The Earth Defense System

Summer has arrived, and heat waves have become the norm. High temperatures kill many wild creatures as well. The climate is no longer one they can adapt to, and many animals and plants are heading down the road to extinction.

To Stop Global Boiling, We Must Change the Education System

Humans are no exception. Record high temperatures are broken almost every year, and we suffer from the fury of nature in the form of extreme weather: heat waves, torrential rain, tornadoes. Primary industries, which work directly with nature, are becoming unsustainable, and even consumers who never touch the soil are starting to notice as they take an economic hit.

Even though the global environment is changing this much, we humans are trying to get by with symptomatic treatment, without changing anything. We clearly lack problem-solving ability. Problem-solving ability is cultivated by the educational environment and by daily habits, and unless both are improved urgently and fundamentally, our attempts to solve global problems will keep failing.

Research in Geophysics Is Essential for Tackling Global Problems

To understand Earth’s greenhouse effect, we need to study geophysics. Earth is thought to maintain an environment in which life can survive thanks to the presence of greenhouse gases, but there are also many layers of invisible barriers, such as the geomagnetic shield, and they are what keep the homeostasis of ecosystems intact. For example, the solar wind and cosmic rays coming from the Sun are invisible, but without the Van Allen belts¹, Earth would become a harsh environment for living things, like living inside a microwave oven.

In Western civilization, a climate-change business is booming around technologies that directly remove carbon dioxide and methane, but even if particular gases can be removed, that will not solve everything. As science always does, it is symptomatic treatment, not a cure. Symptomatic treatment creates a new problem B when it solves problem A. For example, if we remove too much greenhouse gas, the planet will then cool too much and head toward a global freeze.

Putting off the problem with “If it gets too cold, we’ll think about it then” merely shifts one problem into another. Once fossil fuels have all been dug out from underground, thickening greenhouse gases that have become too thin will be just as hard as thinning greenhouse gases that have become too thick. Whether too hot or too cold, Earth becomes a planet where many living things cannot live.

Solving Global Warming with Children’s Pure Thinking

Like the porridge on the table in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it must be neither too hot nor too cold. How do we get it to just the right temperature?

With Calpis (a Japanese soft drink made by diluting a sweet, milky concentrate), if it is too weak, you add more concentrate and it becomes just right. If it is too strong, you add water to dilute it. We just need to do the same thing with Earth’s atmosphere. After all, if your Calpis is too strong, you can’t take out only the Calpis that has already mixed in, and even if you could, it would be far too much trouble! That is how children who think things through with Calpis would see it.

Dilute Greenhouse Gases the Way You Dilute Calpis

So what is the composition of Earth’s atmosphere? If there are too many gases with a greenhouse effect, we can increase the gases without one. Is there a gas without a greenhouse effect that we could increase? How about oxygen? Would there be any problem with more oxygen?

Nitrogen makes up about 78%, oxygen about 20.95%, argon about 0.93% and carbon dioxide about 0.0415%². Of these, nitrogen is a very stable molecule that rarely undergoes chemical reactions, so its concentration stays almost constant. It constantly circulates through the atmosphere, the soil and water.

Argon is an inert gas that does not react chemically, so its concentration is stable. It is produced by radioactive decay inside Earth and released into the atmosphere, but production and release are in balance, so its concentration stays almost constant.

Oxygen is supplied by organisms with chloroplasts through photosynthesis. If the number of plants and other organisms with chloroplasts increases, oxygen will simply increase. For example, we could grow plants where there are none. Candidates include deserts, ice, the sea surface and the surfaces of human-made structures. Of these, the place where plants once grew is the desert. Do that, and oxygen will increase and the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect should weaken a little. In fact, there is no way to increase oxygen on Earth other than plant photosynthesis. And photosynthesis uses up carbon dioxide too: two birds with one stone! The logic of children who think things through with Calpis is so simple and clear that even a cat would be convinced.

Cover the Deserts with Plants, Retracing Earth’s History

But how do you cover a desert with plants? Won’t plants brought to a place with no water and no soil just wither right away? Yet if you look very closely, there are insects in desert regions, there are animals, and cacti are standing there. There are oases where springs well up. Why not plant lots of plants around an oasis and keep expanding it? Then more kinds of insects and birds will fly in, herbivores will come, and the carnivores that eat them will come too. Microorganisms that decompose dead plants and animals will come. Soil will form from the humus of what they decompose.

In this way a cycle takes shape, and plants sprout, stretch their stems, bloom and scatter their seeds. Even if left alone, the plants should keep spreading like this. If humans do nothing unnecessary, this cycle will turn the desert green. If deserts can be greened, so can wastelands and dry mountain regions. Even former mine sites can be greened, as long as the plants are not grown for food. This is how, on the ancient Earth, the habitats of living things spread from the sea to the land and from low places to high ones.

Plants pioneer, and animals move in. Microorganisms pull the strings behind the scenes. That is how Earth has been maintained until now, and that is how it should be from now on. That is what children who love Calpis, a lovely drink born of the power of microorganisms, would think.

What Is Essential Is Invisible

The carbon dioxide that increases through burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests and tilling the soil is invisible. That is why the problem is hard to solve. If it had a color and we could see how dense it was, we would surely try to do something about it.

Oxygen is invisible too. Subsurface streams and groundwater are invisible. The underground world of microorganisms and the networks of fungal hyphae are invisible. Whether we can realize that we are kept alive by the existence and workings of invisible things is no longer a matter of religious stories but something scientific theory can explain; it is an ability that comes naturally as we raise our level of literacy about the universe and Earth.

A New Growth System Is a Mechanism for Protecting Earth

According to developmental theory, from age 6 a child sets out on a journey of intellectual inquiry, using the five senses trained up to that point to explore the outside world and solve problems. Existing education does not let children use their five senses. It does not let them use their ability to move or their ability to think. Instead, it plants humanity’s mistaken common sense and prejudices about nature.

Such preconceptions, planted unconsciously, get in the way of solving global problems. Grasp nature as it truly is with the five senses, and use the sixth sense to do the supernatural work the universe wishes intelligent life to do. That is what makes it possible to manage Earth. A new growth system, as a mechanism for protecting Earth, makes this possible. The new growth system is also an Earth defense system.

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Footnotes

1. The Van Allen belts are radiation belts made up of protons (proton radiation) and electrons (beta radiation) captured by Earth’s magnetic field. They are thought to form when particles from the solar wind and cosmic rays are trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. ↩

2. The current composition of Earth’s atmosphere. ↩