A FACELIFT FOR THE PLANET, AT WHAT COST?M

Last year, a private company proposed “fertilising” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. “The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.

Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the centre, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
So far, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal”, said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”
That’s what some environmentalists feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would fertilise part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a UN group called for a moratorium, but Planktos abandoned the effort for lack of money.

Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns”, factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyse electrical systems across a continent.
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished”. He said it was common for scientists to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology—pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”

But in an essay in Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant”, the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to understand science and appreciate its potential for good”.
Hollander said, “Do we recognise when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another? There are social questions we should be paying attention to.”