“Why show me this? You aren’t claiming that the eruptions in Siberia are about to kick off again?”
“No. But a similar causative sequence may be unfolding. The root cause of the Permian extinction was the Siberian-trap eruptions. Their emissions of carbon dioxide and methane began a global-warming pulse, but the tipping point came when the temperatures rose so high that polar gas hydrate deposits began to be released. After that a positive feedback effect did the rest.”
“There are no basalt eruptions going on today,” I said. “But instead of the Siberian traps—”
“Mankind,” the robot said. “Your activities, by injecting heat and greenhouse gases into the air over centuries, have had precisely the same effect as the Permian-era eruptions. And similar consequences.” She said this simply.
Standing there on that baked, dead plain, I tried to think it through.
I had grown up with the Warming, laden with guilt over extinctions and environmental degradations that had happened long before I was born. Like most people, I guess I got bored with it, and got on with my life. “It’s like living with original sin,” uncle George once said to me. “We’re all Catholics now, Michael.”
Then along came President Amin. We all went through the great wrench of giving up our automobiles, and we were smugly proud of the Stewardship. The Warming stopped seeming so bad, the Bottleneck not quite such a hazardous highway. Oh, it was a drag for anybody caught in a flood or a hurricane, and I knew we were still at risk. But we were muddling through. So I’d thought. Even the parts-per-million projections of the final greenhousing load of carbon dioxide in the air were starting to fall.
Now here was Gea telling me that I had been fooling myself—that Tom was right. I couldn’t believe it, on some deep intuitive level.
Gea said, “Perhaps you aren’t thinking about the Warming, the Die-back, the right way. Perhaps, deep down, you imagine that the Earth’s processes are linear. That the response from the biosphere will be proportionate to the pushing you give it. But that isn’t necessarily so.
“The Earth’s systems are only quasi-stable. For example the Amazon forests, drought-stricken, are dying back rapidly. The injection of their locked-up carbon into the atmosphere raised temperatures, which will in turn accelerate the dying of the forest. This is biogeophysical feedback. And so it goes, on a global scale, geospheric and biospheric systems flipping suddenly to other states.
“Not only that, the various factors, themselves nonlinear, interact with each other in a nonlinear way: habitat destruction, overpopulation, overharvesting, pollution, ozone destruction, all working together—”
“
Lethe.
You’re talking about Lethe. The anti-Gaia.”
“There comes a point where if you keep pushing you don’t get more of the same but something new entirely, events of a different quality.”
“You know, I think I imagined that you would be like an electronic Gaia. Here we are talking about death.”
“I contain both Gaia and Lethe, in my imagination,” she said.
“OK.” I had to ask the final question. “And if temperatures were again to reach the point where the hydrate deposits are released—”
“The normal interactions between life and the physical world will break down completely. Gaia will nearly die.”
“The end of the world?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t put it as severely as that! It won’t even be the end of mankind. You are far more widespread than the lystrosaurs ever were; humans are smart and adaptable and able to recover. You are hard to kill off completely—though it is easy to kill vast numbers of you.”
“But our culture will be destroyed.
Most
of us will die. Billions.”
She rolled back and forth, emitting showers of sparks, her little wheels scraping across a lid of post-Permian bare rock. “You know, it’s a lot easier to move around now that everything is dead,” she said. “No foliage to clog up my wheels, no insects to get in the way or hopping amphibians to knock me over. Perhaps we should give over the world to robots—”
“Shut up,” I said.
She stopped still.
“How long do we have?”
“That’s hard to say. A decade? Probably less.”
“This can’t be allowed to happen.”
“I tend to agree.” A thick bound report popped into existence on the rock surface before her. “I am delivering a definitive study today to all my sponsoring agencies, and all governments and intergovernmental agencies. Not that I expect this to make a difference by itself; people have a tendency to dismiss bad news.”
“Is that why you brought me here?”
“You asked to see me, remember,” she said. “You came to me asking questions about the polar hydrates.”
“OK. But what now? Do you want me to argue the case for you?”
“More than that.”
The tinny voice lacked tone, color. But I knew what she wanted of me.
“You expect me to
do
something about it, don’t you? . . .” Was that what this was all about? Did Gea, this superhuman artificial intelligence, expect me to come up with a way to save the world? “Gea, if you’re so concerned why don’t you do something about it?”
The robot rolled back and forth. “I am a biosphere modeler. I have my specified goals. But it is difficult to limit sentience. I am curious. I am concerned not just with my models but their implications. But I cannot initiate any action in the wider world; I have neither the means nor the authority.”
“You need a human to do it.”
“I needed a human to come asking the right questions, yes.”
I said harshly, “What do you care about the destiny of life? You have never been alive yourself.”
“Michael Poole, I am fearful.”
“Fearful? You?”
“I am facing extinction, too, I and the other sentiences you have brought into the world. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Probably not. None of us can survive without the infrastructure of human society. If this goes on, artificial intelligences will be one with the mammoths and the cave bear. . . .”
I thought I saw movement in the corner of my eye—movement, here on this lifeless VR world, inhabited only by me, a tin robot, and lystrosaur bones. I turned.
A human figure, slim and silent, stood at the summit of one of the low, bare hills. She was so far away the Mist obscured her. But I knew who she was.
I whispered, “Do you see her, Gea?”
“You are important, Michael Poole,” Gea said. “Significant.”
“I don’t want to be significant. . . . You see her, don’t you? Tell me.
You see Morag.
”
“You stand at a crossroads. A tipping point. The world and its cargo of life faces the gravest danger in human history—perhaps since the Permian. And yet you have strength, unprecedented, greater than at any time in human history.”
“Are you talking about Higgs-energy?”
“One day the future will be as you imagine, Michael Poole. But first you must make the future come to pass.”
“How can I shape the future when I’m haunted by a ghost from the past?”
“But the deepest past and furthest future merge into one . . .”
Morag stood still, and yet she seemed to be receding from me, sinking deeper into the unreal mist. I longed to run after her, but knew it would be futile.
In this lifeless world, alone with an utterly alien mind and a virtual ghost, I shivered.
TWO
Chapter 24
I invited Tom and Shelley to my home in upstate New York. I wanted them to help me try to get my head around the problem of gas hydrates.
I gave Tom a bald summary of my private consultation with Gea. I left out the wu-wu stuff, the mixing up of past and future, Gea’s vague hints about my own cosmic destiny. I
definitely
said nothing about Morag.
But even this sanitized version was enough to send Tom’s antennas twitching. “One of the world’s finest artificial sentiences said this to
you
?”
“Why not me?” I snapped back. “Gea has to start somewhere. I do have access to some of the world’s most advanced technological capabilities, the Higgs engines. And I have
you,
Tom. You were right in the middle of that hydrate blow-off in Siberia. Maybe Gea is a good judge of character. Maybe she thinks that as your father I will be motivated to do something about this, to take her seriously.”
“You really think she’s capable of that kind of manipulation?”
“You didn’t meet her,” I said fervently. “Besides, you said yourself she’s one of the world’s most advanced minds. But she doesn’t have any kind of formal power in the human world. She doesn’t even get to vote. She can only get things done through people, by persuasion. If you think about it, she’s behaving exactly the way you’d expect her to.”
He looked doubtful—in fact he looked at me as if I were crazy. But in the aftermath of Siberia we had agreed, kind of, that we would try to work together on stuff, rather than use our interests and motivations as a way to pull apart from each other. So he agreed to fly over to New York, at John’s expense. But, he said mysteriously, he wanted to bring a guest of his own.
My visitors converged on my house, by plane and train and bus, for my amateur brains-trust session.
I’d been here a little over five years. The place was only an hour’s commute out of Grand Central Station, so I was hardly remote, but I was happy enough to be away from the stretched-to-the-limit overcrowding of the city itself.
My house was the modern kind, a big weatherproof concrete brute, suffused with intelligence. With solar cell arrays, a wind turbine I could unfold from the roof, and fuel cells in the basement, I was pretty much self-sufficient in electricity. There was a big chest freezer, and a cellar I kept stocked with cans and dried food. I had deep foundations and high sills and doors that sealed shut; I could have ridden out a meter-deep flood. And so on. I was no survivalist, but you had to think ahead. I’d insisted on puncturing the walls with windows, though—real windows, despite the architect’s complaints. Inside I’d faced many of the walls with wood panels. It was still a home, not a spaceship.
Tom, though, had always seemed to disapprove of the place.
He had never lived here. After Morag’s death the two of us had never really been comfortable in the old family home; it had room for the larger family Morag and I had always planned, and now it was too big for us. I took a smaller apartment in New Jersey, but it never felt like home, and was of such old building stock it became increasingly costly. When Tom started college I was happy enough to move out and take this place, a house built to modern specs.
Also I’d hoped my new place was different enough that both Tom and I would be spared any unpleasant memories. But Tom said it reminded him of
my
family home, my mother’s house in Florida where I’d grown up. It was “a nostalgic facsimile in concrete and gen-modified wood,” as he acutely said.
“Well, I think it’s cozy,” Shelley said to me when she arrived. “A kind of cozy bomb shelter, but cozy nonetheless.” Shelley was a pleasure, as always, a bustling knot of sanity and intelligence who brought light into my sometimes darkened life.
My greeting from Tom was more guarded. And I was surprised when Tom produced his guest: Sonia Dameyer, the American soldier who had helped him out in the first hours after his injury.
It turned out that she and Tom had formed a relationship during his recuperation. She said, “I know it’s a little sad for the only two Americans in a foreign country to glom onto each other. But there you go. I had some furlough due, and a free plane ticket from Uncle Sam. So when Tom said you’d invited him over here, I couldn’t resist. I thought it would be good to meet you in person, Mr. Poole. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Michael. Why should I mind?”
She was in civilian clothes, a neat, attractive jumpsuit. But she was one of those soldier types who always looked military, even out of uniform; her posture was upright, her manner correct, her intelligence obvious, her attention focused. I hadn’t seen any hint of her relationship with Tom when I’d met her during my VR jaunt to Siberia—though maybe I should have. I liked her, as I had immediately in Siberia, but I found her a bit formidable.
We gathered on the living room sofas with mugs of coffee, heaps of cookies, flipcharts, scratch pads and softscreens, and got down to business.
“So,” said Tom. “The world is going to flip its icy lid. What are we supposed to do about it?” He meant to be ironic; he just sounded out of his depth.
To my surprise Sonia leaned forward. “Can I make a methodological suggestion? . . .” She began to outline an approach to problem-solving she said she’d used many times before. “We’ll break the day into two halves. It’s eleven
A.M
. now. We’ll work until lunch—one, say, or one-thirty. And we’ll use that time to open up the problem. We’ll just throw in everything we know, and anything else we come up with—any suggestion or idea, however tentative.”
Tom said dryly, “And are we allowed to laugh at other people’s dumb suggestions?”
“The whole point is to develop ideas. But there are two rules. One is that everything gets recorded. And the second is, before lunch anyhow, that if you do comment you do it in a positive way. You have to start by saying what you
like
about the idea. We’re trying to find ideas and build on them, not destroy them. After lunch we’ll pull it all together more coherently and critically.” Tom laughed, but Sonia said firmly, “Those are the rules.”
Shelley grinned. “Fine by me.”
I was impressed. For sure, if I had suggested this, Tom would have shot it down in flames at the get-go. I imagined Sonia working like this out in the field, pulling together her own motivated, trained-up, overbright staff with a few unhappy or angry locals, to fix whatever was broken. Now she was using those same management skills to handle our awkward father-son dynamic.
Shelley leaned to me and whispered, “I think we’re going to be glad she’s here.”
So we began pool what we knew about gas hydrates.
Tom had his personal experience, and what he’d picked up on the ground in Siberia. I had what I’d learned from Gea, and in follow-up studies since. Sonia for now acted mostly as a recording angel.
The most interesting new facts came from Shelley, who, typically, had been doing some burrowing. She’d found that the end-Permian extinction, through which Gea had walked me so painfully, wasn’t the only instance in which gas hydrate releases had made a mess of Earth’s climate. She displayed graphs of temperature and atmospheric composition. “This spike is known as the ‘initial Eocene thermal maximum.’ It happened about fifty-five million years ago, ten million years after the dinosaurs died off.”
There had been a sharp increase of global temperatures, a hike of five or ten degrees in a “geological instant”—a time so short it couldn’t be distinguished in the rock record, perhaps as fast as decades, maybe even just a few years. And at the same time there had been a big pulse of carbon dioxide injected into the air. It had been a major gas-hydrate release, just like the end-Permian event.
Just as the end-Permian had been kicked off by the immense Siberian traps volcanism, so in the Eocene, volcanism had again, it seemed, been the trigger. Off the coast of Norway, in deep sediments under the ocean, lava had funneled up from deep magma chambers and seeped into the hydrate layers along the continental slopes. The lava hadn’t even broken the surface; this was minor as volcanic events go. But as the lava had dumped its heat, the icelike crystals that contained the gases had melted, and the lid had come off the hydrate deposits. We stared at images of layers of sediments that had collapsed over emptied-out hydrate layers, and at great vertical ruptures, the remains of conduits where the released gases had forced their way to the surface.
The methane had reached the ocean floor, bubbling up in immense spouts like the one that Tom had lived through, and causing, no doubt, plenty of local damage. But that was just the start.
Once the methane reached the ocean and the air there had been a complicated series of chemical reactions. The methane cheerfully reacted with oxygen, a process that itself released heat. The products of the reactions were more hydrocarbons, water—and carbon dioxide, gigatons of it, more greenhouse gas.
“And the rest,” Shelley said, “is history. The event wasn’t nearly so severe as the end-Permian catastrophe, because only a fraction of the global hydrate load was released. But it was a huge sloshing, a perturbation of the entire carbon pool of Earth’s surface. You can still see traces of it in isotopic imbalances and the like. Eventually the excess carbon dioxide was drawn back down out of the atmosphere by Earth’s systems—photosynthesis, weathering. But that took millennia, maybe megayears. And in the meantime there was a spike of warming.”
Sonia said, “So in the Eocene the trigger was this undersea volcanism. But in the present day—”
“In the present day,” Shelley said, “the trigger is anthropogenic global warming. Gea is right, as far as I can tell, Michael. The carbon dioxide and other crud we’ve dumped into the air has done the damage, more than enough to replicate the volcanic perturbations of the past. The anthropogenic warming of the climate we have already induced
will
cause the hydrate deposits to become unstable. At least we know what’s coming,” she said sepulchrally. “Different causes but same effects: the fossil record can teach us that much.”
Tom said, “And the timescale—”
“As Gea said,” Shelley told us. “A decade or less. In fact the destabilization is already happening—as you know.”
We let this sink in.
As she went about her self-appointed task of recording all this Sonia’s small face was pursed into a frown. The practical soldier was having some trouble with thinking about these huge scales in space and time, I thought. “OK,” she said. “So we can’t afford to let these hydrates go up. That’s the consensus, right? So what do we do about it?”
We all looked at each other warily. This was the crucial question—and the tricky part.
We were a guilt-ridden generation. President Amin and the Stewardship had taught us we had to change our ways; now we all lived a lot cleaner, and had stopped fouling the pond. But a legacy of the new thinking was that one of the worst insults was to be called an
instrumentalist,
in jargon that dated from Amin’s time: a meddler. To imagine that we could actively
fix
planet-sized problems seemed as hubristic and arrogant as the mind-sets that had got us into this mess in the first place. So to ask Sonia’s question—what do we
do
?—was to confront a modern taboo square in the face.
Shelley said reasonably, “Look at it this way. We don’t trust ourselves not to make a mess even worse. But those gas hydrates have no conscience, no soul, no sympathy; they will blow however we feel about it.”
Tom surprised me. “All right, so let’s play the instrumentalist game. If the crud we’re injecting into the atmosphere is going to cause the hydrates to tip over into instability, let’s just stop doing it.”
I caught Sonia’s eye and remembered her rules. I said, “What I
like
about that is that in the long term it has to be the right solution. To remove the root cause of a problem has to be a better strategy than to tinker with the symptoms.”
Tom said cautiously. “Let’s hear the
but
—”
“But it’s too late.”
Shelley backed me up.
We’d already done a great deal by eliminating most of the automobiles. But even if we shut down all the factories and power plants tomorrow, carbon dioxide would still be injected into the air from, for instance, rotting deposits on the dying seabeds. We were dealing with planet-sized systems; the vast inertia of Earth’s processes would ensure that the rise in carbon dioxide content continued to rise for decades, and the warming with it.
Sonia recorded all this. “So it won’t help if we stop putting the stuff into the air. Why don’t we try taking it out again?”
Shelley said, “That’s such a good idea that people are already doing it.”
It was true; there were “geoengineering” projects going on in various corners of the globe—tentative, deeply unfashionable. Most of them focused on modest efforts at what was called “carbon sequestration,” drawing down carbon dioxide from the air faster than natural processes could manage.
“So we just accelerate those programs,” Sonia said. “Maybe we should make the carbon dioxide snow out, like it does on Mars.”
That was one from left field, the kind of wacky idea that I imagined Sonia’s own process was supposed to generate. We played around with it a bit. The difficulty was that Mars is much colder than the Earth. You’d have to reduce the global temperatures to make carbon dioxide freeze, which was precisely the problem we were dealing with anyhow. Or maybe you could somehow tinker with the atmosphere, add some kind of freeze factor to the air . . . None of us knew enough chemistry to come up with a plausible way of making this happen.
Tom clasped his hands behind his head and sat back in his chair. “I hesitate to say this in front of an arch-instrumentalist like you, Dad, but maybe we’re thinking
too
big here. After all we aren’t interested in cooling down the whole damn planet. Just stabilizing the hydrate sediments would be enough—wouldn’t it? So why don’t we just think of a way to refrigerate the poles?”