BRAVE GREEN WORLD

How future technology can clean up the environment.

Physicist Forman and science writer and biologist Asher note the interesting datum that each day, a human “expends eight times the amount of energy released when a single stick of dynamite explodes”—but at a much slower rate. Slowness allows living organisms to metabolize with superb efficiency and produce waste products—mostly water, carbon dioxide, heat, and organic matter—that are not discarded but become energy sources for other organisms. In stark contrast, human creation and consumption dump waste into landfills or the atmosphere. The authors propose an alternative that replenishes resources and passes waste on to other industries for further use—a “circular economy” instead of our ruinous linear one. They emphasize that we must learn to grow material organically, just as wood, bone, silk, and others are grown in the real world: “How incredible would it be if a smartphone could be grown like an apple on a tree?” Using many dazzling illustrations, they deliver a capsule but definitely not dumbed-down education on the biology and thermodynamics that engineers must understand as they change the world. Skeptical readers will discover that two technologies that support the circular economy are already well along in development: additive manufacturing (3-D printing) and synthetic biology, which reprograms DNA “to give us complete control over the chemical tasks that biological cells can perform on our behalf.” The end result of these advancements, write the authors, will be a transformative, interconnected global system. Whereas the internet connects us to information, this “synthernet” would connect to the materials around us; allow us to recycle nearly everything, including our out-of-date smartphone; and then build the latest “biosmartphone” to order. Humans are superb problem-solvers, and the authors make a convincing case that technology will mitigate at least some of the devastation we are inflicting on the Earth. Readers unfamiliar with heterotic computing, photolithography, and other technical terms will appreciate the glossary.

An ingenious, if highly speculative, save-the-planet proposal that emphasizes science over politics.