A journey across space

Geoengineering (noun): “deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change” -

The Royal Society

Greetings, fellow space traveller! You are joining me on a journey across space – a journey that my home planet, Eazrah, dearly depends on.

I have been sent on this mission by our Eazling leaders, to discover new technologies from around the galaxy that could help to save our planet.

Figure 1. My vessel for the mission. 

Eazrah is facing a crisis. Its climate is changing dramatically because atmospheric levels of gases like carbon dioxide and methane have become so high they’ve caused global temperatures to get too hot. We’ve been warned that the higher temperatures could cause droughts so extreme that crops cannot grow. Most of the beautiful ice-lands are melting too, and causing sea levels to rise and swallow up entire coastal cities.

But nobody has done anything to stop it. Not really. Carbon dioxide and methane are still being pumped out into the atmosphere every day and the temperature is still rising.

As a last resort, our leaders want to look for alien “geoengineering” technologies that will either suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, or to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the planet’s surface and heating it up.

My objective is simple: find a technology that’s been developed on an alien planet to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide or manage solar radiation to control global temperatures.

Many of the Eazlings are wary of using such large-scale technologies to control global temperature. Some worry that inadvertent damage could be done by the techniques. Others are concerned it will take too long to implement a successful geoengineering plan on the scale needed to avoid the disaster brought by climate change. And some Eazlings claim we need to address the fundamental reasons why we’ve let climate change get to this point – make changes to our system, rather than using a techno-fix to carry on with business as usual.

But one thing is for certain: we desperately need something to be done to prevent ongoing climate change. So I'm exploring any technologies that could be part of a plan to do that.