At the time I was born, it was very
difficult for anyone to reach 100 years. Today it is not unusual for someone to
reach this age. It seems that the new lifestyle and the advances in genetic
medicine have led to life expectancy to levels never seen before. From what I
hear, it has been 50 years since no one dies old. It is not my specialty, but
it seems it has to do with a set of genes that appear to be associated with the
aging process. Our friends, the doctors, created a genetic treatment that disables
this set of genes. A curious thing is that only the first two generations of humans
had to receive treatment. The third onwards began to be born with the genes of
old age inactive. Perhaps this is the first example of self-caused evolution.
The same technique was used to cure diseases like color blindness or hemophilia.
But all this progress has created a big problem. Although birth rates are
relatively low (I hear about 1.75 children per woman), mortality rates are also
very low. Infant mortality is almost zero and wars, crimes and traffic accidents
are no longer a concern (traffic accidents almost ended when the car stopped
need drivers). Thus, human population continues to increase. Today we are in 15
billion. The Torres guarantee space and ecological conditions for up to 10
times that, except that there is no enough carbon on the planet for so many
Towers. So, although things are good today, it will not be like this forever.
Some proposals such as the migration to the Moon or Mars are being considered.
But this is
a future crisis and I would like to talk about a past crisis, where there was
no shortage, but excess carbon in the wrong place.
I am one of
the survivors of the Carbon Crisis, the time when we almost self-destroyed
because of our carelessness and greed. Mankind has learned from his mistakes,
but I have no assurance that such errors or other worst will not be repeated in
the future. I then decided to tell this story to future generations. For a long
time we no longer use paper for obvious reasons. Today we depend entirely on
digital media for our records and our communication. But if one day our
technology fails for some reason, we will lose access to all our records, our
entire history. Without them, humanity can take a huge time to rebuild, and
this may be our ultimate downfall. Thinking about it I'm making this my record being
printed on pages made of a special polymer, which according to the experts
prognosis can survive for several million years. I will make sure that copies
of this record shall be present in each tower already built and in each of
which will be built from now. I'm making to be included microfilmed records
made of the same material, with a record as complete as possible of all the
relevant information of our culture and society as well as instructions for
building an easy to manufacture and handling microfilm reader for the case in
which all players have been destroyed. That is to ensure that someday, in case
that the civilization should be destroyed, the mankind can rise again, doing
things the right way. I hope this multiple redundancy guarantee that this record
reaches the hand of those who need it.
Ah! I was
about to talk about the Carbon Crisis. Let me explain a little about what
preceded this crisis. Since the 1970s, it began to emerge early indications
that the climate was being changed by human action. For many years, this
anthropomorphic climate change was attributed to human carbon emissions, a
result of burning fossil fuels and deforestation by fires. It was created a
group of researchers, then called IPCC, which was responsible for collecting
all data from climate research to corroborate with the thesis of the "anthropomorphic
global warming", and to produce from these data a periodic reports that should
serve as a guide to governments and other institutions in a decision making
position. At the beginning, everything seemed to indicate that human emissions
of carbon dioxide were actually altering the Earth's climate. The problem began
when global average temperatures stopped rising in accordance with the
theoretical model. However, it took some years before the public began to take
notice of this trend. Coincidentally or not, in this time an incident occurred
which damaged the IPCC image and provided ammunition for critics of global
warming, the so-called skeptics. It was discovered that one of the researchers
selected the data so that it fit the theory, discarding the rest. It is common
practice among researchers to discard data that detract too much from the
expected average (due to measurement errors), but in this case, the discharge
was clearly a forced curve fitting. This provided wood for the fire from
critics, who began to suspect other jobs. Faults were detected in the data collection
and selection, faulty methodology, and political and economic interests in both
factions. But the sensationalist and unskilled technical press failed to
clearly identify what was really happening. A part of the press continued to
systematically disseminate the global warming thesis with no change, as if
nothing had happened. Another part (the most notorious) gave focus to critics, giving
to public the idea that there was not a global warming at all.
In the midst of this war of facts,
lies and accusations, a few groups of serious climatologists began to filter
the signal from the noise. It seemed clear that there was some sort of climate
disruption, something that could not simply be explained by natural variations.
The problem was to define if the trend was heating, cooling or strong oscillations
between these two extremes. It was easy to see from the data (those correctly
collected) that there was a strong correlation between human activity and
climate extremes, but not only in the direction of warming. It was also easy to
see that these disturbances appeared more intensely in more densely populated
and industrialized areas. It was very difficult to filter this disturbance
among the various natural phenomena such as El Niño and solar cycle, but as
more data were collected more the correlation began to be clear, not toward a
warm, but definitely a natural cycle disturbance. This disruption could no
longer be exclusively attributed to human carbon emissions, but the set of all
activities that somehow caused their impact. Soon it was proved that
deforestation was more severe than burning fossil fuels, even when this deforestation
was aimed at planting sugar cane or other biomass to replace oil consumption.
Other things like the urban occupation, water and water sources use, water, air
and soil pollution, electronic junk, waste of energy, raw materials and food,
overfishing, species extinction, and much more, were changing so significant
the planetary ecosystem. It soon became clear that simply cutting carbon
emissions was far from enough to solve the problem. It was necessary to change
the system, to do things in a different way. This resulted in profound changes
in eating habits, housing and transportation, in addition to profound economic
and political changes.
Unfortunately, when the scientific
community finally came to this conclusion, many trillions of dollars have
already been irretrievably spent on "active carbon mitigation", i.e.
the construction of huge and expensive machines designed to actively remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This had its good side, because it allowed
the surplus of material needed to lower the construction of the towers. But we just
barely escaped from plunging into an early Ice Age. This happened because
humanity decided to act before understanding what was really happening.
Gilvan
Apolonio
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