Terraforming Earth

One of the favorite topics of classic science fiction was terraforming. Mars, it was thought, might some day have an atmosphere and climate enough like earth's to allow humans to wander around happily without spacesuits. More grandiose space-operas envisioned this process being taken to planets scattered across our galaxy.

Meanwhile, more or less by accident, we have been reverse-terraforming earth. Generalizing the term to mean any major global changes in a planet, we have been terraforming earth.

And we don't need spacesuits. Not yet. Global temperatures have risen, but mostly that just means more t-shirt weather and the annoying expansion of insect populations.

We were once well down the path to destroying the ozone layer, but scientists convinced politicians to put a halt to that process. Unfortunately part of the terraforming process seems to be the gradual but obvious decrease in intelligence and ethical capacities of politicians. Two decades ago a politician who denied Darwin and other basic science was quaint. Now denying Darwin is a requirement to head science appropriation committees.

The great thing about terraforming is that it is a lot like home decorating: you can go a lot of ways with it. Back before ozone destruction and global warming were well-recognized designer motifs there was nuclear winter. Scientists calculated that if enough atomic bombs went off more or less at once we would not have to worry too much about death by background radiation (presuming we were among those not vaporized by the initial blasts). Instead so much dust and water vapor would be sent up into the stratosphere that the sun's radiation would be reflected back into space. The whole planet would freeze. A few people might survive for a while huddled around nuclear reactors or petroleum depots, but with no sunlight there would also be no agriculture, no food, and eventually not even a satirist left to comment on the stupidity of it all.

By way of terraforming, many plans have been suggested for keeping global warming from becoming too much of a reality. After all, if it ever hits 135 degrees in New York City and the air conditioners on Wall Street break down, the politicians are really going to get an earful. To prevent this we could put up artificial shade, like big umbrellas in orbit, or just purposefully put just the right amount of dust up into the stratosphere. Some global climate change denialists even believe that temperatures will be self correcting because more heat causes more water to vaporize, which forms more cloud cover, which in turn reflects sunlight. Mugginess is the worst case scenario if they are right.

In addition to designing a new room temperature, there are a lot of knickknacks beginning to clutter up old Terra. Canals that cut across continents and shipping both allow species mixing between formerly separate bodies of water. All kinds of cute insects and plants and such are finding new homes that are free of their traditional enemies. This can result in whole forests dying, which is the opposite of trying to get trees to grow on Mars, but which is impressive for a species that likes to think it does great things on purpose.

Asphalt too has a nice way of absorbing sunlight and baking up organic life forms in summer. Factory farming can turn whole states into monocultures just waiting for the right disease or weed to arrive to flip productive farmland into desert.

The earth's ecosystem is large and resiliant. It has survived about a million years of human pranks. Despite the carnage in species, there are still millions of species fighting it out over living space.

For most of those millennia, however, there just were not that many people around. No one was actually counting back then, but likely the human population of earth remained under a billion until around 1900. Now its seven billion or so, and everyone wants a cell phone, centralized heating and air-conditioning, and medical services guaranteed to keep them alive forever.

Maybe we really should think about terraforming Mars. I'd be willing to pay a few extra tax dollars to ship Paul Ryan there to be its first President, along with maybe 80 million Tea Party Republicans to help him get started.

Jefferson's Nails, Morsi's Mishap, and Democracy Dilemmas

Thomas Jefferson famously penned the Declaration of Independence and went on to become Governor of Virginia, U.S. Ambassador to France, and eventually the third President of the United States. The Declaration had some very fine words borrowed from republican, Enlightenment thinking and writings of Britain. The guys who supervised Jefferson and approved it were politicians interested in increasing their own economic and political power, which was being cramped by the elite of the British Empire.

Thomas Jefferson may have been brilliant compared to his peers, but he had many faults and weaknesses. A lot of trouble came from his spendthrift ways. He was born to a fairly prosperous slave plantation owner and can be fairly said to be the founder of the shop-till-you-drop American tradition. He constantly bought expensive horses and wines, scientific gadgets and uber expensive clothing. Later there would be the never-ending construction and reconstruction of MacMansion Monticello.

To pay for all this Jefferson owned roughly 200 slaves (they multiplied over time, but he occasionally sold some off to make ends meet). The British tried to free all American slaves during the Revolution, not just as a war measure but because that was the law of Britain (no slavery can exist on British soil, as had been recently confirmed in the Somerset case). The success of the Revolution confirmed Jefferson and other slaveholders in their human property. While Vice-president (under John Adams), Jefferson attempted to wring more profit from his slaves by setting up a nail factory. Adult slaves were needed to grow tobacco, so the children were employed cutting iron rod and shaping it into nails.

We tend to idealize Democracy, but sometimes a more cynical view gets us closer to the truth. Democracy could just be the best way for certain people to get what they want. Democracies may not be quite so different from dictatorships (or monarchies) as we Americans like to think.

Consider the very recent military/judicial coup against the elected leader of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi. President Morsi does not represent my views. I would like to see a secular, modern Egypt, relatively free of religious nonsense. Morsi is a leader of the Islamic Brotherhood, a puritanical reform group. It is fair to say that Morsi only did what many American Presidents have done: he interpreted winning an election as meaning he could implement his party's agenda and ignore other parties. He was wrong. He should have imitated George Washington. He should have been more moderate and inclusive. His job (from a Democracy theory viewpoint) was to make democracy work, to insure it would work in the future.

But Morsi had a lot of pressure from below, from his own followers. They had never held power, and their views had been dissed by others for decades. He chose to satisfy his base.

The real problem was not with Morsi, but with my fellow secular democrats. They lacked patience. They should have let Morsi rule until the next election, and griped the whole time. They would likely have won the next election. Then they could have tried to fix an overpopulated, undercapitalized nation themselves.

People often want democracy until it does not get them what they want. American foreign policy history is littered with examples. American Presidents have almost always favored only pro-American democracies. Anti-American democracies got the cold shoulder, or financing for opposition (but pro-American) parties, or a CIA-managed coup.

Now it is likely that if the Islamic Brotherhood makes a comeback, they will abandon democracy. Why shouldn't they? At this point bloody revolution looks like a better option, if they can pull it off. Even if they re-establish a democracy in the sense of allowing for elections, at the very least they would be idiots if they did not try to execute the coup leaders.

Back in Jefferson's United States, democracy is under control. All men and women may be created with equal rights, but they start life with such vastly different amounts of wealth that we might as well be governed by an aristocracy. Social mobility has sunk to the lowest level since the founding of this Republic. There are plenty of bright ideas around for improving the situation, but the Aristocracy makes sure such ideas never get off the ground.

Imperialism made most Americans comfortable for several decades after World War II. The Great Recession and our astonishing current national debt (which will balloon further as interest rates rise) should have inspired reforms, but almost the only thing that got patched up was the banking system. We aren't broke yet. We'll think about fixing things if we ever reach that point.

At which point worrying about who would make America's best puppet in Egypt won't seem very important.

Agree? Disagree? You can comment on this post at Natural Liberation Blog at blogger.com

The Accounting System #12: Electronic Money Takes Over

previous: Unraveling in 1930 and the New Deal

But in the 1930's ubiquitous accounting was being held back by the sheer amount of human effort needed to produce accurate accountings. In addition to adding machines (bulky, mechanical predecessors to today’s electronic calculators), there was some mechanized counting and data manipulation using punch-card machines. After World War II the accounting machines used by humans to do data entry and calculation started a cycle of major upgrades. The machines now known as computers were invented during the war. The new computers could do more than arithmetic: they could be programmed to manipulate numbers and information in almost limitless ways. Starting around 1950 they became available to the largest corporations for accounting and data processing.


With the computer revolution the accounting system itself began to be virtualized. Records and programs were first kept on punch cards or punched paper tapes, then as years passed on magnetic tape, on magnetic disks, and then on hard disk drives. The rules of accounting could be written in computer programming code. Humans still made the rules, and understood the rules, but the code itself had no material substance to it at all. Accounting programming code could be printed out, or viewed on a machine, but its essence was just an arrangement of electric charges or anything else that could represent numbers and symbols.

Money — abstract, virtual, accounting money — began to be transferred between banks using electronic means, tracked by the computerized accounting systems. Various methods were used, but the important thing was that such transfers were accounted for. Otherwise someone could create (or destroy) money in an account by making a phony transfer. More directly, if the accounting system did not catch such errors or cheats, money could be created or destroyed just by changing the balance numbers in accounts.

By 2010, an American could still write paper checks, but once they entered the banking system they would be virtualized. Cancelled paper checks were no longer returned to their writers. In 2002 Germany started phasing out paper checks altogether, and other nations followed suit. An increasing percentage of transactions are done using credit cards or electronic direct transfers to and from bank accounts.

Money is now electronic, and The Accounting System, with its myriad tentacles, must be totally trustworthy or the entire global economy would be at risk. While identity thieves and computer hackers continue to find chinks in the armor of the System, so far it has been reasonably reliable. Errors in accounts are eventually detected and dealt with. People generally trust that the electronic dollars they put in their accounts will be available to withdraw and use later. Creditors, including the banks themselves, trust that they can keep track of loans and, if necessary, courts will trust their electronic records proving indebtedness.  [Contracts may be on paper, and signed by human hands, especially for larger deals like mortgages, but even contracts and signatures are moving to electronic formats.]

Next: to be continued

[The Accounting System, Your Fate is in the Cloud, is a work in progress by William P. Meyers, ©2013]