Growing Houses: The Solution to Climate Change

Climate change can be solved. In fact: all problems which are solvable can be solved with the application of sufficient intelligence.

I am against the idea of carbon sequestration for sequestration's sake. Carbon sequestration is the removal and storage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's like lighting money on fire. There is no economic value in this process. Any process which has no economic value will not get a lot of attention from society. If you want to make an electric car, you better make it a desirable car.

It doesn't have to be this way because carbon is a widely useful atom for building materials. The most useful atom. Most known useful molecules and materials we use in civilization have carbon as a critical component. From steel to all organic molecules. Life uses carbon as a primary building block. This is probably due to it being a widely available and chemically useful atom.

CO2 should be valuable. CO2 is heavily carbon, and carbon is the most useful atom. Life finds CO2 very useful. But CO2 is not valuable because using it is expensive. CO2 is a very stable molecule and changing it to other things requires a lot of energy.

But energy should not be expensive. Albert Einstein showed that an incredible amount of energy is available with what we have around us. Every day, we find new ways to make energy less expensive. Less expensive solar cells. New kinds of solar cells like roofing or even transparent materials or materials that are thin and flexible. All this will come in the future, faster if we invest in the right research and development. In the long term, we will be able to create a sun in a box: fusion power. One organization doing this is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

Further, synthetic biology will be able to harness 3.5 billion years of organic evolution. Organisms obviously can already do useful things with sunlight. We already "grow houses" in a roundabout way: wood. But we can do better. What if we engineer single cell organisms that can grow the skeleton of an entire building as a single crystal? Throw some feedstock and sunlight in and watch the structure rise from the ground like from a 3D printer. Such things may be possible in the future, as we continue to understand and engineer biology. These organisms could use CO2 from the atmosphere just like plants do. In a sense we would be sequestering carbon but in a useful way. We can also use synthetic biology for creating food very efficiently directly from CO2.

Advancements in synthetic biology will require understanding biology and understanding biology will require advancements in artificial intelligence. Even if not artificial general intelligence, we have advancements in artificial narrow intelligence which involve optimizing non-linear functions or narrowing down a large amount of possibilities. These advancements will be applicable in materials science.

This is how we can solve climate change. But it could also be a part of creating massive utopian cities as I described in this post.