“But if we don’t continue to develop, how will humanity survive?”
“Why not ask how other life-forms will survive if there are too many people? If the population of Homo sapiens were controlled, then we wouldn’t have to extract so much from the environment, would we?”
“I think,” said Detlef, “that as long as we can keep developing new ways of feeding even more people, as occurred during the Green Revolution, that means that the world can support ‘this many people.’ It’s our generation’s responsibility to feed all the people who are alive in the world.”
“But in fact,” said Sara, “there’s mounting evidence now indicating that we can’t afford to support ‘this many people,’ and that if everyone lived the way you and I do we’d need three earths. They calculated the ecological footprint at the end of the last century. But the reality is that wealth never reaches the poor, and they’re the ones who have the most mouths to feed. This issue cannot be solved politically or technically, by another Green Revolution. The rich and powerful are already entrenched, and they don’t really care about the people who go hungry.”
“With all due respect, Sara, isn’t the lifestyle you personally lead quite comfortable?”
“I do all I can to avoid unnecessary waste. Better to do what you can than not try at all.”
Detlef pondered the unnecessary waste in his own lifestyle.
“Lots of people,” Sara continued, “say that feelings aren’t part of the scientific enterprise, but actually all scientists can do as scientists is try to determine what’s true and what isn’t. They can’t tell us what the right choices are. I want to be a person who can offer the decision-makers better choices instead of avoiding all these thorny ethical issues by invoking ‘professional neutrality’ or some such hypocrisy. As long as the human population stops growing, and we change our way of life, there’ll be no need to extract methane ice.” Sara’s red hair was swelling in the ocean breeze, like the only flaming thing in a pale blue fog.
“Do you know why this place is called Storegga?” Sara tried to clear the air by changing the subject.
Detlef shook his head.
“In Norwegian it means ‘the Great Edge.’ Have you heard of the Storegga Slide? It happened thousands of years ago, and in the past few years it’s happened again. For the past several decades, with the acceleration of global warming, hydrates in the shelf frost layer have been melting and bubbles forming. The resulting crystal decomposition has increased sedimentary instability, causing a massive slide of a layer two hundred and fifty meters high and several hundred kilometers wide, practically half the distance from Norway to Greenland. It’s changed the whole coastal ecology. Geologists initially argued that this sort of slide occurs once every hundred thousand years, in synchrony with the Ice Age cycle. You think it’ll be a hundred thousand years before it happens again?”
“Hard to say.”
“Right, it’s hard to say.” Sara gathered her windblown hair and said, “Probability theory isn’t much use for the prediction of this kind of catastrophe, because there are only two outcomes: either it happens or it doesn’t. To me, if the shelf frost collapses again someday, I wouldn’t want it to be because people have been digging around in the earth. If it happens naturally, I won’t have anything to complain about, because it’s none of my business and out of my control. Whatever happens, I just don’t want it to be because of us. We’re everywhere! Why do people reproduce to the point that we cover the entire planet? Enough already! I don’t have a child and won’t consider having one, either, so I’m not thinking about these issues for the sake of my own offspring.”
Detlef gazed at Sara’s eyebrows, which were just as fiery red as her hair, and at her brown eyes beneath. The signals were clear: he was enchanted by those eyes. He wanted to deny it, but the truth was irrefutable.
Actually, Sara had been paying attention to the Trash Vortex for quite some time, ever since oceanologists started observing and arguing about it at the end of the twentieth century. She applied to Norway’s National Science Academy for a grant to study the potential impact of the vortex on Taiwan’s coastal terrain, but as the grant was still under review when the edge of the vortex hit the east coast, Sara decided to pay her own way. What hurt the sea hurt her personally. Now Detlef had an excuse for a return visit: it was only logical that he would take Sara to an island he’d been to himself many years before.
Jung-hsiang Li picked them up at the airport. He was one of the engineers that had participated in the same tunneling project and the only one who knew about Detlef’s visit. When they first met Li had just gotten married. Now he was a man with a hoarse voice, thinning hair and a bit of a bulge, features which made him look older than his actual age. Back in the day, they had many e-mail discussions about the project in the year before Detlef actually came to Taiwan. They drew up a checklist for the superhard quartz-rich sandstone in the area and considered how to cope with crumbly strata and excessive groundwater inflows. Detlef’s final assessment was that the difficulties involved in digging the tunnel shouldn’t be insuperable, but it might not be worth the time and money: it was a cost-benefit issue. Jung-hsiang Li took the official line: the tunnel is feasible no matter what.
Detlef knew what this meant. On any project engineers like him were just moles. If he couldn’t get the job done he could get lost. But not even considering his remuneration, Detlef wanted to know as a mechanical designer whether a TBM could drill through the quartz-rich Szeleng sandstone along the route, which contained so much quartz it was basically quartzite. It had a Mohs hardness of between 6 and 7, when steel was only 5! The young Detlef was very confident. Except that the structure of the actual rock stratum might not be quite as “regular” as they imagined from the samples. They had the geological report on a trial borehole several dozen meters deep, but that was just scratching the surface for such a big mountain as this. The actual texture of the heart of the mountain was anyone’s guess. They would just have to improvise. But Detlef didn’t care about any of that. He embraced the challenge. Besides, why not give it a try when someone was providing the funding?
Except that groundwater inflows might be even scarier than the sandstone. If they penetrated a water-saturated layer during the drilling process, the groundwater would start gushing out, propelling massive amounts of muck at the TBM and causing machinery breakdowns or triggering cave-ins. As a preventative measure, Detlef recommended the addition of a chain-style conveyor as a way of getting the inflows out of the way. After all, any damage to the machine would compromise mechanical smoothness.
The factory team custom-built two 11.74-meter diameter hard-rock double-shielded TBMs. Even assembling such huge machines was an enormous undertaking that took several months all told. During that time, the most interesting time of day for Detlef was checking his e-mail for progress updates.
Not surprisingly, there were setbacks when the machine was put into operation. The rock was so hard that the cutters kept developing abnormal wear and tear, and if they were not replaced immediately the diameter of the borehole would shrink. Like a cat trying desperately to get its head into a hollow, the TBM would keep trying to nibble away at the face of the rock; once the outer shield got wedged in there, the machine could only wait helplessly for the workers to come to the rescue. According to the data Detlef received, during the worst of it the cutters had to be changed every 2.3 meters. Moreover, the inflows were much more serious than anticipated, causing frequent shutdowns even with the conveyor.