Why, asks Keats, should we leave the continents free to drift about aimlessly, when communitarian geoengineering could weld them, and us, into one nation indivisible, on a single supercontinent bounded by a single ocean?
While the United Nations Environmental Program has yet to add an International Panel on Continent Change to the existing I P C C , Keats' plans to extend its hegemony are on view at The Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.
His Anthropocene workaround entails taking a tectonic shortcut through the Neo-Hadean epoch:
His Anthropocene workaround entails taking a tectonic shortcut through the Neo-Hadean epoch:
'Powered by the heat below the Earth's core, nuclear reactors would cool magma in some places, while subterranean machines would heat it up elsewhere, moving continents around. The Pacific Ocean would disappear, bringing together the U.S., Russia & China.
"You have three countries that are looking at each other with a high degree of suspicion from across an ocean, that would literally be in the same place," he says. "I think that that changes things."
The new supercontinent would also bring the Global South upward. "It becomes a way in which to potentially alter the economic status quo," Keats says. "Because economics is such a crucial matter as far as how we address climate change, ... by bringing them into greater alignment, perhaps we no longer have this us versus them antagonism."A trifling investment in dimensional analysis suggests a minor problem. While geoengineers merely aspire to change the color of the sky, bringing Pangaea back alive would require powering up mantle plumes generating magma flows on a scale exceeding the flood basalts that figured in the Permian-Triassic and Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions. The re-arrangement of the continents might entail melting about 10% of the Earth's crust and upper mantle - a volume roughly 100 times that of the oceans and atmosphere combined.
Since magma is some three orders of magnitude denser than air and the upper mantle needs to be heated 1000 degrees Kelvin to make it flow fast enough to revise the map within mankind's evolutionary lifetime, a lot of surplus heat from the beefed-up geotherm would end up in the oceans and atmosphere.
Dividing the ~ gigajoule - per - tonne heat of fusion of that much incandescent rock into the thermal mass of the hydrosphere will, alas, boil the oceans dry, and then some. One worlders may applaud this side effect as a feature, not a bug, since absent the oceans, we'll end up on one continent by definition.
Beside Climate Truthers droning on about undersea volcanoes as the true wellsprings of climate change, Keats fanboys should include cornucopians and the Club For Growth. With nuclear power priced at fifty bucks a gigajoule, more or less, his proposal's start-up bill would come to roughly $350,000,000,000,000,000,000 a head for each of seven billion prospective World Citizens, plus tax and tip.
