You might not know it, but the hot water and rocks deep within Earth are teeming with undiscovered life. Dr. Tanvi Govil is one of the biologists studying this new frontier of microbial life that thrives in extreme places.
It sounds like you have no idea the magnitudes involved, or the timelines. You’re talking about something that took place over a period of 400 million years and whose effects (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and our oceans) remain. There’s no chance that geoengineering would change the oxygen levels to anything we can’t handle, and if it starts to head down that direction we can easily handle it (just stop the processes that would sequester carbon).
It’s like being worried that your air conditioning is going to freeze your pipes in the house, in the middle of summer.
You’re probably right, but bioengineering this to self-propogate quickly in the environment would be exponential. I’m sure that isn’t the plan, but it could be done, and it could make this an issue. We shouldn’t let that stop us because we’re currently in an exponential fuck up in the opposite direction, but it is something to think about.
Look up the Oxygen Catastropy, also called Oxygen Holocaust.
That’s what happens if too much carbon is removed from the atmosphere and thus there’s too much oxygen in it.
It sounds like you have no idea the magnitudes involved, or the timelines. You’re talking about something that took place over a period of 400 million years and whose effects (the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere and our oceans) remain. There’s no chance that geoengineering would change the oxygen levels to anything we can’t handle, and if it starts to head down that direction we can easily handle it (just stop the processes that would sequester carbon).
It’s like being worried that your air conditioning is going to freeze your pipes in the house, in the middle of summer.
I mean, we are currently doing geoengineering on a planetary scale that change CO2 levels to something we can’t handle.
You’re probably right, but bioengineering this to self-propogate quickly in the environment would be exponential. I’m sure that isn’t the plan, but it could be done, and it could make this an issue. We shouldn’t let that stop us because we’re currently in an exponential fuck up in the opposite direction, but it is something to think about.
The article talks about mass producing the enzymes themselves, not the life forms that produce the enzymes. It’s a key distinction.
Plus these organisms already live on this earth. They can’t outcompete other life on the surface, in less harsh conditions.