Bioengineering could save the biosphere from the ravages of climate change
The members of the scientific community predict that climate change will have serious repercussions on our societies. The global warming of the planet may have disastrous effects. Experts warn that gradual processes over time could lead to sudden collapse once a critical point is reached.
In the past few decades several strategies have been proposed to combat climate change, from the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to geoengineering techniques, strategies of which Solé remains sceptical: "The cost of the proposed solutions is huge given the magnitude of scale and the technology required and, possibly, insufficient", said the author of the work.
Terraforming, a theoretical concept that could make our planet change.
One alternative put forward by Ricard Solé in his article is based on the concept of terraforming, a biological engineering process with which a planet could change its atmosphere, temperature, topography and ecology in order to achieve a stable biosphere.
This idea has been proposed for the colonization of the planet Mars. Some scholars argue that the red planet could be inhabited by bacteria capable of adapting to extreme conditions, so that these microorganisms would be the bases for the establishment of other more complex organisms.
An obvious, crucial, but important difference of this type of biological engineering is that, unlike geoengineering, a live system has the ability to self-replicate and disseminate until reaching the desired scale within the recipient ecosystem. "Instead of looking to the red planet, the proposal would be to terraform our own planet", Solé stated.
Potential of synthetic ecosystems
Modified bacteria could be designed to help recover the upset balance or to achieve a new stable state. A synthetic ecosystems-based approach could produce organisms with the ability to grow and modify key properties in fragile ecosystems, such as water retention or nitrogen fixation, thus avoiding the collapse that would be caused by an abrupt transition from a system with vegetation to a desert state. This process would affect many of our planet's habitats.
Colonizing habitats that have degraded thanks to human activity would be another of the possible applications of synthetic organisms. For example, they could be used to mitigate the accumulation of plastic in the oceans. The combination of an appropriate biological design and the existence of appropriately selected ecological barriers could greatly limit the potential for evolution of the organisms introduced.
As Solé explains, "all of this could be achieved in reasonably short time scales and the proposal would not be limited to the harnessing of carbon dioxide. For example, plants subjected to stress conditions could improve their survival through the improvement of microbial communities of the subsoil", Solé adds.
In this future scenario, somewhere between disturbing and hopeful, this expert scientist on complex systems confirms that carrying out these innovative projects will require the integration of ideas and the participation of experts from many different fields of knowledge, such as synthetic biology, ecology, genetic engineering, evolutionary biology, climate sciences, biogeography, and others.
Reference work:
Ricard Solé (2015), " Bioengineering the biosphere?", Ecological Complexity, 22, pp. 40-49.
Further information:
- Ricard Solé is the author of the book Vidas sintéticas : (Synthetic lives), in the collection Metatemas de la Filosofia de la Ciència (Meta Themes of the Philosophy of Science) published by Busquets (March, 2012).
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