Geoengineering and Terraforming Artificial Earthquakes Through Fracking to Save Lives?

Geoengineering Artificial Earthquakes to Save Lives?

This blog has focused primarily on practical solutions to the problems of PM2.5 air quality pollution. Things like inexpensive dust particulate sensors for your home, ultra-cheap DIY air purifiers made from duct tape. We’ve run a fashion section with inexpensive masks that are handy to keep stockpiled not only for air pollution and wildfires but also in case of Ebola and Bird Flu panics (both happening at this writing). We just wrote a blog article on big data analysis of earthquakes, and recommended only the cheapest and most-practical immediate crowdsourcing solutions.

But frequent readers will not that we have not been afraid to speculate or address controversial topics. We know of no other corporate blogs that discuss geoengineering, astroengineering, or terraforming. (If you know of one, get in touch.) If we don’t do it, who will?

Cosmos and Sagan on Astroengineering

A re-make of the Cosmos TV series is currently being aired. The host of the original Cosmos series, Carl Sagan discussed the concept of terraforming and astroengineering entire planets in much greater detail in books such as Cosmic Connection. If we are to become a spacefaring civilization, we would need these technologies to transform distant worlds into something habitable and Earth-like. With alarming data on climate change, the question is whether we will need these technologies closer to home someday soon to reverse the increase in greenhouse gases such as CO2. (The proposals for artificially reducing CO2 in the atmosphere or the sea are controversial, sound dangerous, are often impractical, and would face a nightmarish international approval process.)

Predictive Modeling and Geoengineering

In light of recent tremors in our home city of Los Angeles, we used analytics to decide whether or not to leave town temporarily. We talked about the problems of overfitting in analytics model and its impact on earthquake prediction and forecasting. The big modeling problem is that we (humans) do not have a good understanding of the physical processes involved in earthquakes. Deep-well sensors to measure remain prohibitively expensive. (As we wrote in our earlier post, we believe one day geoengineering of deep-well sensors will be used in support of predictive earthquake analytics.)

Humanity’s best predictive models of earthquakes suggest that the probability of a larger quake can be determined from the prevalence of smaller quakes. More small quakes (usually) means more larger quakes. However, this is counterintuitive because a higher number of smaller quakes (especially over a short period of time, like an “earthquake swarm”) would suggest a dissipation of dangerous energies in the Earth’s surface, which one would think would reduce the chances of quakes. (And, indeed, as we mentioned in our earlier posting, there is a town in Connecticut, USA that experiences a microquake on most days, but the region is not considered seismically active: so simply lots of small quakes don’t necessarily imply a higher chance of a bigger quakes, at least not without looking in more detail at the data.)

What’s going on?

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