“It’s this kind of built-in limiter on people’s brains that can be removed, and is only put in there essentially through cruelty and through a kind of Homo sapiens supremacy,” Newitz said.Īs you can imagine, that’s one of the sources of conflict driving the plot. Instead, they’re manufactured in bioreactors, which gives their corporate overlords the option of providing full human-scale intelligence (even for earthworms!) - or tamping down their intelligence if they’re meant to do menial tasks. One of the novel’s crazy twists is that the workers aren’t conceived in the traditional way. “I can imagine the future of terraforming being kind of like Amazon warehouse workers in space,” they explained. “They’re just typical first responders and construction workers and environmental engineers just trying to get by,” Newitz said. The terraformers of “The Terraformers” are a motley crew of Homo sapiens, plus other flavors of hominin species, plus totally non-human workers ranging from cats and moose to naked mole rats and earthworms. “But at the same time, I think better understanding what the risks may be is very important.”īut the billionaires aren’t the ones doing the work. “I seriously hope we’ll never get in a situation where this actually has to be done, because I still think this is a very scary concept and something will go wrong,” Harvard’s Frank Keutsch told MIT Technology Review. But the experiment was put on hold after an outcry from the region’s indigenous residents and conservationists.Įven the experiment’s principal investigator admits that solar geoengineering probably isn’t a great idea. In an effort to reverse the trend, a group of Harvard researchers proposed conducting an experiment in Sweden that would eventually involve spraying particles into the upper atmosphere to dim the sun’s warming effect. You could argue that we’re already reshaping Earth’s environment to pump more greenhouse gases into the air, adding to a terraforming trend that’s getting us into more and more trouble. The environmental issues on the one planet that we’re currently capable of terraforming - our own - illustrate how tricky things can get when you start tweaking a planet’s parameters. Newitz is due to discuss “The Terraformers” and the plot’s parallels to our present day during two meet-ups in Seattle: at Third Place Books on Friday, and at Fuel Coffee on Sunday.
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