Bugs and Stuff...

No, I'm not talking about the kind of bugs that crawl around in the kitchen, nor even about the kind that crawl around in the woods or in the lawn, I'm talking about the kind that crawl around on a microscope slide. The kind you harvest and culture up from a sample of bullshit, which is how this idea got started, just pure bullshit for sport. But, the longer I've looked at it the more I've realized hey, sometimes bullshit is the most fertile environment going to conceive and gestate an idea that really, really needs to happen. So I'd like to talk about bugs for a minute or two in relation to something most folks wouldn't think is related at all. Bugs may be one possible solution for global climate change.

The problem with burning fossil fuels for power is that the remnants of the fuel get added to the atmosphere in the form of carbon compounds, CO2, methane. These are gases in the atmosphere, they're there for a very long time, unless something pulls them back out. What takes these gasses and converts them into some other form? Plant life does, plants inhale those gasses, exhale the oxygen and integrate the carbons. Pretty standard and stock understanding, that is. But the plants on the surface of the Earth are pretty much at capacity, they can't begin to utilize all the excess carbon floating in the air from burning fossil fuels. So what I'm very seriously considering is the need to add a new and controlled layer to the bio-sphere of planet earth. We need a whole bunch of flying bugs, well, plankton like plants to be more precise, and we need them in the mid-layers of the atmosphere, right at the top of the troposphere to be precise.

These tiny creatures need to be configured such that they arrive starving hungry, for light, for carbon, and the end result of their metabolism goes like this: they bloat up with the methane, don't really convert that much of it, but the swelling of the methane makes each little critter a baby balloon that will float for a while. And of course, they treat the CO2 just like any other plant, integrating the carbon into their own body and exhale the oxygen. The little bugs live their life cycle, eventually the weight of their body overcomes the bouyancy of the methane and they settle lower into the atmosphere, get trapped into the weather cycles to rain out and return the carbon into the terrestrial food chain.

Now, of course the little sky sweeper plankton need mankinds help to do all of this, they won't be able to reproduce at altitude (and yes, I know the joke about the ducks flying United, and the old southerners stories about the mosquitos breeding in mid air it's so humid, but no, that really isn't likely to happen) so they'll need to be started on the ground, and then delivered to their job site by man. How? I'm seeing massive fleets of high altitude blimps serving as air freight, hydrogen powered so their exhaust is water and oxygen, very likely robotically controlled from orbit and being operated with a huge tax write off to carry like ten percent of the total payload up to where such blimps would work the best, which would by coincidence be exactly where the little critters need to be delivered... let the world's economy reform around an arrangement like that and hey... in fifty or a hundred years the sky might actually be blue again.