Q: You’ve written a Victorian mysteries & thrillers that took off quite well. Why a Sci-Fi now?
A: The idea came to me in early summer 2014. I was in a meeting with twenty environmental scientists. We discussed our visions (nope, we didn’t smoke stuff) and future projects. I wanted to know how to lower a person’s CO2 footprint to the recommended level. To my surprise, none of the people in the room (all senior scientists, all in the environmental and biotech field) knew what the average German CO2 footprint is (11 tonnes of CO2 per person per year), or the recommended level (2.5 tonnes). What surprised me even more was that none of them thought it had anything to do with science to find out how one can lower one’s footprint, that none of them believed it could be done on a per-individual basis, and that some thought new technologies could help us reach the 2.5 tonnes goal. I then asked which technologies could help us reach this goal in the next ten years. The answers were…sobering, to put it mildly.
So a bunch of experienced environmental scientists, who have known about climate change for roughly twenty years, had no idea how to fix it and certainly didn’t think it necessary to change their own habits significantly. This pissed me off so much that I killed ten billion people in my Sci-Fi. Talk about anger management…
Q: So we are all going to die?
A: Yep. The average life expectancy of a human in a first world country is 80 years.
Q: What I meant was — is the science in your Sci-Fi sound?
A: A simple “yes” doesn’t nail it, so let me put it like this: It is abundantly clear that our planet is warming. But not only the warming itself will change our world as we know it. We are already seeing changing weather patterns with extreme weather and droughts. We are already in the middle of three pandemics: The HIV/Aids pandemic is slowly retreating, the seventh cholera pandemic that started in the 1960s is still not under control, and the tuberculosis pandemic infects roughly one third of the human population. The World Health Organization warns about the spreading of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria with 900,000 cases each year. Microbiologists warn about the spreading of antibiotics-resistance genes in a great number of pathogenic bacteria, and they expect us to reach a point when antibiotics are no longer effective. Think of Victorian London with diseases like syphilis, cholera, typhus — there were no antibiotics available back then and a lot of people died a gruesome death.
What has disease to do with climate change you might ask — a lot! The warming of the oceans will not only cause sea levels to rise, but will also raise groundwater tables. Imagine the dramatic input of faeces from flooded sewer systems into groundwater — our most important drinking water resource. In combination with elevated atmospheric and sea surface water temperatures, the spreading of disease will speed up. Add this to the warning of hydrologists: clean drinking water will soon be a very limited commodity.
Q: So you do believe in climate change and global change and other weird stuff?
A: Duh?
Q: Anyway. Where is the proof?
A: Umm. You could, for example, check the “extras” in the next section that gives you a few examples of the things that are already happening and a few data from predictive models. Or you can ask a scientist. They have blogs and stuff.
Q: Ooookay. Back to the interesting things. Will we hear more about Micka and Runner?
A: Yup.
Q: Cool! When?
A: Um…now?