7. Laura Matrajt, a mathematician at the University of Washington in Seattle: L. Matrajt and I. M. Longini, Jr., “Optimizing Vaccine Allocation at Different Points in Time during an Epidemic,” PLoS ONE 5 (2010): e13767.
8. Dr. Tadataka Yamada of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Tadataka Yamada, “Poverty, Wealth, and Access to Pandemic Influenza Vaccines,” New England Journal of Medicine 361 (2009):1129–31.
9. Robert Moss is an immunization researcher: R. Moss, J. M. McCaw, and J. McVernon, “Diagnosis and Antiviral Intervention Strategies for Mitigating an Influenza Epidemic,” PLoS One 6 (February 4, 2011): e14505.
10. Joseph Wu says his models show that countries should always “hedge”: J. T. Wu, A. Ho, E.S.K. Ma, C. K. Lee, D.K.W. Chu et al., “Estimating Infection Attack Rates and Severity in Real Time during an Influenza Pandemic: Analysis of Serial Cross-Sectional Serologic Surveillance Data,” PLoS Medicine 8 (2011): e1001103.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: CITIES THAT HIDE
1. frying the ozone layer off: I’m getting my account of the effects of a gamma-ray burst from astronomer Phil Plait’s excellent chapter on the subject in Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End…(New York: Viking, 2008).
2. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) complex beneath Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain: These days, NORAD has been relocated to another facility and the underground city is run by a skeleton crew. Nuclear weapons technology has advanced enough that the city would likely not survive a direct attack.
3. raids from neighboring groups and from Muslims during the Crusades: See a historical account of the region in Spiro Kostof, Caves of God: The Monastic Environment of Byzantine Cappadocia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
4. a layer of concrete can provide more safety still: For an interesting discussion of the history of designs for radiation shielding, including contemporary thinking on the topic, see J. Kenneth Shultis and Richard E. Faw, “Radiation Shielding Technology,” Health Physics 88 (June 2005): 587–612. They point out that concrete is such a good material for most kinds of radiation shielding that it is one of the most widely studied substances for this purpose.
5. John Zacharias, a city-planning professor at Montréal’s Concordia University: Personal interview, June 5, 2012.
6. “stimulating, varied environments”: Raymond Sterling and John Carmody, Underground Space Design (New York: Wiley, 1993).
7. Agust Gudmundsson, a geology professor at Royal Holloway, University of London: Personal interview, June 26, 2012.
8. Dmitris Kaliampakos and Andreas Bernardos, two engineers who specialize in underground development: D. Kaliampakos and A. Bernardos, “Underground Space Development: Setting Modern Strategies,” WIT Transactions on the Built Environment 102 (2008).
9. RÉSO-like structures such as the one: You can see the full plans for this underground city, to be called Amfora, on Zwarts & Jansma Architects’ website: http://www.zwarts.jansma.nl/page/1597/en.
10. “Smoke—especially black, sooty smoke”: Alan Robock, “New Models Confirm Nuclear Winter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (September 1989): 66–74. Not much has changed since Robock published this article in terms of our understanding of how nuclear winter would work. Many climate scientists agree that a massive explosion would plunge the planet into unseasonable winter for at least a year. Interestingly, it’s likely a megavolcano would cause the same problems we face in a nuclear disaster—minus the radiation danger. See Alan Robock, “New START, Eyjafjallajökull, and Nuclear Winter,” Eos 91 (2010).
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EVERY SURFACE A FARM
1. Raquel Pinderhughes, an urban planning professor at San Francisco State: Raquel Pinderhughes et al. offer a short account of the history of urban farming in Cuba in an essay called “Urban Agriculture in Havana, Cuba,” in Down to Earth (New Delhi: Centre for Science and the Environment, 2001).
2. “small-plot intensive farming” (SPIN): You can learn more about SPIN, and view a number of articles and videos about the system, on its website here: http://spinfarming.com/whatsSpin/.
3. skyscraper farms: See Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010).
4. A popular way to transform cities in Germany is by building green roofs: Not likely to be used as a food supply: Khandaker M. Shariful Islam, “Rooftop Gardening as a Strategy of Urban Agriculture for Food Security: The Case of Dhaka City, Bangladesh,” Acta Horticulturae 643 (2004).
Might help with reduction in cost of cooling buildings: S. Gaffin et al., “Energy Balance Modeling Applied to a Comparison of White and Green Roof Cooling Efficiency and Cool Surfaces and Shade Trees to Reduce Energy Use and Improve Air Quality in Urban Areas,” Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Proceedings (Washington, D.C.: Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, 2005).
Storm-water runoff: Doug Hutchinson, Peter Abrams, Ryan Retzlaff, and Tom Liptan, “Stormwater Monitoring Two Ecoroofs in Portland, Oregon, USA,” proceedings for Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference (Chicago: Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, 2003).
5. without burning coal: One of the big issues with variable power sources like solar and wind is storage. For an excellent and thorough treatment of how we could transition our energy infrastructure over to systems that rely partly on variable power, see Maggie Koerth-Baker’s excellent book Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2012).
6. MIT’s environmental-policy professor Judith Layzer: Personal interview, August 22, 2011.
7. vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate: One of the issues here is obviously the current trend toward a general warming of the global climate. Cities located in fertile areas could, in just a century, find themselves trapped in arid, drought-racked landscapes. This is something that land planners are already worried about, and are preparing for today. How do we build cities and farms that are ready for radical climate change? The environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard deals with this extensively in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
8. Amy McNally, a geography researcher with the group: Personal interview, February 27, 2012.
9. But it’s possible that our political priorities: How would we transform the political and social landscape to prioritize environmental concerns? This is an enormous question that is outside the scope of this book, but luckily many other thinkers have tackled it, including Judith Layzer in The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy (Third Edition) (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press College, 2011).
10. New York architect David Benjamin: Personal interview, April 5, 2012. For more about his AutoCAD-like software for biological design, you can look at the project website: http://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects/biocompevolution.
11. The students described BacillaFilla: For more about this substance, you can see the BacillaFilla project page here: http://2010.igem.org/Team:Newcastle.
12. synthetic-biology designer Rachel Armstrong’s: Personal interview, May 5, 2012.
13. who hope to use experimental proto-cells: Armstrong describes some of her work on the Venice reef in her e-book Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives (TED Books, 2012).
CHAPTER NINETEEN: TERRAFORMING EARTH
1. Bill McKibben and Mark Hertsgaard: See, for example, McKibben’s books The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989) and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010); and Hertsgaard’s Hot: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
2. Maggie Koerth-Baker points out: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (New York: Wiley, 2012).
3. Government representatives who attend the annual U.N. Climate Change Conferences: Currently, our most urgent task as a planet is to form international agreements that limit carbon emissio
ns. The only certainty when it comes to climate change is that if we limit fossil-fuel use we will slow down the warming process that threatens to cause food shortages and the sixth mass extinction. We already have the technological ability to reduce carbon emissions. How we will do it politically and socially is outside the scope of this book, though it’s likely that the same international bodies regulating emissions will ultimately regulate any geoengineering projects we undertake.
4. “hack the planet,” as they say in science-fiction movies: I am, of course, referring to the famously silly (but undeniably awesome) 1990s movie Hackers, where two characters have a TV show called Hack the Planet.
5. Futurist Jamais Cascio: Personal interview, July 9, 2012. You can read Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering online: http://openthefuture.com/2009/02/hacking_the_earth.html.
6. sulfur-laced aerosol exhaust emitted: There are a number of studies showing a connection between ship aerosols and changes in the albedo of clouds. For example, P. A. Durkee et al., “The Impact of Ship-Produced Aerosols on the Microstructure and Albedo of Warm Marine Stratocumulus Clouds: A Test of MAST Hypotheses 1i and 1ii,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 57 (February 12, 1999): 2554–69. Using this as a form of geoengineering is discussed in part in Y.-C. Chen et al., “Occurrence of Lower Cloud Albedo in Ship Tracks,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 12 (2012): 13553–80. It remains unclear whether these ship aerosols are actually having a substantial effect on clouds and weather. See K. Peters et al., “A Search for Large-scale Effects of Ship Emissions on Clouds and Radiation in Satellite Data,” Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011): D24205.
7. One of its researchers is Simon Driscoll: Personal interview, May 11, 2012.
8. The Harvard physicist and public-policy professor David Keith: See David W. Keith, “Photophoretic Levitation of Engineered Aerosols for Geoengineering,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (September 7, 2010): 16428–31.
9. Driscoll’s colleagues at Oxford believe: See, for example, an experiment proposed by the group Driscoll works with, called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE), in which researchers have suggested they would accomplish atmospheric injection via a balloon tethered to the ocean: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/SPICE/SPICE.htm.
10. Alan Robock has run a number of computer simulations: Alan Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62 (May/June 2008): 14–18.
11. During many of the experiments, however: This difficulty is explored in the Royal Society report Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (London: the Royal Society, 2009). More recent experiments with iron fertilization appear to work somewhat better than the ones described in the Royal Society report. See Victor Smetacek et al., “Deep Carbon Export from a Southern Ocean Iron-Fertilized Diatom Bloom,” Nature 487 (July 2012): 313–19. Smetacek and his colleagues report that the algae they worked with fell over 1,000 meters into the deep ocean, often finding its way into sediment on the ocean floor.
12. Tim Kruger, who heads the Oxford Martin School’s geoengineering efforts: Personal interview, May 10, 2012.
13. The Cambridge physicist David MacKay: See David MacKay, Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (Cambridge: UIT Cambridge, Ltd., 2009).
CHAPTER TWENTY: NOT IN OUR PLANETARY BACKYARD
1. Torino scale, a kind of Richter scale: Devised by MIT astronomer Richard Binzel in the late 1990s, the Torino scale is used to estimate the likelihood that an object will hit the Earth, as well as how much damage it might do. You can see a diagram of the Torino scale here: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/torino.cfm.
2. NASA launched an asteroid-spotting program called Spaceguard: Read more about Spaceguard at NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report.html.
3. bring them close to our own orbit: Generally, an object is classed as an NEO if its orbit is between 0.983 and 1.3 AU from the Sun. One AU (astronomical unit) is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 149,597,871 kilometers.
4. some near misses: For a complete list of every NEO that’s flown by since 1900, you can search NASA’s database here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca.
5. asteroid hunter Amy Mainzer calls one of the most hopeful: Personal interview, July 9, 2012.
6. she and her colleagues estimate: A. Mainzer et al., “Characterizing Subpopulations Within the Near-Earth Objects with NEOWISE: Preliminary Results,” Astrophysical Journal 752 (June 20, 2012): 110.
7. Run by aerospace engineer William Ailor: Personal interview, July 9, 2012.
8. a series of suggestions over the past 15 years for how we’d deal with asteroid threats: These include, among others, recommendations urging governments to gather more data on the locations of asteroids, create a governmental organization for “planetary defense,” fund tests to figure out how we could move an asteroid, and “include NEO impacts as possible disaster scenarios for disaster recovery and relief agencies.”
9. Ailor’s company, the Aerospace Corporation, did a study in 2004: You can read the entire study via NASA here: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=139.
10. NASA’s Deep Impact mission: Learn more about Deep Impact via NASA here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html.
11. In an early paper about nuclear winter: Alan Robock, “Snow and Ice Feedbacks Prolong Effects of Nuclear Winter,” Nature 310 (1984): 667–70.
12. Alex Weir, a software engineer based in Zimbabwe: Download the database here: http://www.cd3wd.com/.
13. CD3WD and similar projects can help us restart civilization: One of these is Marcin Jakubowski’s Civilization Starter Kit project. It’s a free online resource (you can print it out to prepare for an asteroid strike) that will eventually contain all the information required to make 50 crucial farming machines and sustain a small village. Find out more here: http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php. A slightly different example is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located beneath the mountains on Norway’s remote Arctic island of Svalbard, where philanthropic and diplomatic groups have paid to build a massive underground structure for seed storage. It’s designed to be a backup copy of the planet’s ecosystems in the event of a dramatic crash in biological diversity, such as what you’d see after a global disaster like a PHO impact. See more at: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-vault.html?id=462220.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: TAKE A RIDE ON THE SPACE ELEVATOR
1. NASA has offered prizes of up to $2 million: Find out more about NASA’s Strong Tether Challenge, which offers up to $2 million to the team that creates an elevator cable strong enough to form the centerpiece of a space elevator, on the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/centennial_challenges/tether/index.html.
Much like the X Prize, the Space Elevator Games are events where inventors compete for large cash prizes, in this case for viable models of space-elevator climbers and ribbon structures. ISEC, the International Space Elevator Consortium, is a group that holds annual conferences and prize giveaways for inventors and investors to explore novel materials and methods we could use to build a space elevator. This association unites groups from Europe, Japan, and America that are working on space-elevator engineering, and they also publish books and a journal devoted to designing a working space elevator.
2. a scientist named Bradley Edwards, who wrote a book about the feasibility: Though there are other models for space elevators, Edwards’s design is the one that NASA and its affiliated scientists are currently pursuing. Indeed, spaceflight engineer Peter Swan has written extensively about the process of building space elevators, and suggests that the final designs may change a great deal by the time we’re actually building the structure. See, for example, Peter Swan and Cathy Swan, Space Elevator Systems Architecture (Lulu.com, 2007).
3. reduction in water pollution from perchlorates: See the EPA’s information abo
ut perchlorates: http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/unregulated/perchlorate.cfm/.
4. NASA reports that each Space Shuttle launch cost about $450 million: See NASA’s Space Shuttle FAQ online: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10.
5. 100,000 kilometers out into space: There is some disagreement over whether this length is necessary, or whether it could be shorter. Different plans call for different lengths.
6. In 2009, NASA awarded $900,000 to LaserMotive: Clara Moskowitz, “Space Elevator Team Wins $900,000 from NASA,” MSNBC.com (January 7, 2009).
7. “I like to compare [carbon nanotube development]”: Personal interview, August 12, 2011.
8. Engineer Keith Lofstrom suggested: Personal interview, August 12, 2011: You can see his plans for the maglev platform on launchloop.com.
9. Vasilii Artyukhov argued that we might not want to use carbon nanotubes: “Making and Breaking Graphitic Nanocarbon: Insights from Computer Simulations,” Space Elevator Conference presentation, Microsoft Campus, Richmond, WA (August 12, 2011).
10. “The bottom line is that you need to find”: Personal interview, June 26, 2012.
11. Alex Hall, the senior director of the Google Lunar X Prize: “When Can I Buy My Ticket to the Moon?” Panel discussion at SETICon 11, Santa Clara, CA (June 23, 2012).
12. Bob Richards, a cofounder of Moon Express: Ibid.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: YOUR BODY IS OPTIONAL
1. I visited the UC Berkeley synthetic biologist Chris Anderson: Personal interview, June 6, 2012.
2. “During a long-duration manned space flight”: Personal correspondence, June 25, 2012.
3. Still, her research and that of other geneticists working with NASA: Personal interview with Sylvain Costes, June 15, 2012. Costes works at the Berkeley Lab, researching how radiation damages DNA. His work is funded in part by NASA, and he hopes that at some point we can pinpoint regions on the genome responsible for making some people’s DNA more robust against cosmic radiation damage.
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