Nuke the climate
We all know that climate change is dangerous, which means it can be tempting to take drastic measures to tackle it. Such as building a nuclear bomb orders of magnitude bigger than any to date and setting it off deep under the seabed.
News reporter Alex Wilkins drew Feedback’s attention to this little scheme. It is the brainchild of Andrew Haverly, who described his idea in a paper released on 11 January on arXiv, an online repository without peer review.
Haverly’s plan builds on an existing approach called enhanced rock weathering. Rocks like basalt react with carbon dioxide in the air, slowly removing the greenhouse gas and trapping it in mineral form. By crushing such rocks to powder, we can accelerate this chemical weathering and speed up CO2 removal. However, even under optimistic estimates, this will only mop up a small fraction of our greenhouse gas emissions.
That is where the nuke comes in. A decent nuclear explosion could reduce a large volume of basalt to powder, enabling a huge spurt of enhanced rock weathering. Haverly proposes burying a nuclear bomb at least 3 kilometres below the Southern Ocean seabed. The surrounding rocks would constrain the blast and radiation, minimising the risk to life. But the explosion would pulverise enough rock to soak up 30 years’ worth of CO2 emissions.
The first hurdle Haverly identifies is the scale of the bomb required. The largest nuclear explosion was that of Tsar Bomba, detonated by the USSR in 1961: it had a yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT. Haverly wants a bigger blast, a device with a yield of 81 gigatons, over 1600 times that of Tsar Bomba. Such a bomb, he writes solemnly, “is not to be taken lightly”.
Quite how we are supposed to build this thing, then transport it to the notoriously windy Southern Ocean, safely lower it to the seabed, and then send it several km below said seabed, is very much left as an exercise for the reader. Haverly estimates this endeavour would cost “around $10 billion dollars”, which would indeed be a lot of bang for your buck considering the huge costs of climate change. However, Feedback has no idea how he came up with that figure.
Anyway, nobody tell Elon Musk.
Afterlife sneak peak
Every so often, Feedback experiences a revelation through the medium of social media. Our most recent one came courtesy of an X user called @pallnandi, an occupational therapist and “unbiased realist”, who on 12 January posted: “Leaked photo of heaven is going viral on social media. No wonder Christians are so determined to get there! “
The accompanying image shows a city carved out of white stone, with architecture that looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, the Colosseum in Rome and Rivendell from Lord of the Rings. The hundreds of windows all glow the same shade of golden yellow. Above the city is a dark, starry sky, with what looks like the Milky Way streaking across it.
Hence Feedback’s revelation: that if you wait long enough, a long-debunked silly claim will circulate yet again.
This one goes back to at least 1994, when the outlandish Weekly World News published a story headlined “Heaven photographed by Hubble telescope“. It included a blurry black-and-white image of a starfield, with a huge glow in the middle that contained a collection of posh-looking buildings. Anyone who remembers what Asgard, home of the Norse gods, looked like in the Thor movies will have about the right idea.
It shouldn’t need saying that this image wasn’t from Hubble, or even NASA, and is fake. But it went viral as recently as February 2024, after being highlighted in videos on Instagram and TikTok.
It isn’t even a year later, and a new image with a similar tagline has gone viral. Several reports have pointed out that the image looks AI-generated: the Milky Way, in particular, has glitch-like patterns in it.
Feedback’s real issue with it, though, is that it looks like a dreadful place. For starters, the stars are crystal-clear, which implies a distinct lack of air. It looks freezing cold and the structures are like something designed by Adam Driver’s monomaniacal architect character in the movie Megalopolis. Sci-fi author Naomi Alderman waded in on Bluesky: “Right so no animals – or plants or trees – or rivers or lakes – just cold marble – dark sky and no sun – literally can’t see any people.” She likens it to the output of “a terrifying neighbourhood committee which enforces absolute rigid uniformity”.
Maybe one day we will get an iteration of this meme where heaven actually looks like a nice place to spend eternity. But Feedback doesn’t recommend holding your breath for it.
A fishy finale
A press release alerts us to the new book Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the least known habitat on Earth, by Sönke Johnsen. In it, the author explains what we know about life in the vast volume of water below the ocean surface, isolated from the air, the seabed and continental shelves. What is it like, Feedback wonders, to spend all your life in a place where only the force of gravity and a slight variation in light levels can tell you which way is up and which is down?
We don’t know, but we do know that the illustrator of this fishy tome is one Marlin Peterson.
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