SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
A Changing Climate of Opinion?
from the Economist
There is a branch of science fiction that looks at the Earth’s neighbours, Mars and Venus, and asks how they might be made habitable. The answer is planetary engineering. ... So, fiddle with the atmospheres of these neighbours and you open new frontiers for human settlement and far-fetched story lines.
It is an intriguing idea. It may even come to pass, though probably not in the lifetime of anyone now reading such stories. But what is more worrying—and more real—is the idea that such planetary engineering may be needed to make the Earth itself habitable by humanity, and that it may be needed in the near future.
Reality has a way of trumping art, and human-induced climate change is very real indeed. So real that some people are asking whether science fiction should now be converted into science fact.
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