One look at Scientific American and I want to write something else

"How do you get your ideas?" is a stock question writers often get.

"Whatever creates exigency," the composition theorist in me responds, and I admit it's unflattering of me and pedantic.

So to give answer by example to the question, you are about to witness the kind of chain reaction that oft occurs in this writer's mind.

I read an article in Scientific American called, "World Needs to Set Rules for Geoengineering Experiments."  Geoengineering is the act of purposefully and intentionally altering the world's climate. For the better, of course. In fact there are those who have argued that climate change has already progressed past the tipping point and that the most prudent and practical course of action is not to enact policies that attempt to prevent the change, but rather to re-engineer the world's atmosphere and attack and counteract the effects of climate change.These proposed methods may include but are not limited to spraying aerosols in the atmosphere to cool the planet, space-based mirrors to deflect sunlight and (hopefully) reducing temperatures, and various mechanisms to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The problem, as the Scientific American article argues, is that placing these strategies into practice carries risk. While potential problems can be foreseen and tested for, it's not like we have another Earth where we can test the technology and see what happens before we try it on us. Reading all of this reminded me of a book I was going to write. That is until my college closed and all of my literary energies went solidly towards telling that story and ferreting out the truth (as best as I can, anyway). No, I don't mean my book on Dulce, either. Which I really will get back to one of these days. Sheesh. Just when I thought my "to-read" pile was inordinate, I'm starting to think the same of my "to-write" queue.

No, the theoretical book I have in mind came to me when I looked at a jet plane.

There is a municipal airport not far from where I live. It mainly caters to the exceptionally wealthy and the sight of private business jets soaring overhead is not uncommon. As I walked my dogs one day, I happened to look up at one of these clean, white birds with the swept-back wings, hearing its high-pitched whistle of engine noise. I then looked around at my neighborhood. It occurred to me in that moment that those people in that plane had no more concept of what it is like to be me than I do of what it's like to be them. We might as well be two different species. They cannot see me or anyone else from so high above, and I suspect the same level of visibility would occur at ground level. Just before these thoughts came to me, I had been mulling an article on geoengineering and fighting climate change. My jumbled mind was also replaying a faux-documentary from the UK called "Alternative 3."

A story with heavy debt to all of these factors (especially "Alternative 3") began percolating in my psyche.

I imagined, as I often do, a future where climate change has continued unabated. We've attempted geoengineering such as biochar in the soil and other methods, but they have not been enough to stem the tide. The world is ecologically inhospitable, with threats such as viral plagues released from melted permafrost and a sentient super-hurricane named Larry. Nations with any amount of wealth decide that their populations must move underground in order to survive. Thus, vast, densely-populated subterranean arcologies come to be.

It's far from heaven. Those who can afford them wear "coolsuits," trying to regulate their temperatures as population density creates a heat of its own underground. Our social problems still exist, only they're magnified now. Racial and economic inequality keep everyone teetering on a razor's edge, wondering as they carry their pennets of ill-afforded rations if they can make it home before another riot or police shooting. Mass suicides happen from time to time. One really creative one occurs when a group of self-determined individuals all sit in an old, grounded airplane, drug themselves to the point of utter numbness, and then light the plane ablaze. That way, sitting in the airliner's rows of seats, they at least have the sensation that they're going somewhere, far above the world.

But we also benefit from cool technology, such as artificial intelligence and androids. So we got that going for us. Which is nice...

Okay, another open admission. this milieu I envisioned was also inspired by an awful movie called Circuitry Man that I watched with Brad back in the early 1990s. People lived underground and when pressed for whatever reason to go to the world's surface, they called it "going topside." Maybe I'll have to hunt down that flick, watch it again, and review it. After all, that's what I do for my loyal ESE readers. I watch b-movies so that you don't have to. But I digress...

How do the wealthiest 1% handle this change in living? They don't seem to be doing anything differently, but there does seem to be an odd uptick in deaths among celebrities and wealthy businessmen (think 2016)...

Amid all this mess, a plucky professor of English and journalism has a friend of hers up and disappear. This friend is a STEM academic of one sort or another, possibly physics. Worried for her friend and unable to resist a mystery, the writer tries to track her friend down. In doing so, she discovers just how the wealthy are handling the world's problems.

They're secretly leaving.

I mean, heading into space.

Keeping in mind the supposed "secret space program" alleged by the likes of Gary McKinnon, I envisioned spacecraft taking away arks of elites while leaving the rest of us to stumble around in the muck and the sweat of a worsening world. Yes, I'm taking many social cues from Neill Blomkamp's wonderful, Elysium.

Anyway, after voyaging through space, the most likely place for them to land and start over would be a terraformed Mars. Great. Except for one thing. They're not alone on Mars and someone...or something...is about to show them how insignificant they and all the rest of us really are.

Maybe one day I'll get to this story. Emotionally, it will be a welcome change from writing about the College.

Then again, I thought of this story before February 3rd, 2017. The book was going to be partially set on the campus after it had moved underground. We even moved the Chapel brick by brick and reassembled it in our end of the "Greater Chicago Arcology."

I wonder if there will be any Chapel bricks left by the time I finally write this book?


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