How man has been engaged in climate change from ancient times to the present, and how the ultimate salvation of humankind may be finding new homes off-world, by using controlled climate change through the technology of terraforming.

1. The Once & Future
Planet:
AnthropoGenic
Climate Change
and the Destiny of
Humanity

2. Introduction
When we say that climate change is an existential threat we’re
saying that it could bring about the end of human life on Earth.
Heavy stuff, right, but maybe not everyone would be all that torn
up?
French philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre
famously said that
“Hell is other
people” and Los
Angeles poet
Charles Bukowski
was known for his:
“I don't hate them
(people)...I just feel
better when they're
not around.”
All kidding aside, there is no single issue that
stands at the heart of global affairs in the way
that climate change does. Americans may kick
and scream over race, abortion, immigration,
gun control, and etc, ad inifinitum, but all of
this amounts to little more than tempests in
teacups in the face of the world lighting on fire.

3. For some time now, and for a variety
of reasons, most of them having to
do with economics, there the
political issue of climate change has
been a difficult one for Americans to
parse: the liberal left has generally
been more open to accepting it as a
reality, and one that is affected by
human actions (anthropogenic
climate change) whereas the
conservative right has been more
hostile to this interpretation, and
secure in the interpretation (rejected
by the overwhelming majority of
scientists worldwide) that there are
periods of global climate change that
have little or nothing to do with the
activities of humankind. Many
conservatives have rejected the
existence of climate change in any
form.
However, over the last several
years, the rapid pace of change all
across the globe has effected a
slow but sure shift in public
opinion as more and more
Americans (and not just
Americans, but global citizens, see
next slide) have begun to not only
accept climate change but also to
sign on to the idea that yes, the
hustle and bustle of mankind’s
beehive of activities is the reason
behind the planet’s changes in
temperature and the wild
fluctuations in weather patterns.

5. As a result of this, here at West Los Angeles College a decision has been made
that every course, regardless of the discipline, should offer a teaching unit, a
lesson, on anthropogenic climate change, so that our students can leave the
college a little bit better informed about this most important of issues.
Which is an excellent thing, no question about it.
Still and all, as my mind runs sort of…sideways to most folks my first thought
was…well, it seems to me that a full-time student may get a little bored after
taking ten, twelve, fifteen courses with us, and having that many more-or-less-
the-same climate change lessons coming at them, so I’ve got to figure out how
to give my students something a little bit different.
So rather than just do ‘climate change is awful, here’s how to try to make it
better, #goearth!’ what I want to talk about in addition is…how to be a bit
more understanding about our modern dilemma, maybe, and not be
so…judgmental? I want to suggest that altering the climate because of how
we live is something that’s just a natural part of people living together in large
groups, and it pretty near always has been. And then we can look at the
modern world and what I’ve mentioned above and lastly, go out on a note of
uplifting, joyous hope.

6. Uxmal, Pyramid of the Magician 6
I. The Ancient Maya – 2600
Years to Climate Change
Collapse
The author Michael Gruber has said of the
colonial era that the Europeans came from
a future that the Native Americans could
not imagine, and that the Indians came
from a past that the colonizers could not
remember – in other words, they were so
distant from one another on a socio-
historical continuum that they could never
understand one another’s differences well
enough to avoid the varieties of conflict
that led to the near-extermination of the
indigenous populations of the Americas.
While this may have been true, some
indigenous societies were closer to the
Europeans than others in terms of their
population density, societal complexity,
and cultural and technological
achievements. The Maya were one of the
three great Amerindian civilizations, and
the one whose societal collapse in the 9th
century can be examined for insights into
the current situation that confronts global
civilization here in the early 21st century.

7. The ruins of ancient Maya civilization were lost to the
jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula and what is now
areas of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador
until the mid-1800s and not until the later part of that
century would there be any real modern scientific
investigations into the mysteries of the Maya past.
The Maya entered into the mainstream of popular
culture in the early part of the 20th century with the
‘Mayan Revival’ in art and architecture and as the
century wore on historians and archaeologists began
to slowly piece together a picture of the rise and fall
of the Maya, starting around 1800 B.C. and ending
around the end of the 9th century A.D., when the veil
was drawn across the face of the Classic Era of Maya
civilization.
The Maya were brought down by a variety of factors,
the primary amongst them being (1) political/cultural
issues concerning the relationships between kings and
nobles which led to far too much warfare between
city-states and the wasting of valuable time/resources
on the erection of monuments, as opposed to solving
problems that affected the great mass of the people;
El Mirador - one of the largest Maya sites and home to the largest pyramid in
the world (in terms of mass), but almost entirely covered by jungle foliage to
this day

8. (2) natural climate change; (3) man-made damage to their environment, most of which came about as a result of soil depletion
and erosion due to deforestation; and lastly (4) a society living as best they could in a place that wasn’t best suited for them
until it was too late to live any differently.
II. Living Wrong In the World In the Only World You’ve Got
There are instances in history where human societies have, in hindsight, been able to see that the place where they chose to
build a city was…not the best choice, really, but – they reached a point of no return. Think Pompeii. Think New Orleans.
Think Phoenix, Las Vegas and, to a lesser degree, Los Angeles.
However in some places, entire regions have proven in retrospect to be problematic, and such is the case in the Yucatan
Peninsula, where the basic geography was detrimental to the long-term survival of population-dense, advanced civilizations.
Proof?
Glad you asked. To begin with, most of the Peninsula is made up
of a spongey limestone with a very thin layer of topsoil called karst
and the rain that falls runs right through this and into the water pan
that lies dozens to hundreds of feet below the surface. Rivers and
streams are at a minimum. Farming is quite challenging but
doable, and then there’s also the need for drinking, cooking, and
bathing. So – the key phrase above is ‘dozens to hundreds’– hang
onto that for a moment and keep this image on the left in mind as
well (that’s a cenote), OK, and let’s head to the next slide…

9. Every dot on the left is a cenote (forget the colors,as
they’re not germane to our chat). Notice that they are
totally restricted to the upper 1/3 or so of this map, which
only covers the upper 1/6 or so of the Yucatan/Peten part
of the Maya world. This peninsula that you see has an
interesting geographic feature: the further north you are –
where all of the cenotes are clustered? – the lower the
elevation of the land. There’s just no hills, let alone
mountains up there, I’ve been there, it’s as flat as the
Kansas prairie. As you head south, further and further
from the ‘cenote ring’ you also begin to climb and,
weirdly, you move out of what might be mistaken for the
forests of coastal California and into what can only be
called jungle – from Smokey the Bear territory into the
land of Tarzan: it’s far greener but more importantly, it’s
much more elevated, even mountainous. The reason
there’s no cenotes is because the surface is just too darned
high above the pan of water underlying the peninsula for
one of these ‘holes’ in the limestone to occur – they’d
have to be hundreds and hundreds of feet deep and this
Just doesn’t, can’t, in fact, occur. So if now you’re wondering well then, DAVE, where the devil do they get their extra
water for farming, and then the drinking/cooking/bathing water you were talking about - ? The answer is this: the Maya
hollowed out large reservoirs in the karst and then lined them with clay to make them watertight. In this way they could
catch enough rainwater to give even the largest cities sufficient water to last for up to eighteen months.

10. 10
And so – it got hotter, it rained less, there was
less water for all purposes, and less food due to
less productive agriculture; the elites continued to
engage in counter-productive activities like
erecting monuments to their own vanity and wars
that profited no one and nothing save their own
egos; and they milked the people so as to pay for
all of this. Is it any wonder that this is when the
collapse of Classic Maya civilization occurred?
However, as the urban populations grew and spread,
and farmlands extended, it became more problematic
to extend water supplies for all needed purposes.
Even worse, when drought struck, the water the
Maya had been able to keep in reserve did not last
long enough, and around A.D. 760 the worst drought
of the last 7,000 years made its appearance. This
drought’s effects were even worse because the Maya
had engaged in massive deforestation in the areas of
their cities for the purpose of agriculture, which
increased the temperature in their region and reduced
rainfall. On the hillsides, the soil was no longer held
together by the roots of trees and so erosion began,
thus greatly diminishing the fertility of the
farmlands…

11. Tikal,
Guatemala 11
III. “It’s the End of the World As We Know It and I Feel Fine”
Look my friends, ‘denial’ is not just a river in Egypt, as you all know. It’s a problem that every human being, and by
extension, every human society, confronts from time to time or, worse, for extended periods of time. The wisest among us
can be in denial about how much ice cream they’re eating out of the container as they’re bingeing that Netflix show on the
sofa, and the wisest and most advanced societies can be in denial about how their behavior and policies are dooming them.
The Maya were extraordinary, mis
amigos, verdad! They created rubber,
maybe two thousand years before anyone
else in the world, and they had the only
system of writing in the Americas. They
had a system of highways connecting
their city-states and used pressurized
aqueducts for the movement of water
underground. They originated an
advanced system of mathematics which
included the concept of zero and allowed
for advanced calculations; their solar
calendar was by far the most accurate of
the ancient world and was only 28
seconds away from the perfectly realized
365-day, 24-hour calendar year – and this
achieved simply by virtue of their

12. 12
astronomer’s careful
observations of the movements
of the celestial bodies from one
night to the next, all year long.
They built pyramids and
temples, observatories and ball
courts and their artistic
achievements were a marvel by
any definition of the word.
Nonetheless, at the time of the
collapse, appr. 5,000,000 Maya
were competing for resources in
a territory about the size of the
state of Colorado. The
intensified competition that
resulted due to the drought,
deforestation, exhausted fields,
scarcity of food, and increased
conflict led to a catastrophic
population loss after the collapse
in the 9th century. The evidence
suggests that the Maya world
encompassed a population of 3
to 14,000,000 people at the time
of the collapse (a dramatic span
in terms of us not knowing the

13. numbers with more specificity, certainly, but there are some things that we
can only be just so certain of based on the clues that the historical record
has left behind). By the time Cortes and his army moved through the
region in the 1520s the population had been diminished to something like
30,000.
The map at left shows the cities of the Maya that archaeologists have
identified up to the present day. However, over the last several decades
the use of lidar aerial photography has revealed more than 500 additional
Olmec and Maya sites that have yet to be explored, uncovered, named –
most of them Maya. It’s fair to say that, were this map fully filled in, we
would have an even greater sense of just how intense the competition for
resources became between the Maya cities once things became difficult in
the 9th century and beyond.
The Maya were intelligent, advanced, and far-sighted yet in spite of all of
this, they laid their civilization low by way of anthropogenic climate
change (the currently most fashionable turn of phrase for human-caused
climate change).

14. So it’s not just us – modern, gas-guzzling, factory-building, mass-producing did
not invent climate change, in spite of what the super-heated rhetoric suggests
– man has been involved in problematic change since complex civilizations
emerged. But the pace and scale of the problem has radically accelerated over
the last few centuries and we need to take a few minutes to try and make
sense of how we’ve been attempting to grapple with the enormity of of the
problem, how we might (CAN WE?!) fix it, and what options exist…if human
civilization on Earth is, indeed, doomed…

15. II. Attempts to
Address
Anthropogenic
Climate
Challenge at the
Legislative Level

17. In 2015 the Paris Agreement is laid out,
which proceeds through five-year periods
during which signatory states must live up to
GHG commitments outlined in climate action
plans. The Paris Agreement becomes
something of a political volleyball as
President Obama signs off on it, bypassing
Congress, after which President Trump
cancels U.S. involvement, and then President
Biden recommits the U.S. in 2021.

18. Federal Regulations on GHG
Vehicle Fuel Economy & GHG Standards
In 2010 a single national standard for
auto manufacturers on the reduction of
GHG emissions was established in an
agreement spearheaded by the Obama
Administration in alliance with over a
dozen auto manufacturers, the United
Auto Workers Union, and the State of
California
*
Oil & Natural Gas Systems, GHG
Standards
The Obama Administration’s Climate
Action Plan gives the EPA the power to
to enforce new regulations, most
importantly those that “reduce
methane emissions from new and
modified activities and equipment in
the oil and natural gas sector.”
Unfortunately, President Trump
suspends many of these regulations
with Executive Order 13783

19. State Efforts to Battle Climate Change
GHG emissions are under attack in many states but, as has often
been the case in U.S. history, California is at the forefront of
this fight
California has a GHG emissions cap-and-trade program going
back to 2013 that addresses fossil fuel companies, electric
power, and other selected industries. With this, the state will
meet its target of reduction in GHG emissions by 40% below
1990 levels by 2030.
There are eleven other states including New York, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts, and Virginia that are partners in the Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program on
CO2 emissions from electric power dating back to 2009.
As regards vehicle emissions, California once again was at the
fore in 2009, acting in accord with the federal government to
set new standards to reduce GHG emissions and increase fuel
efficiency for a wide variety of on-road vehicles.
And states have taken the cause of the climate to court, as with
Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), wherein MA, alongside eleven
other states and several major cities, brought suit against the
EPA to force that federal agency to regulate GHGs.

20. III. Stark Realities, Circa 2023
Considering the preceding information we
could have been getting more done, in
theory, but not really, realistically, because,
again, half the people in the country or
more, and their elected representatives, and
powerful economic interests have simply not
been behind positive change in terms of
slowing the pace of climate change. We’ve
done some good, moved the needle, and in a
recent issue of Rolling Stone author Bill
McKibben summed up some of the most
salient points in a very succinct manner, so
DIG:
The atmosphere can only hold so much
carbon before it overheats the Earth. Think
of it as a one-gallon bucket: If you put more
than a gallon of water in it, it will overflow.
So that would be dumb.
A decade back, scientists calculated that in
order to have any real chance of meeting the
climate goals the world had agreed on, our
atmospheric bucket had space for about 585
gigatons more carbon dioxide. And new data
showed the fossil-fuel industry had in its
reserves — the stuff it had told shareholders
and banks it would dig up and burn — about
2,795 gigatons worth of CO2. Which is to
say: five times too much.
The London-based NGO Carbon Tracker
provided those numbers a decade ago,
and has kept an ongoing count -- here’s
where we stand. The fossil-fuel
industry has continued to explore and
prospect, and now controls reserves of
coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would
produce 3,700 gigatons of carbon
dioxide. That’s 10 times the amount
that scientists say would take us past
the temperature targets set in the Paris
Climate Agreement.
Another way of saying this: If we are to
meet the climate targets set by
scientists, we have to leave 90 percent
of known fossil fuels underground. And
at current prices that means stranding
about $100 trillion worth of assets in
the soil. If you want to understand why
the battle over climate progress is so
fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry
fights so hard, with all the political
influence it can buy — remember that
$100 trillion. That’s a lot of incentive.

21. No. 1 - $34 per Megawatt Hour
That’s the new figure from the investment bank
Lazard for the average cost of utility-scale solar
power. That is, if you have a bunch of solar panels in
a field, that’s how much it costs to produce electricity
from them. To understand why it’s a figure that could
change the world, you need to know a couple of other
things.
One, it’s far, far lower than it was a decade ago: The
price of renewable energy has dropped as much as 90
percent since then.
And two, it’s lower than any other way of producing
energy. The only thing that comes close is a wind
turbine catching the breeze, which checks in at $39
per megawatt hour. Running a gas-fired power plant,
still the most common solution in America, runs you
$59; a coal-fired power plant produces power at $108
a megawatt hour; nuclear is more expensive yet.
(Though there’s hope that new developments, like
fusion, could eventually bring that total down. If we
can get through the next few decades intact,
innovation will give us lots more tools to work with.)
A learning curve is a remarkable thing — it tends to
persist over time, which means the price of
renewables should keep dropping.
But: not all power sources are on learning curves.
Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it
hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s
less a technology than a commodity — and you have
to work harder to find that commodity now that the
easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in
the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean
now, or under a polar ice cap; etc.
No. 2 - $2.8 Billion
In 2022, we were hit with a staggering
number: $2.8 billion is how much profit the
fossil-fuel industry has earned daily for the
past 50 years. Which is a problem, because
the people making that money have the
motive and the means to try to keep it alive.
“It’s a huge amount of money,” Aviel
Verbruggen, the academic who calculated
that figure, points out. “You can buy every
politician, every system with all this money.
It protects [producers] from political
interference that may limit their activities.”
You can see this happening at the highest
levels — at last year’s global climate
conference in Egypt, there were 636 fossil-
fuel-connected people registered in
attendance, dwarfing the delegations of
people from almost every country who were
there to address fixing the climate problem.
This year’s climate conference is scheduled
for Abu Dhabi, and its chair is also the CEO
of the national oil company. And you can
see it at the most granular levels, too.
Earlier this year a study was released
showing that gas stoves cause hundreds of
thousands of cases of childhood asthma in
the U.S. alone — an unnecessary toll since
cheap magnetic induction cooktops
produce dinner without fumes. But within
days of that study, it was reported that the
natural-gas industry spent millions hiring
“influencers” to say happy living demanded
a blue flame…

22. No. 3 - SIX MILLION
That’s roughly the number of students
worldwide who skipped school to go on
“climate strike” in 2019, in what marked
the height of the climate movement before
the pandemic chased it indoors.
And those millions, in turn, stand for
everyone who built the biggest global
movement of the millennium over the past
decade, coming together across nations to
demand action on climate change. They
were as important to climate progress as
the engineers who dropped the price of
renewables.
You know Greta Thunberg, and you should.
But she would be the first to say there are
thousands of young leaders like her; in this
country, they’ve included people like
Varshini Prakash, whose advocacy of the
Green New Deal through the Sunrise
Movement helped transform U.S. politics.
By 2020, thanks to a decade of
mobilization, climate change broke through
politically: Polls showed it near or at the
top of Democratic-voter concerns. And so
Biden named Prakash to a small team
working on climate policy. Citizen pressure
finally translated into legislative action
when our first real climate bill, the Inflation
Reduction Act, passed in August — 34 years
and 45 days after climate scientist Jim
Hansen first testified to Congress that
global warming was underway. Which leads
us to…
No. 4 - $369 Billion
That’s the floor on spending that Congress
designated in the Inflation Reduction Act for
energy transformation in our country —
money that could accelerate the switch to a
clean, electrified America and spur the same
around the world.
The bill passed by the barest of margins —
Kamala Harris broke a 50-50 tie in the
Senate, and no Republican in either chamber
voted for the bill.
This is a serious pot of money. And it could
grow larger — the spending is essentially
uncapped, so if enough projects materialize
that qualify under its rules, the total could
end up closer to $800 billion. That money
could underwrite the quick conversion of
home after apartment after office: The
consumer trinity of heat pump and induction
cooktop and e-mobility is suddenly a real
prospect. But there’s nothing automatic about
it; it’s a lot of cash but consider the challenge
we still face: There are 140 million homes and
apartments in America. Even finding enough
electricians to do the work is hard. By some
estimates, America needs a million more of
them.
If it takes us 40 years to make this transition,
the planet we run on clean energy will be a
broken planet. The only question that really
matters, then, is pace: Can we go fast enough
to begin to catch up to physics? Which means
that the key numbers may turn out to be
things like …

23. No. 5 - 121
No. 5 – 121 Degrees
Which is how hot it got in Canada the
summer before last, breaking the old
national record by eight degrees as a
“heat dome” settled across the north,
a development so unsettling to
scientists that it convinced some we
had entered a new phase of the
planet’s warming. This conviction was
bolstered this summer when we saw
similarly anomalous and even more
deadly heat waves in China and the
subcontinent. Or 780 percent, which
is how much of the year’s average
rainfall fell in parts of Pakistan over
just a few weeks, a rainstorm so epic it
melted away people’s earthen homes.
Or $313 billion, which is how much
economic damage climate-spawned
disasters created last year. We live in a world where reason — including economic reason — dictates we move as fast as is possible toward clean
energy. But inertia and vested interest provide friction that slows that transition. So the tie will be broken, or not, by something that can’t be
quantified: a combination of fear, hope, moral indignation, and human solidarity that provides, or doesn’t, the political will to break this logjam.
You can’t count on it — but if we push, it will count.
But…what if we CAN’t get it done - ?
What then becomes of humanity in the absence of a ‘Planet B’ - ?

24. Or…
MIGHT there
BE A
Planet B?

25. V. Positive Climate Change for the Future of All Mankind
Kim Stanley Robinson is generally considered one of the greatest living science fiction writers and was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time Magazine in 2008 for his optimistic
view of the future.
After earning a Ph.D in English Literature at UCSD, Robinson began to construct through his science fiction a vision of the near future that largely focuses on the challenges of human-
directed anthropogenic climate change for the purpose creating new homes for humanity beyond Earth in the rest of the solar system to ensure humanity’s survival on Earth. In The Mars
Trilogy, written in the late 1980s-early 1990s, Robinson paints a glorious picture of the two-century project whereby a multi-national coalition of scientist-settlers (the First Hundred) go
about the process of turning Mars into a world of water and greenery complete with a breathable atmosphere where humankind, armed with the knowledge of the mistakes of their past,
can create a new civilization ripe with the promise of new opportunities for humanity to begin anew.
Through the process of terraforming, the atmosphere is
heated, solar irradiation increased, greenhouse gases released,
subterranean aquifiers identified and water pumped to the
surface. In addition to the last measure, an enormous asteroid
of ice is fitted with engines, steered into Mars orbit, and then
into the atmosphere at an angle so as to burn off all of the ice
into a release of water, creating superstorms that that aid in
accelerating the transformation of the planet. This is
anthropogenic climate change on the grandest possible scale,
but set at fast-forward, and in a positive direction…or is it?
As the story moves forward, and more settlers arrive, factions
develop amongst the First Hundred over whether the mission
of terraforming is actually – a just course of action to begin
with? Now that they have lived there for decades, many of
them have fallen under the spell of the natural landscape of
Mars and have begun to wonder if they even have the right to
alter the climate of an entire planet, not by accident, as on
Earth but through intentional planning when, in fact, human
beings could thrive in their hundreds of millions on Mars in
domed communities and leave the planet in its natural state.
This argument is countered with one that asserts that
intelligent life in the universe is only found on Earth, and
humanity’s existence is precarious – Mars must be
terraformed to better guarantee the survival of human
civilization.

27. As Robinson plays out these debates, the position of the Green Mars faction, or the pro-terraformer’s, could almost be described as America’s
Manifest Destiny writ large. In invoking the sacred mission of science and the importance of the preservation of intelligent life, one may hear the
echoes of the ideology that drove the American people to fill up the most profitable areas of the North American continent within just a few
centuries, stripping it of much of its natural resources along the way and creating environmental and climatic havoc. This is the cautionary tale that
must be kept in clear focus if the Green Mars path of pro-human climate change is to be followed.

28. In the Red Mars, or anti-terraformer’s position, the Native Americans who couldn’t make sense of the terrain-altering imperative of European colonizers;
even the laments of those 19th-century pathfinders and mountain men who, having gone West and fallen in love with the natural landscape, abhorred the
flood of settlers that followed, despoiling, for them, the transcendent beauty of the West with their farms, ranches, towns, and barbed wire; and the protests
of modern-day environmentalists are intermingled into one pained protest: Earth First! taken up and remade into Mars First! for a preservation of Mars’
past on into the future.

29. And if you think my talking up this Mars thing is just the idle chit-chat of a lifelong sci-fi goof…this is a major
topic of conversation at each year’s Annual NASA Convention and Elon Musk’s idee fixe. Indeed, he recently
talked about the time he was wasting on fixing Twitter and Tesla…when all that really matters is…Mars.

30. It’s been said that science fiction is not so much about the shape of
things to come, but about things as they are, a projection of today’s
realities into a future constructed to show them off to greatest effect.
The Mars Trilogy is good proof of this definition of science fiction, but
in 2312 (and published in that year, some decades after the Mars
Trilogy) Robinson proceeds from the assumption that humanity was
unable to stave off ecological catastrophe on Earth. From the late 21st
century and lasting for one hundred years, a ‘Time of Troubles’
plunged the world into a catastrophe of global poverty, famine,
pandemics, warfare, population loss, and rising sea levels (30 feet).
Yet in spite of all of this, Mars was successfully terraformed, and
Venus, Mercury and many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have
been colonized.
In addition dozens of the largest asteroids have been turned into
terraria – which is to say, they have been hollowed out, fitted with an
engine to ‘spin’ the asteroid in order to create artificial gravity on the
interior (thus creating an ‘inside-out’ world or biosphere), and then the
interiors have been given artificial suns, soils, and atmospheres; some
of them are ‘farmworlds’ that produce much of what is needed to feed
the people of Earth, and some are biomes modeled after destroyed
areas of Earth (like the African Serengeti) and populated with
endangered and or extinct species that have been returned to life
through the use of the DNA that was harvested from these creatures by
scientists before they vanished from existence on Earth (shades of
Jurassic Park!).

31. Tens of millions of human beings live in these terraria, anchored in
the asteroid belt or moving throughout the solar system, engaged in
their various useful economic and scientific endeavors. One of the
most stirring sections of the novel begins with a description of how
“drowned Florida” is being raised and restored for the use of
humanity, and how vast areas of Africa and North America have
already been restored after the work of more than a century and are
ready for the reintroduction of the native species that have been
absent from those areas for many, many generations. Several
thousand terraria pool their resources in landing these species, from
top predators (wolves) to their prey (titmice), and everything in
between and to either side – entire ‘circles of life,’ if you will,
restoring those regions to the state which they existed in, more or
less, prior to colonization and the widespread pillaging of their
natural resources.
What more glorious and humanistic a vision of the future could you arrive at
than one wherein not only does human ingenuity preserve mankind, but it
enables us to go back and undo the grave harm that our ancestors
perpetrated against the creatures and environment of our mother world?

32. VI. In Closing
It’s October, 2023. Winter has not even
begun, and New York City, indeed, most
of the upper East Coast, has been
battered by torrential rain that’s simply
incomprehensible. NYC, the Big
Apple, was drowning for a week. And
it’s only going to get worse, each year
that goes by. (Interestingly, one of Stan
Robinson’s latest novels, New York
2140, focuses on the lives of New
Yorkers after the global sea level has
risen 30 feet and the city has no more
streets, subways, elevated trains, but has
instead become a metropolis of bridges,
canals, and small aircraft – nonetheless,
humanity thrives!)

35. The heat, the rain, the blizzards, the storms, the flooding, the world on fire, the proliferation of insects and fungi that produce new and baffling
illnesses with which modern science will have to contend – all of this is hardest on and affects disproportionately the poor and the most vulnerable
communities of color, women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities. Perhaps the only real hope, on the grand scale, for these people is
opening a new world with the infinite array of possibilities that this would present? For after all, what did the Americas, Australia, and other areas of
Earth represent to the poor and downtrodden of Europe…but another chance in a New World? And, happily enough, on Mars, in the rest of the solar
system, there would be no ‘colonialism’ – no displaced indigenous peoples, no ugliness of racism to contend with (save what we might being with us).
Perhaps the greatest movement for social justice of the 21st century might be the movement of mankind off of Earth, to Mars, to the asteroids, to the
moons of the outer worlds, where tens of millions of people would have new and extraordinary opportunities to pursue their best possible destinies?
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: maybe this will be the last best hope of mankind.

37. BONUS ROUND #1
Think living inside an asteroid sounds like I’ve been eating magic mushroom soup?
Think again, because here’s the proof, here the science!
Build your own asteroid terrarium!
When Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 was published, Orbit Books set up this fantastic page on their website showing
exactly how this can be done. Check it out if you like, it just takes a minute or so by clicking through each phase of the
construction, really interesting. ;^)
https://www.orbitbooks.net/2312/

38. BONUS ROUND #2
If you found the Green Mars vs. Red Mars argument at all provocative, here are two positions points
from the book Red Mars where the original scientist-colonists, the First Hundred, are debating the
future of the terraforming project.
Ann, the leader of the Red Mars, or anti-terraforming faction, says (in part)
“Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a
chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world
where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times
older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the
whole history of the planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And…we could live here and
study the planet without ever changing it – we could that with very little harm or even inconvenience
to ourselves. [And you’re] justifying this mass alteration of the environment because you think you
can. You want to try it out and see – as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build
castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not
science.”
“It’s not science, I say! It’s just playing around. And for that game you’re going to wreck the historical
record, destroy the polar caps, and the outflow channels, and the canyon bottoms -- destroy a pure,
beautiful landscape, and for nothing at all.”

39. Sax, leader of the Green Mars, pro-terraforming faction, replies:
“The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind. Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other matter in the
universe. It’s we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the
stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels
with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That’s what makes Mars beautiful.
Not the basalt and the oxides.”
“Now that we are here it isn’t enough to just study the rock. That’s science, yes, and needed science. But science is more than that. Science is part of a
larger human enterprise, and that enterprise includes going to the stars, adapting to other planets, adapting them to us. Science is creation. The lack of
life here, and the lack of any finding in the fifty years of the SETI program, indicates that life is rare, and intelligent life even rarer. And yet the whole
meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread
that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be
wiped out. And now we’re on the Moon, and Mars and we can make Mars safer to live on. Changing it won’t destroy it. Reading its past may be harder,
but the beauty of it won’t go away. If there are lakes, or forests, or glaciers…it adds life, the most beautiful system of all. Mars will remain Mars and be
ours at the same time. But there is this about the human mind: if it can be done, it will be done. We can transform Mars and build it like you would build
a cathedral, as a monument to humanity and the universe both. We can do it, so we will do it.”

40. To which Ann returns:
“I think you value consciousness too high and rock too little. We are not lords of the
universe. We’re one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the
consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It
means rather fitting into it as it is and worshipping it with our attention.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever even seen Mars.”