erupted in 1991. It was the 2nd biggest eruption of the 20th century, and most

importantly for this topic, it introduced to the atmosphere 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide. For measure, on average all volcanoes on earth release annually 20-25 million tonnes of SO2. it was released so high that it reached the stratosphere, where it reacted with water to form a hazy layer of aerosol particles composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. Over the course of the next two years strong stratospheric winds spread these aerosol particles around the globe for the following 2 years. The result was a measurable cooling of the earth for that period. If we were able to mimic the effects of the eruption, we have the possibility to considerably cool the earth. One of the possible side effects would be depleting the ozone level. The externalities are relatively easy to predict, as we will mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions, but it will be extremely hard to reverse as we don’t have a technology to remove gases from the stratosphere.

Arctic methane release - as a result of climate change, the arctic areas are melting. This means that regions that were once in permafrost are now thawing. This causes microbes in the soil to wake up and start consuming once-frozen organic material, in a process that releases methane. Newly formed lakes in the regions called thermokarst lakes that are created because of the thawing cause the ground to slump, and speeding up the process of permafrost, releasing more methane, which bubbles up through the lakes and enters the atmosphere.

When exploring methods of geoengineering, be sure to consider:

This topic is about things that we should think about when researching the subjects in the passage above, and they are included in the summaries above,, but I will make a few clarifications right here for the less obvious ones.

Externalities - יאוול תועפות

Termination effect - pretty much the same meaning as termination shock, basically withdrawal symptoms. Reversibility - I'm going to assume that by reversibility, they meant if you are able to reverse the process of the geoengineering

method, since if you are looking at the reversibility of climate change, that is already measured by the effectiveness of the process.

Encapsulation - refers to whether the method is modular and contained, such as is the case with air capture and space reflectors, or whether it involves material released into the wider environment, as is the case with sulphate aerosols or ocean fertilisation. Encapsulated technologies are sometimes viewed as more ethical in that they do not involve releasing ‘foreign material’ into the environment. This is not to suggest that encapsulated technologies may not have environmental impacts: depending on the nature, size and location of the application, there may be direct and indirect impacts, for example on habitat, landscape and/or species, or unintended consequences on other elements of the climate system.

One common criticism of geoengineering is that, if people believe new technologies could “solve” climate change, they will lose the political will to reduce carbon emissions and take other preventative measures. Some refer to this problem as “moral hazard”. Discuss with your team: do you think people would react in this way? If so, should we stop research into geoengineering, or would the solution be for governments to implement it secretly?

There are obvious pros and cons to geoengineering. It might be a way to reverse climate change, but, if we start changing the mechanisms of the planet, some people may believe that it is the sole solution, and stop cutting carbon emissions. This will cause other problems, and will slow down the process of diverting global warming. Geoengineering should be used in combination with cutting emissions, so that the two can complement each other to cool down the earth as quickly as possible.

Suppose a geoengineer came to you with the perfect technology for adjusting the climate of the Earth: it could create any climate desired with zero side effects. Discuss with your team: what would you do with this power? Would you look to restore the climate from a certain point in the past— and, if so, what point?

Well, if we should geoengineer is definitely a very controversial and debated topic. You can say that we should optimize the planet for human activity, and that it is our moral obligation to undo the changes that we caused in the planets, and on the other hand you can say that it is basically ‘playing god’ and that there will be many consequences, including an increase in carbon emissions. Even if we would theoretically be able to return to the temperature of any point in the past, there isn’t a specific “ideal temperature” of the earth. Some countries like russia and canada would want less cooling than some tropical countries that can be hurt by crop losses due to the heat. The important thing is the stability of the earth’s temperature, as frequent drastic rises and falls have an extremely negative impact on the earth.

Will Antarctica become habitable in the near future? If so, who should decide who lives there? Discuss with your team: should nations threatened by rising sea levels be given Antarctic territory for relocation?

This article talks about how Antarctica will become habitable in the next two centuries due to climate change. Well, it is already livable there, we just need to have food shipped in. No matter how intense global warming gets, Antarctica will always have one enemy: darkness.

It’s conceivable that the temperatures on Antarctica, particularly on the coast, could be warm enough for “normal” people to live there, but the maximum solar angle is still so low for the entirety of the continent that plants would really struggle to survive. The maximum solar angle on the longest day of the year in antarctica is about 47 degrees, which means that the maximum height of the sun there is around what we see in the very early morning or late evening. In winter, it’s very dark for long stretches. You would think that these conditions make agriculture unsustainable, but it turns out there’s a place very much like what the coast of Antarctica might be like on a much warmer Earth: Vesteralen, in northern Norway. The conditions there are very similar to the ones in antarctica, and crops like barley and potatoes can grow there. Currently, Antarctica is very dry, but there is a chance that global warming would cause more precipitation there. Nevertheless, the further away we go from the equator, the harder it will be to sustain living there.

While geoengineering aims to tackle issues that impact the world on a large scale, there are other technologies that also aim to affect the environment, but on a smaller level. If you had the power to change one thing about the climate of your city, what would you change to make it more comfortable or habitable? Are there changes you would make to the landscape?

There are many small ways we can help the environment, without needing things like marine cloud brightening or giant space mirrors. Buses for example, are great ways to cut carbon emissions. So is carpooling. Cool roofs are another technology that helps climate on a smaller scale. Going digital also helps in cutting down trees. Imagine having to write the current 135 (currently 426!) pages of this document on paper, and doing it multiple times for everyone to be able to see it.

Explore the following techniques used to manipulate, take advantage of, or otherwise utilize elements of the environment in a “non-natural” way. How well do these methods work? What are the arguments against using them more often?

cloud seeding (glaciogenic and hygroscopic) | fog harps

Cloud seeding - the type of weather geoengineering which aims to change the type or amount of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or ice nuclei to the air. Cloud condensation nuclei form water droplets around them, and ice nuclei form ice crystals around them. We can also make them produce less hail (this is called hail suppression). Hail suppression is the most expensive method, while making rain is the least. You can only modify clouds that already exist. This means that you cannot really create rain, for example, but enhance it. Some of these methods are already practiced, for example by the UAE. The term glaciogenic cloud seeding refers to creating ice with the ice nuclei, and the hygroscopic method refers to enhancing rainfall with CCN. Normally, water particles in clouds aren’t heavy enough to fall out as rain. The CCN particles serve as a sort of base for the water particles, and they combine around it and become heavier. The process with ice nuclei is very similar. Fog harps - in dry climates, rain is very rare (obviously), which can put people at risk of water shortages. To combat this, researchers created methods to harvest water from fog. The most common method currently is to set a wire mesh netting to catch

water droplets, which then falls into a collector. If the wire mesh is too coarse, it will have difficulties catching water, but if it’s too fine, it will get clogged easily. Harp structures that use only vertical wires can avoid these complications, and they can harvest up to three times more than normal mesh wire.

bioprecipitation | cloudbuster | hail cannon

Bioprecipitation - it was discovered that the clouds are not only filled with ice crystals and water droplets, but also with bacteria. Normally, rain will form around stuff like dust particles, but sometimes it will form around microbes. Some microbes can actually cause ice to form at warmer temperatures than inorganic particles, thanks to special proteins that encourage the orderly arrangement of water molecules.

Cloudbuster - A device designed by the austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, which would supposedly produce rain by manipulating what he called “orgone energy” in the atmosphere. It was meant to be used in a similar way to a lightning rod: focusing it on a location in the sky and grounding it in some material that was presumed to absorb orgone—such as a body of water—would draw the orgone energy out of the atmosphere, causing the formation of clouds and rain. Reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling the research "Cosmic orgone engineering". Below is an example of how the cloudbuster looked.

His proposed “orgone energy” was shown to be radiating from life forms, and was found in free state in the atmosphere. Basically, it was synonymous with “life energy”. Reich built a device he called the “orgone accumulator”. The open end of the cloudbuster would be aimed at water, which Reich believed could absorb orgone energy, and its rods were aimed at the sky, so it could draw in energy like a lightning rod, and rain along with it. Reich claimed that his cloudbuster could drill holes in the sky and produce

prolonged rain or even cause tornadoes if used by an unskilled practitioner.

Hail cannon - for farmers, hail is one of the biggest causes of produce loss. To prevent this, a technology called “hail cannon” was created. Basically, you use a cannon to create shockwaves at the speed of sound, and these shockwaves go up to the clouds, where manufacturers claim that it disrupts the formation of hailstones, which come down as rain or slush. This technology often causes conflicts between farmers and neighbors, because the former would often fire them up every 1-10 seconds while a storm is approaching, even though there is no scientific evidence for its effectiveness.

The ability to modify the weather isn’t just coveted by climatologists and policy-makers—it has also found military applications. Look into the tenets of the UN’s Environmental Modification Convention and discuss with your team: why was this treaty written in the first place? What risk (if any) is posed by countries not signing it?

Every March, at the time of the annual showpiece meeting of China's parliament and top advisory body, known locally as the two sessions, the local governments try to create clearer skies by imposing temporary bans on heavy polluters, shutting factories and limiting the number of vehicles on the road. This is called the “political blue sky”, and a similar effect can be seen in what is called ‘APEC blue’. Researchers found that the pollution levels jumped back, and got even worse after the meetings are finished. More likely than not, ramping up production to compensate for the losses is at blame. The second article is about the secret weather-manipulation program the US military ran during the Vietnam war. For 5 years, the US spent around 3 million dollars to extend the monsoon season in order to flood the Ho Chi Minh trail, the system of supply routes used by enemy fighters in Vietnam. The Americans hoped to cause landslides, wash out river crossings, and just generally disrupt the movement of North Vietnamese troops. It was the first large scale effort to manipulate the weather for military purposes. And it's still unclear how well it actually worked. The program went by many names. It was called at various times Operation Popeye, Operation Motorpool, and Operation Intermediary - Compatriot. Reportedly the name had to be changed so many times on account of people without the proper security clearances learning the name. American forces saw it as a better way to disrupt the vietnamesse forces than

bombing, “make mud, not war” was the motto of the pilots carrying the missions. The US did so by seeding clouds over Vietnam with silver iodide over 2000 times during the war. The entire operation was denied multiple times during nixon’s presidency. Under public pressure from people nervous about the U.S. military playing God, both houses of Congress rushed to pass legislation in 1974 to ban weather control for combat purposes. By 1974 a UN Treaty was in the works, but once it was signed in 1978 it was pretty much useless. It forbade countries from using environmental modification in war, but had so many loopholes that they may as well have not tried. The UN’s environmental modification convention (or ENMOD) formally the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques was signed in Geneva by 48 countries.

House Hunters 3000: A User's Guide to Settling the Stars

You can’t get there from here. One argument against colonizing other planets is that it would be very difficult for humans to reach them. Look into the following forms of faster-than-light (FTL) travel found in science fiction. Are any of them at all plausible in the real world?

hyperspace | warp speed | wormholes

An important thing to remember when talking about faster-than-light travel is that it is actually impossible to do in the real world. The actual explanation is a lot more complicated, but basically, space and time are not separate, but combined in what’s called spacetime. When you move faster through space, you move slower through time. The opposite is also true. When you don’t move in space (you’re not in motion) you experience the time the fastest. The fastest possible speed is the speed of light, because when you move at that speed, time completely stops. At that

speed, we are only moving through space, which means that there is no more speed to gain.

Hyperspace - a science-fiction form of FTL travel. It is typically described as a “sub-region” of space that can be entered using a device. Once in hyperspace, the laws of physics do not behave in the same way. Through it, you can travel large distances, and also travel through time just as you would through space, allowing you to travel faster than the speed of light. The classic example of jumping into hyperspace is in the star wars movies. There are risks, though. Without precise calculations you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova.

Warp speed - is the measurement of speed during a warp in the star trek series. Getting to that speed is achieved using a warp drive. Warping is different from hyperspace in the sense that you’re still traveling in the normal universe - just very, very fast, and you interact with objects normally. The warp speed itself defines how faster than the speed of light you move. This is achieved by colliding matter and antimatter. You calculate the speed by the warp speed (for example, warp 5) to the power of three. The result is how many times is the speed larger than the speed of time. For example, when they say “warp 3” the speed is 27 times the speed of light. In the original series, warp 9 was considered the maximum speed, but it was later increased to warp 9.9999, and later to 10 and more which was considered infinite velocity.

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ScholarsCup

To edit a planet - Part #2

20:26

ScholarsCup_Science

To edit a planet - Part #2

http://summur.ai/lFYVY

Copy

ScholarsCup

To edit a planet - Part #2

marine cloud brightening | desert reflectors | cool roof | sunshield

Marine cloud brightening - explained in the article above

Desert reflectors - basically covering deserts with reflective sheetings. This can not only increase the earth’s albedo and reflect light back to space, but also be an anti-desertification

tool. calculations suggest that covering an area of a little more than 60,000 square kilometres with reflective sheet, at a cost of some $280 billion, would be adequate to offset the heat balance and lead to a net cooling without any need to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, they caution that it would be necessary to control the area covered very carefully to prevent overcooling and to continue with efforts to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It

16

wouldn't be easy to actually place all of the reflectors, and just as hard to reverse it.

Cool roof - building roofs with typically bright colors, often made with materials that have high solar reflectance, so it is able to reflect the sun’s light back to space, and also keep the building cool. When the weather is warm, a conventional roof is the hottest place in a building. The two benefits are the direct reflecting, which won’t cause drastic change, and also the elimination of the need for energy to cool the building. Studies show that it reduces energy needed by up to 15%. It helps to eliminate the effect called the urban heat island. Basically, the temperature in developed urban areas tend to be higher by 2-5 degrees than in surrounding areas, because of the ground covered with dark pavements and buildings. There is also a version called the green roof, in which greenery is grown on top of the building. It is very easy to reverse, and the termination effects will be minimal, there will be very little externalities and costs. Also, the idea is fairly easy to explain.

Sunshield - sunshield, or space sunshade, is a sort of block that diverts the energy of the sun, reducing the earth’s insulation. Basically space mirrors. It is quite a literal way to manage solar radiation. It isn’t very practical, though. Over time, reflecting the light would cause the sunshield to fall out of orbit. If it is heavier, it can stay in orbit, but we don’t exactly want to launch extremely heavy objects to space. There is a point in space where the earth’s gravitational point cancels out called the L1 lagrangian point, in which it will always stay in orbit relating to the sun and the earth,so theoretically it could be placed there. See the article above for further explanation. The solution will be extremely costly, and hard to reverse. The externalities and termination effects are unpredictable.

stratospheric aerosols | Mt. Pinatubo | Arctic methane release

Stratospheric aerosols - see the summary above for stratospheric aerosol injections.

Mt. Pinatubo - aka the “Pinatubo strategy”. This mountain, located in the philippines, is an active volcano that last erupted in 1991. It was the 2nd biggest eruption of the 20th century, and most

17

importantly for this topic, it introduced to the atmosphere 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide. For measure, on average all volcanoes on earth release annually 20-25 million tonnes of SO2. it was released so high that it reached the stratosphere, where it reacted with water to form a hazy layer of aerosol particles composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. Over the course of the next two years strong stratospheric winds spread these aerosol particles around the globe for the following 2 years. The result was a measurable cooling of the earth for that period. If we were able to mimic the effects of the eruption, we have the possibility to considerably cool the earth. One of the possible side effects would be depleting the ozone level. The externalities are relatively easy to predict, as we will mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions, but it will be extremely hard to reverse as we don’t have a technology to remove gases from the stratosphere.

Arctic methane release - as a result of climate change, the arctic areas are melting. This means that regions that were once in permafrost are now thawing. This causes microbes in the soil to wake up and start consuming once-frozen organic material, in a process that releases methane. Newly formed lakes in the regions called thermokarst lakes that are created because of the thawing cause the ground to slump, and speeding up the process of permafrost, releasing more methane, which bubbles up through the lakes and enters the atmosphere.

When exploring methods of geoengineering, be sure to consider:

effectiveness | time scale | externalities | costs trade-offs | termination effect | reversibility | encapsulation

This topic is about things that we should think about when researching the subjects in the passage above, and they are included in the summaries above,, but I will make a few clarifications right here for the less obvious ones.

Externalities - יאוול תועפות

Termination effect - pretty much the same meaning as termination shock, basically withdrawal symptoms. Reversibility - I'm going to assume that by reversibility, they meant if you are able to reverse the process of the geoengineering

18

method, since if you are looking at the reversibility of climate change, that is already measured by the effectiveness of the process.

Encapsulation - refers to whether the method is modular and contained, such as is the case with air capture and space reflectors, or whether it involves material released into the wider environment, as is the case with sulphate aerosols or ocean fertilisation. Encapsulated technologies are sometimes viewed as more ethical in that they do not involve releasing ‘foreign material’ into the environment. This is not to suggest that encapsulated technologies may not have environmental impacts: depending on the nature, size and location of the application, there may be direct and indirect impacts, for example on habitat, landscape and/or species, or unintended consequences on other elements of the climate system.

One common criticism of geoengineering is that, if people believe new technologies could “solve” climate change, they will lose the political will to reduce carbon emissions and take other preventative measures. Some refer to this problem as “moral hazard”. Discuss with your team: do you think people would react in this way? If so, should we stop research into geoengineering, or would the solution be for governments to implement it secretly?

There are obvious pros and cons to geoengineering. It might be a way to reverse climate change, but, if we start changing the mechanisms of the planet, some people may believe that it is the sole solution, and stop cutting carbon emissions. This will cause other problems, and will slow down the process of diverting global warming. Geoengineering should be used in combination with cutting emissions, so that the two can complement each other to cool down the earth as quickly as possible.

Suppose a geoengineer came to you with the perfect technology for adjusting the climate of the Earth: it could create any climate desired with zero side effects. Discuss with your team: what would you do with this power? Would you look to restore the climate from a certain point in the past— and, if so, what point?

19

Well, if we should geoengineer is definitely a very controversial and debated topic. You can say that we should optimize the planet for human activity, and that it is our moral obligation to undo the changes that we caused in the planets, and on the other hand you can say that it is basically ‘playing god’ and that there will be many consequences, including an increase in carbon emissions. Even if we would theoretically be able to return to the temperature of any point in the past, there isn’t a specific “ideal temperature” of the earth. Some countries like russia and canada would want less cooling than some tropical countries that can be hurt by crop losses due to the heat. The important thing is the stability of the earth’s temperature, as frequent drastic rises and falls have an extremely negative impact on the earth.

Will Antarctica become habitable in the near future? If so, who should decide who lives there? Discuss with your team: should nations threatened by rising sea levels be given Antarctic territory for relocation?

This article talks about how Antarctica will become habitable in the next two centuries due to climate change. Well, it is already livable there, we just need to have food shipped in. No matter how intense global warming gets, Antarctica will always have one enemy: darkness.

It’s conceivable that the temperatures on Antarctica, particularly on the coast, could be warm enough for “normal” people to live there, but the maximum solar angle is still so low for the entirety of the continent that plants would really struggle to survive. The maximum solar angle on the longest day of the year in antarctica is about 47 degrees, which means that the maximum height of the sun there is around what we see in the very early morning or late evening. In winter, it’s very dark for long stretches. You would think that these conditions make agriculture unsustainable, but it turns out there’s a place very much like what the coast of Antarctica might be like on a much warmer Earth: Vesteralen, in northern Norway. The conditions there are very similar to the ones in antarctica, and crops like barley and potatoes can grow there. Currently, Antarctica is very dry, but there is a chance that global warming would cause more precipitation there. Nevertheless, the further away we go from the equator, the harder it will be to sustain living there.

20

While geoengineering aims to tackle issues that impact the world on a large scale, there are other technologies that also aim to affect the environment, but on a smaller level. If you had the power to change one thing about the climate of your city, what would you change to make it more comfortable or habitable? Are there changes you would make to the landscape?

There are many small ways we can help the environment, without needing things like marine cloud brightening or giant space mirrors. Buses for example, are great ways to cut carbon emissions. So is carpooling. Cool roofs are another technology that helps climate on a smaller scale. Going digital also helps in cutting down trees. Imagine having to write the current 135 (currently 426!) pages of this document on paper, and doing it multiple times for everyone to be able to see it.

Explore the following techniques used to manipulate, take advantage of, or otherwise utilize elements of the environment in a “non-natural” way. How well do these methods work? What are the arguments against using them more often?

cloud seeding (glaciogenic and hygroscopic) | fog harps

Cloud seeding - the type of weather geoengineering which aims to change the type or amount of precipitation that falls from clouds by dispersing cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or ice nuclei to the air. Cloud condensation nuclei form water droplets around them, and ice nuclei form ice crystals around them. We can also make them produce less hail (this is called hail suppression). Hail suppression is the most expensive method, while making rain is the least. You can only modify clouds that already exist. This means that you cannot really create rain, for example, but enhance it. Some of these methods are already practiced, for example by the UAE. The term glaciogenic cloud seeding refers to creating ice with the ice nuclei, and the hygroscopic method refers to enhancing rainfall with CCN. Normally, water particles in clouds aren’t heavy enough to fall out as rain. The CCN particles serve as a sort of base for the water particles, and they combine around it and become heavier. The process with ice nuclei is very similar. Fog harps - in dry climates, rain is very rare (obviously), which can put people at risk of water shortages. To combat this, researchers created methods to harvest water from fog. The most common method currently is to set a wire mesh netting to catch

21

water droplets, which then falls into a collector. If the wire mesh is too coarse, it will have difficulties catching water, but if it’s too fine, it will get clogged easily. Harp structures that use only vertical wires can avoid these complications, and they can harvest up to three times more than normal mesh wire.

bioprecipitation | cloudbuster | hail cannon

Bioprecipitation - it was discovered that the clouds are not only filled with ice crystals and water droplets, but also with bacteria. Normally, rain will form around stuff like dust particles, but sometimes it will form around microbes. Some microbes can actually cause ice to form at warmer temperatures than inorganic particles, thanks to special proteins that encourage the orderly arrangement of water molecules.

Cloudbuster - A device designed by the austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, which would supposedly produce rain by manipulating what he called “orgone energy” in the atmosphere. It was meant to be used in a similar way to a lightning rod: focusing it on a location in the sky and grounding it in some material that was presumed to absorb orgone—such as a body of water—would draw the orgone energy out of the atmosphere, causing the formation of clouds and rain. Reich conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling the research "Cosmic orgone engineering". Below is an example of how the cloudbuster looked.

His proposed “orgone energy” was shown to be radiating from life forms, and was found in free state in the atmosphere. Basically, it was synonymous with “life energy”. Reich built a device he called the “orgone accumulator”. The open end of the cloudbuster would be aimed at water, which Reich believed could absorb orgone energy, and its rods were aimed at the sky, so it could draw in energy like a lightning rod, and rain along with it. Reich claimed that his cloudbuster could drill holes in the sky and produce

22

prolonged rain or even cause tornadoes if used by an unskilled practitioner.

Hail cannon - for farmers, hail is one of the biggest causes of produce loss. To prevent this, a technology called “hail cannon” was created. Basically, you use a cannon to create shockwaves at the speed of sound, and these shockwaves go up to the clouds, where manufacturers claim that it disrupts the formation of hailstones, which come down as rain or slush. This technology often causes conflicts between farmers and neighbors, because the former would often fire them up every 1-10 seconds while a storm is approaching, even though there is no scientific evidence for its effectiveness.

The ability to modify the weather isn’t just coveted by climatologists and policy-makers—it has also found military applications. Look into the tenets of the UN’s Environmental Modification Convention and discuss with your team: why was this treaty written in the first place? What risk (if any) is posed by countries not signing it?

Every March, at the time of the annual showpiece meeting of China's parliament and top advisory body, known locally as the two sessions, the local governments try to create clearer skies by imposing temporary bans on heavy polluters, shutting factories and limiting the number of vehicles on the road. This is called the “political blue sky”, and a similar effect can be seen in what is called ‘APEC blue’. Researchers found that the pollution levels jumped back, and got even worse after the meetings are finished. More likely than not, ramping up production to compensate for the losses is at blame. The second article is about the secret weather-manipulation program the US military ran during the Vietnam war. For 5 years, the US spent around 3 million dollars to extend the monsoon season in order to flood the Ho Chi Minh trail, the system of supply routes used by enemy fighters in Vietnam. The Americans hoped to cause landslides, wash out river crossings, and just generally disrupt the movement of North Vietnamese troops. It was the first large scale effort to manipulate the weather for military purposes. And it's still unclear how well it actually worked. The program went by many names. It was called at various times Operation Popeye, Operation Motorpool, and Operation Intermediary - Compatriot. Reportedly the name had to be changed so many times on account of people without the proper security clearances learning the name. American forces saw it as a better way to disrupt the vietnamesse forces than

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bombing, “make mud, not war” was the motto of the pilots carrying the missions. The US did so by seeding clouds over Vietnam with silver iodide over 2000 times during the war. The entire operation was denied multiple times during nixon’s presidency. Under public pressure from people nervous about the U.S. military playing God, both houses of Congress rushed to pass legislation in 1974 to ban weather control for combat purposes. By 1974 a UN Treaty was in the works, but once it was signed in 1978 it was pretty much useless. It forbade countries from using environmental modification in war, but had so many loopholes that they may as well have not tried. The UN’s environmental modification convention (or ENMOD) formally the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques was signed in Geneva by 48 countries.

House Hunters 3000: A User's Guide to Settling the Stars

You can’t get there from here. One argument against colonizing other planets is that it would be very difficult for humans to reach them. Look into the following forms of faster-than-light (FTL) travel found in science fiction. Are any of them at all plausible in the real world?

hyperspace | warp speed | wormholes

An important thing to remember when talking about faster-than-light travel is that it is actually impossible to do in the real world. The actual explanation is a lot more complicated, but basically, space and time are not separate, but combined in what’s called spacetime. When you move faster through space, you move slower through time. The opposite is also true. When you don’t move in space (you’re not in motion) you experience the time the fastest. The fastest possible speed is the speed of light, because when you move at that speed, time completely stops. At that

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speed, we are only moving through space, which means that there is no more speed to gain.

Hyperspace - a science-fiction form of FTL travel. It is typically described as a “sub-region” of space that can be entered using a device. Once in hyperspace, the laws of physics do not behave in the same way. Through it, you can travel large distances, and also travel through time just as you would through space, allowing you to travel faster than the speed of light. The classic example of jumping into hyperspace is in the star wars movies. There are risks, though. Without precise calculations you could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova.

Warp speed - is the measurement of speed during a warp in the star trek series. Getting to that speed is achieved using a warp drive. Warping is different from hyperspace in the sense that you’re still traveling in the normal universe - just very, very fast, and you interact with objects normally. The warp speed itself defines how faster than the speed of light you move. This is achieved by colliding matter and antimatter. You calculate the speed by the warp speed (for example, warp 5) to the power of three. The result is how many times is the speed larger than the speed of time. For example, when they say “warp 3” the speed is 27 times the speed of light. In the original series, warp 9 was considered the maximum speed, but it was later increased to warp 9.9999, and later to 10 and more which was considered infinite velocity.

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To edit a planet - Part #2

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To edit a planet - Part #2

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To edit a planet - Part #2

marine cloud brightening | desert reflectors | cool roof | sunshield

Marine cloud brightening - explained in the article above

Desert reflectors - basically covering deserts with reflective sheetings. This can not only increase the earth’s albedo and reflect light back to space, but also be an anti-desertification

wouldn't be easy to actually place all of the reflectors, and just as hard to reverse it.

stratospheric aerosols | Mt. Pinatubo | Arctic methane release

Stratospheric aerosols - see the summary above for stratospheric aerosol injections.

When exploring methods of geoengineering, be sure to consider:

Externalities - יאוול תועפות

method, since if you are looking at the reversibility of climate change, that is already measured by the effectiveness of the process.

cloud seeding (glaciogenic and hygroscopic) | fog harps

bioprecipitation | cloudbuster | hail cannon

prolonged rain or even cause tornadoes if used by an unskilled practitioner.

House Hunters 3000: A User's Guide to Settling the Stars

hyperspace | warp speed | wormholes

speed, we are only moving through space, which means that there is no more speed to gain.

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