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well, damn.
Jul. 16th, 2012 12:02 amhttp://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3253
Marine Bio is Watts' chosen field (long before the career in writing sf); if he thinks the coral reefs are d.e.d dead, I tend to believe him even though I really don't want to.... The obvious (to me) question is what dies next? What is utterly dependent on the reefs (biologically, physically, chemically) and is going to fail next?
I've done my share of cell-culture, have left the occasional flask to overgrow and die horribly in acid media, awash in its own effluent. And, for as big as the whole world is, it's no different - it's still a closed ecosystem, just like that solitary flask (just like Watts' punchbowl). This is going to be a very different world in a decade or two, unrecognizable in a century or two; I suspect that The Windup Girl is wildly optimistic as such things go.
Marine Bio is Watts' chosen field (long before the career in writing sf); if he thinks the coral reefs are d.e.d dead, I tend to believe him even though I really don't want to.... The obvious (to me) question is what dies next? What is utterly dependent on the reefs (biologically, physically, chemically) and is going to fail next?
I've done my share of cell-culture, have left the occasional flask to overgrow and die horribly in acid media, awash in its own effluent. And, for as big as the whole world is, it's no different - it's still a closed ecosystem, just like that solitary flask (just like Watts' punchbowl). This is going to be a very different world in a decade or two, unrecognizable in a century or two; I suspect that The Windup Girl is wildly optimistic as such things go.