Science will save us ... right?

Science will save us ... right?

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By Annabel McAleer

Houston, we have a problem. Seems like we might’ve stuffed up our atmosphere. Even worse, two of our favourite things—meat and air travel—are wearing some of the blame.

Don’t panic. Great minds are onto it. Taking cues from nature, Star Trek, Easy-Yo and The Simpsons, scientists the world over are pushing the limits of possibility

Low albedo? Go albino

The vast white expanses of the Arctic and Antarctic do more than camouflage polar bears: they reflect sunlight back into space and help keep the planet cool. Problem is, polar ice is melting. Less ice means less sunlight gets bounced, so the sea absorbs more heat, the ice caps melt some more … and repeat. It’s called a positive feedback loop, and it makes us feel rather negative.

But what if we added shiny white surfaces to other bits of the planet—say, the roofs of all the buildings?

While the Earth as a whole has an albedo (science-speak for reflectivity) of 0.29, towns average an albedo of just 0.1. That means our planet reflects 29% of the sunlight that hits it; towns, only 10%.

Give urban environments an albedo boost, however, and the University of California’s Berkeley Lab found this ‘urban heat island’ effect can be limited, or even reversed, simply by brightening up roofs and roading. Energy Star in the US has put its weight behind so-called ‘cool roofs’, and ten to 15 percent of new and replacement roofing in the US is now made of reflective material.

And globally? About 3% of the planet’s land surface is covered with buildings, reckons the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Paint the roofs of all these buildings snow white, and we could pump up the planet’s albedo from 0.29 to 0.30. According to New Scientist’s calculations, the difference would be enough to create a drop in global temperature of up to 1°C.

Will it save us? 1°C is a lot in climate terms—but we’d only be delaying warming, not stopping it. Covering more roofs with photovoltaic panels would be a longer-term solution.

Could it kill us? Only if you fall off the roof. Your neighbours might suffer a little snow blindness though.

Ready: Next weekend, if it’s fine.

Cost: Coloursteel Endura ‘Cloud’ or ‘Titania’ $24.90/metre; Resene Uracryl 403, $162 for four litres.

Chances: 57%

Will it save us? It’ll save a heck of a lot of animals from lives on industrial farms—and eliminate the vast amount of greenhouse gas and waste they produce.

Could it kill us? In Xbox game Dead Rising, a US scientist’s attempt to mass-produce cattle using zombie wasps turns bad when one escapes and zombifies an entire town. To the best of our knowledge, current scientific practice doesn’t typically involve zombie wasps, so we should be all right.

Ready: 2012

Cost: $10,000/kg now; cheaper than regular meat eventually.

Chances: 96%

Meatri dish

Think of it as hydroponic meat. “The best thing since sliced bread,” reckons the vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has offered US$1 million to whoever makes a commercially viable product by 2012. It’s meat minus the animal, grown in a lab, and any vegetarian who doesn’t relish the thought is lying.

The process begins with a small amount of starter meat, taken painlessly from your choice of animal. The simplest meat to grow is seafood, since fishy myoblasts (stem cells for muscles) divide most easily. We won’t be limited to the usual meat sources in future, though: lions, tigers, bears, oh my! Animal rights activists could even eat themselves.

Pop the starter cells into a bioreactor with nutrient-rich fluid and some ‘scaffolding’ for the cells to cling to, and they immediately begin to multiply and grow into muscle cells. To create muscle fibre, the cells are ‘exercised’ with electrical currents or by stretching the scaffolding.

Sound like the most processed food imaginable? No more so than cheese or wine, says the New Harvest in-vitro meat research organisation, which argues the common US practice of injecting hormones and feeding antibiotics to farm animals is pretty darn unnatural itself. And it’s definitely greener than the conventional meat industry, which generates 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire transport sector worldwide.

Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, believes that eventually we’ll all have meat-makers in our kitchens, growing fresh sausage overnight, alongside our cheese loaf and Greek yoghurt.

It’s happening fast. Although no-one’s had the guts to eat any yet, it’s already possible to produce something like mince with current technology. Steak is a lot further away, because of the long threads of capillaries that run through complex muscle tissue.

Chicken nuggets, on the other hand, will be a cinch.

Fake plastic trees

Lungs of the planet, trees. We love them so much we give them a cuddle every now and again. Sometimes, though, we do wish they were just a little bit, well, better. Real trees fall over, burn down and—noooo!—even emit small amounts of greenhouse gas bad-boy methane.

The monstrosities pictured are 90-metre-tall synthetic trees—almost twice the height of giant kauri Tane Mahuta—and each sucks up 90,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year. They’re also not real; these über-trees are so far, so theoretical for Columbia University geophysicist Klaus Lackner.

Some big technical fixes are needed: a non-toxic, cheap CO₂ absorbent, a low-energy way to extract the absorbed gas—and a permanent place to put it. Lackner is working with Global Research Technologies to tackle these problems and commercialise a real-world device, initially aiming to capture just one tonne of CO₂ a day (still, a decent 3kg per second; about the same as a real tree absorbs in a year).

It will take millions of synthetic trees to absorb the 29 billion tonnes of CO₂ produced annually from fossil fuels, but it’s hoped that eventually they’ll even be able to remove historic atmospheric carbon that’s been building up since the Industrial Revolution.

And there’s the twist. The expectation that CO₂ emissions will be removed in the future, immediately reduces the incentive to decrease them now. Use of fossil fuels might even increase: the US Department of Energy says CO₂ capturing technology could help recover 89 billion barrels of trapped American oil, by injecting the sequestered CO₂ into deep reserves and forcing trapped petroleum to the surface.

Don’t you wish trees could hug back?

Smoke and mirrors

Massive planetary geo-engineering was once the stuff of science fiction and the occasional Simpsons episode. Not anymore; real research is underway.

One of the most tenacious ideas (indeed, Simpsons episode 2F16) is the mirrored space parasol: a reflective shield the size of Greenland, launched into space from the moon to deflect some of the sun’s light and cool our atmosphere a few degrees.

The proposal started sounding a bit mad after Mr Burns tried it, so current scientific thinking now favours a constellation of trillions of small, light and extremely thin spacecraft, launched into position from Earth.

Roger Angel, astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, has crunched the numbers. The spacecraft would settle into the L-1 orbit, 1.5 million kilometres above Earth. Each would be 60cm wide, 0.005mm thick and weigh a single gram. Tiny mirrored sails would tilt to hold each flyer’s position in orbit.

We’d need 18 million tonnes of the wee things to create a planetary parasol ginormous enough—we’re talking 100,000km wide—to deflect the desired 1.8% of sunlight. Twenty electromagnetic launchers could get the job done by launching stacks of 800,000 flyers every five minutes, non-stop … for ten years.

In some ways, it’s a good idea: scalable, incremental and reversible. But it’s also impractical, expensive, and frighteningly unpredictable. No computer models can predict the consequences of geo-engineering, but we’d commit every future generation to continuous maintenance of the planet’s climate, forever.

As for global consensus, anyone who has disagreed with colleagues about the office air-con can foresee problems: what if India’s having a hot flush, but Russia wants to dial up a degree?

Even Dr Angel isn’t so sure: “The same massive level of technology innovation and financial investment needed for the sunshade could, if also applied to renewable energy, yield better and permanent solutions.”

A wing and a prayer

The Swiss Family Piccard has adventure in its genes. Auguste Piccard, a mate of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, was the first person to see the curvature of the Earth when he made the first ascent into the stratosphere in a hot air balloon in 1931. Later, his son Jacques invented the submarine and set the record (still standing) for lowest ocean descent in 1960.

Then there’s Jacques’ son, Bertrand. Up and down records ticked off by pops and gramps, Bertrand’s legacy is to go around. In 1999 he made the first non-stop flight around the world in a hot air balloon. Next up: circumnavigating the globe in a solar-powered plane.

Piccard’s Solar Impulse project wants nothing less than to reinvent flight, with planes that use no fuel and create no pollution. It’s an impossible task—but only according to today’s technology.

With the support of some illustrious allies (the European Commission, International Air Transport Association, Solvay, Omega, Deutsche Bank, Toyota) Solar Impulse is building its first prototype: wingspan 61 metres; weight 1.5 tonnes. Test flights are scheduled for early 2009. In 2011, Piccard and Solar Impulse CEO André Borschberg plan to fly a second plane (80m; 2 tonnes) around the world.

It’s enormous wingspan (the same as the Airbus A340: 80m; 275 tonnes) will provide the surface area for enough photovoltaic cells to power the plane at a leisurely 45km/h. It’s not exactly warp speed, but making an aircraft fly at all on the power of a few lightbulbs requires massive technological innovation in aerodynamics, manufacturing methods, energy efficiency, propulsion and composite materials.

In the face of enormous challenges, Solar Impulse is pushing the boundaries of technology. Solar panels will be made lighter, more flexible. Batteries will become lighter and more efficient, capable of storing enough solar energy during the day to power flight all night. The immodest goal of reinventing flight may well reinvent renewable energy.

The project’s true goal, however, is purely symbolic: to change our perception of the impossible.

Make it so, Piccard.

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