White Mirror I: Prelude
The first of a multi-part reflection on chaos, perception, and agency.
Friday
Washington, D.C.
After 35 long years, the day had finally come. The funeral for one life was the birth of another.
He gathered with his colleagues in their favorite conference roomâall case officers for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. A sheet cake was illuminated by rows of bright fluorescent lights. It read: Happy Retirement Roger.
Rodgerâs mind was elsewhere, even though he was surrounded by the closest remaining thing he had to a family for one last time. Tonightâs retirement party was distracting him from preparing for his forthcoming pilgrimage to the Mecca of fly fishing, and Rodger still needed to pack. Plus, he had just purchased some new gear and badly needed practice with it as he was relatively new to the sport.
His dream of the perfect retirement was born as the excitement of the first few years of his career wore off. From that point forward, Rodger began saving to make this dream a realityâsaving and sacrificing for over three decades. Often, the dream was the only thing keeping Rodger going. And not once did Rodger question if enduring years of ethical battles with tax collection cases was a just price to pay for the chance to live out his dream retirement.
Rodger, now 62, occupied the liminal space between his working life and what he imagined to be his dream life.
Despite being well past his best years physically, he was still in relatively good healthâand long may his good health last, for he had the ambition to live out his days experiencing endless moments of adventure and freedom.
That night, he knew his final steps out of that IRS office building were his first steps on the adventure of a lifetime.
On the other side of the DMV, Lindsey was working late this Friday night. Not because she had a pile of work to complete, but her partner was out of town this week and she didn't feel like staying out late at a bar with her friends or going to the gym.
She wasn't a workaholic by the traditional definition. Rather, she valued her health, relationships, and mission contributing to the world. Tonight, she choose to focus her attention on the latter.
Lindsey was a scientist who studied how melting ice impacts the Earth's climate. And when she was confronted with the question, "Doesn't melting ice just cause sea levels to rise?" Lindsey would patiently explain that sea level rise is only one small, long-term effect of melting ice.
She studied an immediate effect of melting ice: a warmer Earth.
As she explained itâice reflects some portion of sunlight back into space, so losing ice means that less light is reflected into space and more heat is absorbed by the Earth. To those in her circle, this is called ice-albedo climate feedback.
Nothing too pressing was happening this evening, but results were now available from the latest weeks-long run of her climate feedback model. Climate anxiety drove her to work in this field, so whenever new results were ready, she could never wait to start pouring over the data.
Monday
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Rodger touched down in Jackson Hole on Sunday, and of course, darted straight from the airport to observe the spectacle of Old Faithful, which seemed to spout higher than ever. He camped out that night in his rig near Firehole Falls.
The sun shined on Rodger Monday morning. He enjoyed feeling the warm embrace of Mother Earthâhis new family.
As he made his way down to the Firehole River, preparing for a day blissfully fishing for trout, he noticed flocks of birds swarming past him. It was a truly divine momentâas if God told all of the other animals he was coming and to leave all of the fish to Rodger. âThis is exactly what I worked so tirelessly for,â thought Rodger as he descended to the distant river.
Rodger couldnât help but smirk as he was eating his favorite tinned-fish treatâanchovies and mozzarella on sourdoughâreflecting on his blissful morning. This would be the last time he needed to eat preserved fish. The trout were biting today. He just had to get one on his hook.
As he got back in his waders for the afternoon, his fellow fishermen were complaining that the fish had stopped biting. When he got back into the water, he noticed the crisp, crisp smell of Rocky Mountain fresh water was starting to turn rotten. But it seemed like he was having better luck with the fish! Bubbles were appearing around himâa key sign of the activity of smaller fish.
And in the blink of an eye, he was underwater.
It felt like a heavyweight champion had punched him in the chest, knocking the air right out of him. Trying to swim upward was very difficult in his now useless waders, so he had to ditch them.
He began seeing stars. His arms and legs began to tingle. With the last of his breath and consciousness, he finally broke the surface of the river.
This new world was unrecognizable to Rodger. The sun was completely gone, shielded by a great plume of sulfur and dust. This was the last image Rodger saw before being impaled by a rock flying through the air at terminal velocity.
Thursday
Washington, D.C.
On Thursday morning, back in Greenbelt Maryland at NASAâs Earth Science center, Lindsey was trying to understand what this all meant. She wasnât a geologist, but knew that a cataclysmic eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera super-volcano was virtually impossible. It had been dormant for 70,000 years before Monday.
The sun had not shone through the cloud since the day after the eruption. The cloud, which covered the entire continent east of the Rockies, now made its way across the Atlantic. Of course, a silver lining of the situation was the reprieve that this series of eruptions would give the planet from a warming climateâjust look at Mt. Pinatubo's 1991 eruption which cooled Earth by 0.5 ÂșC for a couple of years.
As she turned her attention to the news feed on her computer, Lindsey saw that good news was coming in. Geologist seismic models seemed to indicate that this was a one-off event. So far, Lindsey knew the volume of sulfur and dust spewed into the air was comparable to five times that of Mt. Pinatuboâs eruption.
Unlike the the field of seismology, the recent feeling amongst the climate science community was that they were beginning to get their arms around the chaotic nature of Earthâs weather systems and climate. Though as far as her current work was concerned, Lindsey was effectively blind, as her satellites (or âeyes in the skyâ as she called them) were completely obscured as the growing cloud from Yellowstone covered the continent.
In the back of her mind, she was beginning to think about the climate feedback loop she studied, but in reverseânot global warming, but global cooling leading to ice sheet growth, which reflects more sunlight away, which causes Earth to cool even faster, causing ice sheets to grow even faster.
But she wasn't too bothered by the sun being blocked for a week. Lingering sulfur particles in the stratosphere would definitely keep Earth cool for a year, but due to this week's Yellowstone eruption, ice sheets would not noticeably grow.
And then it happened again.
Though this time the eruption was truly cataclysmic and didnât stop for a week. Violent earthquakes devastated cities as far away as Denver and were felt in Seattle. If there was still life inhabiting the park, observers would have noticed Yellowstone lake almost completely boiled away.
This was the most powerful and destructive eruption that any of our human ancestors had ever experienced.
Fueled by caffeine, followed by adrenaline, and now by fear; Lindsey was trying to wrap her head around the implications of the cataclysmic Yellowstone eruption. With the latest volcanic activity, Yellowstone was now 20 times more explosive than Mt. Pinatubo in 1991âover 100x the volume of sulfur and dust spewed into the atmosphere.
Once unbothered, but now anxious, Lindsey was understanding what this meant: the Earth could cool 5 °C or more over the next 10 years.
Not only that, but the abrupt, prolonged cooling could create enough ice to send the Earth into a runaway period of ice-albedo feedback, turning Earth into a ball of snow and ice for possibly tens of millions of years.
As Lindsey calculated it, the probability of 'snowball Earth' was a staggering 56% if the Earth cooled 6 °C in the next decade.
In her mind, only one question remained: can humanity prevent or endure Earthâs frozen future?