Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (41 page)

“Envision Pakistan, India, and China—all armed with nuclear weapons—skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land,” the report said. Peter Schwartz, founder of the Global Business Network and a principal author of the Pentagon study, confided to me the details of this scenario. He told me that the biggest hot spot would be the border between India and Bangladesh. In a major crisis in Bangladesh, up to 160 million people could be driven out of their homes, sparking one of the greatest migrations in human history. Tensions could rapidly rise as borders collapse, local governments are paralyzed, and mass rioting breaks out. Schwartz sees that nations may use nuclear weapons as a last resort.

In a worst-case scenario, we could have a greenhouse effect that feeds on itself. For example, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic regions may release millions of tons of methane gas from rotting vegetation. Tundra covers nearly 9 million square miles of land in the Northern Hemisphere, containing vegetation frozen since the last Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. This tundra contains more carbon dioxide and methane than the atmosphere, and this poses an enormous threat to the world’s weather. Methane gas, moreover, is a much deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long, but it causes much more damage than carbon dioxide. The release of so much methane gas from the melting tundra could cause temperatures to rapidly rise, which will cause even more methane gas to be released, causing a runaway cycle of global warming.

The situation is dire, but we have not yet reached the point of no return. The problem of controlling greenhouse gases is actually largely economic and political, not technical. Carbon dioxide production coincides with economic activity, and hence wealth. For example, the United States generates roughly 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. This is because the United States has roughly 25 percent of the world’s economic activity. And in 2009, China overtook the United States in creating greenhouse gases, mainly because of the explosive growth of its economy. This is the fundamental reason that nations are so reluctant to deal with global warming: it interferes with economic activity and prosperity.

Various schemes have been devised to deal with this global crisis, but ultimately, a quick fix may not be enough. Only a major shift in the way we consume energy will solve the problem. Some technical measures have been advocated by serious scientists, but none has won wide acceptance. The proposals include:

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Launching pollutants into the atmosphere.
One proposal is to send rockets into the upper atmosphere, where they would release pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, in order to reflect sunlight into space, thereby cooling the earth. In fact, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has advocated shooting pollution into space as a “doomsday device,” providing one final escape route for humanity to stop global warming. This idea has its roots in 1991, when scientists carefully monitored the huge volcanic explosion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which lofted 10 billion metric tons of dirt and debris into the upper atmosphere. This darkened the skies and caused the average temperature around the earth to drop by 1° F. This made it possible to calculate how much pollutants would be necessary to reduce the world temperature. Although this is a serious proposal, some critics doubt that it can solve the problem by itself. Little is known about how a huge quantity of pollutants will affect the world temperature. Maybe the benefits will be short-lived, or the unintended side effects may be worse than the original problem. For example, there was a sudden drop in global precipitation after the Mount Pinatubo eruption; if the experiment goes awry, it could similarly cause massive droughts. Cost estimates show that $100 million would be required to conduct field tests. Since the effect of the sulfate aerosols is temporary, it would cost a minimum of $8 billion per year to regularly inject massive amounts of them into the atmosphere.

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Creating algae blooms.
Another suggestion is to dump iron-based chemicals into the oceans. These mineral nutrients will cause algae to thrive in the ocean, which in turn will increase the amount of carbon dioxide that is absorbed by the algae. However, after Planktos, a corporation based in California, announced that it would unilaterally begin a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron—hoping to deliberately spawn plankton blooms that would absorb the carbon dioxide in the air—countries bound by the London Convention, which regulates dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about this effort. Also, a United Nations group called for a temporary moratorium on such experiments. The experiment was ended when Planktos ran out of funds.

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Carbon sequestration.
Yet another possibility is to use carbon sequestration, a process by which the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-burning power plants is liquefied and then separated from the environment, perhaps by being buried underground. Although this might work in principle, it is a very expensive process, and it cannot remove the carbon dioxide that has already been lofted into the atmosphere. In 2009, engineers were carefully monitoring the first major test of carbon sequestration. The huge Mountaineer power plant, built in 1980 in West Virginia, was retrofitted to separate carbon dioxide from the environment, making it the United States’ first electricity-generating coal-burning plant to experiment with sequestration. The liquefied gas will be injected 7,800 feet underground, eventually into a layer of dolomite. The liquid will eventually form a mass thirty to forty feet high and hundreds of yards long. The plant’s owner, American Electric Power, plans to inject 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually for two to five years. This is only 1.5 percent of the plant’s yearly emission, but eventually the system could capture up to 90 percent. The initial costs are about $73 million. But if it’s successful, then this model could rapidly be disseminated to other sites such as four nearby giant coal-burning plants generating 6 billion watts of energy (so much that this area is dubbed Megawatt Valley). There are large unknowns: it is not clear if the carbon dioxide will eventually migrate or if the gas will combine with water, perhaps creating carbonic acid that may poison groundwater. However, if the project is a success, it may very well be part of a mix of technologies used to deal with global warming.

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Genetic engineering.
Another proposal is to use genetic engineering to specifically create life-forms that can absorb large quantities of carbon dioxide. One enthusiastic promoter of this approach is J. Craig Venter, who gained fame and fortune pioneering high-speed techniques that successfully led to sequencing the human genome years ahead of schedule. “We view the genome as the software, or even the operating system, of the cell,” he says. His goal is to rewrite that software, so that microbes can be genetically modified, or even constructed almost from scratch, so that they absorb the carbon dioxide from coal-burning plants and convert it into useful substances, such as natural gas. He notes, “There are already thousands, perhaps millions, of organisms on our planet that know how to do this.” The trick is to modify them so that they can increase their output and also flourish in a coal-fired plant. “We think this field has tremendous potential to replace the petrochemical industry, possibly within a decade,” he said optimistically.

Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has advocated another variation, creating a genetically engineered variety of trees that would be adept at absorbing carbon dioxide. He has stated that perhaps a trillion such trees might be enough to control the carbon dioxide in the air. In his paper “Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?” he advocated creating a “carbon bank” of “fast-growing trees” to regulate carbon dioxide levels.

However, as with any plan to use genetic engineering on a large scale, one must be careful about side effects. One cannot recall a life-form in the same way that we can recall a defective car. Once it is released into the environment, the genetically engineered life-form may have unintended consequences for other life-forms, especially if it displaces local species of plants and upsets the balance of the food chain.

Sadly, there has been a conspicuous lack of interest among politicians to fund any of these plans. However, one day, global warming will become so painful and disruptive that politicians will be forced to implement some of them.

The critical period will be the next few decades. By midcentury, we should be in the hydrogen age, where a combination of fusion, solar power, and renewables should give us an economy that is much less dependent on fossil fuel consumption. A combination of market forces and advances in hydrogen technology should give us a long-term solution to global warming. The danger period is now, before a hydrogen economy is in place. In the short term, fossil fuels are still the cheapest way to generate power, and hence global warming will pose a danger for decades to come.

By midcentury, a new option arises that is a game changer: fusion. By that time, it should be the most viable of all technical fixes, perhaps giving us a permanent solution to the problem. While fission power relies on splitting the uranium atom, thereby creating energy (and a large amount of nuclear waste), fusion power relies on fusing hydrogen atoms with great heat, thereby releasing vastly more energy (with very little waste).

Unlike fission power, fusion power unleashes the nuclear energy of the sun. Buried deep inside the hydrogen atom is the energy source of the universe. Fusion power lights up the sun and the heavens. It is the secret of the stars. Anyone who can successfully master fusion power will have unleashed unlimited eternal energy. And the fuel for these fusion plants comes from ordinary seawater. Pound for pound, fusion releases 10 million times more energy than gasoline. An 8-ounce glass of water is equal to the energy content of 500,000 barrels of petroleum.

Fusion (not fission) is nature’s preferred way to energize the universe. In star formation, a hydrogen-rich ball of gas is gradually compressed by gravity, until it starts to heat up to enormous temperatures. When the gas reaches around 50 million degrees or so (which varies depending on the specific conditions), the hydrogen nuclei inside the gas are slammed into one another, until they fuse to form helium. In the process, vast amounts of energy are released, which causes the gas to ignite. (More precisely, the compression must satisfy something called Lawson’s criterion, which states that you have to compress hydrogen gas of a certain density to a certain temperature for a certain amount of time. If these three conditions involving density, temperature, and time are met, you have a fusion reaction, whether it is a hydrogen bomb, a star, or a fusion in a reactor.)

So that is the key: heating and compressing hydrogen gas until the nuclei fuse, releasing cosmic amounts of energy.

But previous attempts to harness this cosmic power have failed. It is a fiendishly difficult task to heat hydrogen gas to tens of millions of degrees, until the protons fuse to form helium gas and release vast amounts of energy.

Moreover, the public is cynical about these claims, since every twenty years scientists claim that fusion power is twenty years away. But after decades of overoptimistic claims, physicists are increasingly convinced that fusion power is finally arriving, perhaps as early as 2030. Sometime by midcentury, we may see fusion plants dotting the countryside.

The public has a right to be skeptical about fusion, since there have been so many hoaxes, frauds, and failures in the past. Back in 1951, when the United States and the Soviet Union were gripped in Cold War frenzy and were feverishly developing the first hydrogen bomb, President Juan Perón of Argentina announced, with huge fanfare and a media blitz, that his country’s scientists had made a breakthrough in controlling the power of the sun. The story sparked a firestorm of publicity. It seemed unbelievable, yet it made the front page of the
New York Times.
Argentina, boasted Perón, had scored a major scientific breakthrough where the superpowers had failed. An unknown German-speaking scientist, Ronald Richter, had convinced Perón to fund his “thermotron,” which promised unlimited energy and eternal glory for Argentina.

The American scientific community, which was still grappling with fusion in the fierce race with Russia to produce the H-bomb, declared that the claim was nonsense. Atomic scientist Ralph Lapp said, “I know what the other material is that the Argentines are using. It’s baloney.”

The press quickly dubbed it the Baloney Bomb. Atomic scientist David Lilienthal was asked if there was the “slightest chance” the Argentines could be correct. He shot back, “Less than that.”

Under intense pressure, Perón simply dug in his heels, hinting that the superpowers were jealous that Argentina had scooped them. The moment of truth finally came the next year, when Perón’s representatives visited Richter’s lab. Under fire, Richter was acting increasingly erratic and bizarre. When inspectors arrived, he blew the laboratory door off using tanks of oxygen and then scribbled on a piece of paper the words “atomic energy.” He ordered gunpowder to be injected into the reactor. The verdict was that he was probably insane. When inspectors placed a piece of radium next to Richter’s “radiation counters,” nothing happened, so clearly his equipment was fraudulent. Richter was later arrested.

But the most celebrated case was that of Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two well-respected chemists from the University of Utah who in 1989 claimed to have mastered “cold fusion,” that is, fusion at room temperature. They claimed to have placed palladium metal in water, which then somehow magically compressed hydrogen atoms until they fused into helium, releasing the power of the sun on a tabletop.