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NASA's latest Mars rover, Curiosity, is currently its way to Mars, on a mission to explore whether life could exist there. If we're going to colonize Mars — and some scientists say we must — it's likely that we'll start by terraforming. Terraforming, or planetary engineering, is the process of altering the climate of a planet to be more hospitable to life and human exploration. Of all the bodies in the solar system, Mars is by far the best candidate. Here's how that would work. More »
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We hear a lot about slowing climate change by recycling, cutting fossil fuel use, and just generally limiting our carbon footprints. But scientists and engineers believe there could be solutions that go beyond that. These are so-called geoengineering solutions, which include everything from squirting particles into the stratosphere to cool the planet, to creating massive carbon sinks that would pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Until recently, such solutions were regarded as wildly speculative. But now they are gaining traction — especially among politicians and policy-makers who previously rejected environmental conservation plans. More »
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The Ice Age can be explained by some well-placed specks of iron. Adding dust to the waters around Antarctica can supercharge plankton growth, causing global temperature drops. To stop climate change, we need a whole lot of iron filings. More »
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In 1936, after nearly two decades of devastating floods in the Mississippi River Basin, Congress passed the Flood Control Act, which funneled over $300 million into dams and other projects that engineers hoped would prevent millions from losing their homes in the next flood. But even this dramatic injection of cash left people vulnerable to floods in Ohio. That's when a visionary with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pitched a crazy idea: Why not create a vast, scale model of the Mississippi River, as an entire river system, and use a huge system of hydraulic pumps to simulate floods and flood prevention techniques? More »
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On the cusp of the Great Depression, architect Hermann Soergel had a radical idea: Why not expand the landmass of Europe by draining part of the Mediterranean? It was all part of his plan to found the nation of Atlantropa. More »
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The Three Gorges dam on China's Yangtze River, pictured here, is one of the world's great engineering marvels. It's just one of many structures people have built to transform and contain China's massive rivers for the past 2,400 years. More »
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The artificial island homes off the coast of Dubai are wonders of the world. Unfortunately, they seem to be eroding. More »
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Our efforts to intentionally alter our home planet have been unpredictable at best. Can we terraform other planets without making the same mistakes? Should we? More »
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We've seen how things can go awry when we tinker with our planet, but geology is fairly resistant to short-term change. When we screw with ecosystems, however, the chain of effects can be long and extremely unpredictable. More »
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Humans can rearrange the shape of our planet almost as easily as the furniture in your living room (or the deck chairs on the Titanic). Of course, it doesn't always work out as planned. More »
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We usually think of terraforming as something we'll do in the future to other planets, but we have thousands of years of experience changing the shape of our own planet in profound ways. More »
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Imagine a vast, geoengineered ring around a star, its inner surface entirely devoted to human habitation. Larry Niven used this idea for his Ringworld books. And now VFX artist Simon Terrey flies us through Niven's creation in this video. Gorgeous. More »
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A whistleblower has just reported on a secret organization in Australia called Bluebird, which is a heavily-funded geoengineering project to stop global warming. Now you can join the fracas by participating in the cool eco-thriller game called Bluebird. More »
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Slime molds have evolved to produce some of the most efficient networks seen in nature, but just how good are they? As good as the notoriously complex Tokyo rail system. More »
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Scientists commissioned to track the effects of the Sydney dust storm have found something intriguing - a massive growth spurt in nearby ocean algae growth, which could help counteract global warming. Could the storm be proof-of-concept for geoengineering the oceans? More »
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A group of scientists have a radical idea for combating climate change: terraforming the Sahara Desert and replacing it with a lush forest. But will its carbon capturing potential outweigh the negative ecological consequences? More »
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Humans have been terraforming since the earliest days of agriculture. We've got a gallery showing some of the Earth's most incredible terraforming projects - as well as what terraforming might look like on other worlds. More »
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Is the only way to survive global climate change to try and change it even more through geoengineering? Possibly - if doing so doesn't trigger an international political "incident" accidentally. More »
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These strange cones and holes look like a bizarre wind formation in the Egyptian desert, until you see the pattern they make from the air. More »
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The Dead Sea, a body of water that sits at the nexus of several political hot spots in the Middle East, has been a source of contention for decades. Now a New York City architecture firm called Phu Hoang Office has proposed a way to turn the sea into a thriving center for tourism and eco-research. The firm proposed the creation of artificial islands (pictured) called No Man's Land that would house hotels, create energy, and harvest clean water from the atmosphere. Check out more pictures and a schematic below. More »
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On the chilly Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, farmers are placing 220 acres of land under glass so they can grow vegetables all year round. The greenhouse, when completed, will house 1.3 million plants and increase the UK's crop of green vegetables by 15%. Called Thanet Earth, the project will be a series of 7 connected grenhouses with a relatively small carbon footprint. And nothing grown inside Thanet Earth will ever touch soil. More »
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Tweaking Earth's climate to combat global warming seems like a great idea. Giant mirrors or shades in space, artificially enhanced cloud cover, and regular injections of reflective sulfate particles into the stratosphere could all help cool the planet enough for us to ignore all of the CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere. But a new study says one of the most popular ideas — the sulfate particles — would devastate the ozone layer, leaving us all to fry from exposure to ultraviolet radiation even as the planet cooled. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. The message today seems to be: Become a celebrity, make millions of dollars - and use your fortune to buy alcohol. Get addicted to diet pills. Get your teeth capped. When was the last time the rich got addicted to something interesting? Something that actually made heads turn, made people think what the f-? Why not sink millions of dollars - your entire net worth! - into something truly grandiose? Why not blow your whole bank account building a series of new, artificial show caves beneath the surface of the earth? Why not get addicted to excavation? When it was reported last summer that London's ultra-rich had begun building downward, into the earth's surface, we witnessed what was perhaps the beginning of the world's most interesting subterranean property boom. More »
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The Panama Canal, a human-created waterway between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, is the last century's greatest work of geoengineering. And it continues to evolve. Just a few months ago, workers began setting off explosives like those you see here to widen the canal and allow oil supertankers to get through. Want to see more of the canal and the giant ships that traverse it? More »
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The top of China's "bird's nest" Olympic stadium is open to the elements, and therefore the government has ordered the Beijing Meteorological Bureau to make sure it won't rain during the games. The Bureau has already had some success preventing light rain, but heavy rain is harder to control. They'll use two different "seeding" techniques for dissipating droplets in frozen clouds, and dissipating warmer clouds before they start forming water droplets. Beijing's head of weather manipulation, Zhang Qian, explains how. More »
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A new article in Foreign Policy suggests that geoengineering (or weather engineering) may be part of the next high-tech battle strategy for troops who want a force multiplier. The article is an updated version of an essay by futurist Jamais Cascio. Others have already speculated about how the ability to control rain systems and pull down lightening may be the future of warfare. In fact, all the technologies to do this already exist. But Cascio thinks forced ecosystem imbalances may be the weapon of choice for offensive geoengineers. More »
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