GeoHacking -What are the Dangers of Reconfiguring the Planet's Ecology

Presidential Science Adviser John Holdren recently outlined options for geohacking, forcibly reconfiguring parts of the planet's ecology. Since this is a country where you can't set up a wind farm without someone opposing it, this set off a storm of protest. But the most vocal cry was "We shouldn't study it because we don't know how it would work", indicating that the those opponents don't understand what some of their own words mean.

It's important to note that Holdren was advising the study of scientific options, kind of like you'd expect a science adviser to do. The plan (that of pumping the atmosphere full aerosols) certainly has a couple of potentially-planet-pulverizing problems, but that's exactly his point - it needs study. He's a scientist, you see, where admitting you don't know something is a vital step towards finding a solution. Unfortunately he's talking to politicians and the media.

One the one hand you've got the ultra-Luddite response, that of any scientific change of anything being bad. The sort of people who'd be running everywhere and tutting loudly when one of those fancy "wheelamajigged" things came along if they'd been born earlier. Given their opposition not just to doing something, but even learning about how it might work, we can only assume they learned speech by accident or before they came up with their "Don't learn what I don't already know" viewpoint.

On the other hand, uncontrolled geohacking could be the closest thing to real life Bond villainy we'll ever really see. Even if the government has no interest in altering Earth's environment, they need to understand exactly what they don't like about it - and where the dangers are - to prevent others from doing the same. Corporations won't think twice about altering the environment if it benefits them in even the shortest term, and technology will soon bring ecotinkering from the national to the corporate budget level.

Geohacking needs to be studied as a scientific problem: we don't know how it works, and we want to, so let' learn. That's how science works. We've been altering Earth since we first worked out that things burned - ecogineering isn't some blasphemous defilement of Gaia's green glory, it's humanity saying "Let's see if we can actually fix things on purpose instead of breaking them all the time."