Human civilization will heat up the planet; the glaciers will melt and the seas will rise. It’s a familiar refrain by now, with a familiar solution: stop pumping out the greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat.
But even if we bring the greenhouse effect under control, says a Tufts astrophysicist, the earth will warm up anyway, thanks to a completely different source of heat that we create ourselves.
Over the next 250 years, calculates Eric J. Chaisson in a recent paper, the earth’s population will start generating so much of its own heat – chiefly wasted from energy use – that it will warm the earth even without a rise in greenhouse gases. The only way to avoid it, he says, is to rethink how we generate energy.
Energy has been the key ingredient that has sustained human life, the growth of our intelligence and civilization, Chaisson told them. But the way we are making it could thwart our evolution, and our survival, if we do not adapt now. “Humans are part of an evolving universe stretching across billions of light-years of space, and billions of years of time,” he said. Then he asked, “Who are we to think that change ought now to stop?”
