...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 2-5: Climate Q?

Marian had the most ambitious plan for modeling her Q dream in VR. She began with the interlocking biological cycles of the elements nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, starting with the action of bacteria to fix nitrogen in the form of ammonia using the hydrogen in water. Then she extended it to include growing plants and the interactions of carbon dioxide and oxygen in photosynthesis.

This of course implied sunlight (or a Sun Bottle) as an energy source, soil and water as reservoirs for heat absorption and dissipation, and eventual decay of the plant material to complete the cycles.

That was only the beginning. From there she expanded it to include animals to ingest the plant materials and further transform them, adding more complexity to the carbon cycle and everything else. The animal forms of course included her fish, along with certain beneficial insects and the implicit presence of many forms of bacteria.

She had the full support of Rosita, Naga and Juan in this, all taking turns in the Q chair (as Ray's VR chair came to be called). Drake, Tengri, Dema and Cern all offered inputs, as did Jack and Ryan when the model grew to the point where it needed to include the physical structure of her aquaponics system.

Karen wanted to add chickens, which of course implied eggs. Cheryl said if they did that they should add a few pigs as well. No one laughed. At this point it made too much sense. In fact, Tengri said, it might be time to add people.

Ray realized that this was his challenge. He made a copy of the model without the Q, and turned it into an interactive VR experience where any or all of the crew could walk around in it and harvest virtual produce. Then with those interactions recorded he made virtual copies of all of them that would continue to interact passively with the model when the real people disconnected.

Tengri heartily approved of all this. He asked Ray to add virtual living quarters for the people, so a visitor could experience that too. No problem. He asked if a real person not on the island could visit the model remotely. No problem.

Then Tengri asked his team to do an analysis, to establish the optimum size and population for such a structure. No problem.

Meanwhile, Karen and Cheryl began working on their own copy of the model, expanding it to global scale by incorporating features of their previous work. Karen consulted the Q to improve her understanding of geothermal activity, Cheryl upgraded the ocean current modeling with her details from the Q. There was a lot of excitement when they reported their progress in the lounge. But they soon had to face the fact that there were limitations.

Even with the power of Ray's supercomputer, it required a lot of simplification to get the global model to run reliable predictions in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time. It was obviously useless to predict what would happen in ten years if it took a hundred years for the program to run, which it would if they went for maximum accuracy. Scaling it back to run in real time, where it would only take a day to predict what would happen tomorrow, already degraded it a lot. Any more short cuts to accelerate the run time made it progressively worse.

They realized that predicting the future of the whole planet was impossible. As Dema said, the only completely accurate model of anything is the thing itself. Chaos theory, the so-called butterfly effect, meant that with anything less than complete data no complex behavior could be predicted with full confidence. Ray suggested that in fact the Q itself was the model of the universe, running in real time, and they could only learn from it what it was doing now, not what it was going to do.

So Karen and Cheryl consoled themselves by narrowing the focus of what they tried to predict, by looking at parts of the global system in isolation, holding most external parameters constant. One of Cheryl's simulations was to look at what would happen when warmer water stimulated oceanic surface organisms to produce sulfides, as the Q confirmed would happen. As anticipated, these sulfides, rising into the atmosphere, would create a barrier to solar heating. With data from the Q on the abundance of such organisms in the warm ocean currents, her simulation predicted that in time the balance would be tipped away from the warming trend, and a cooling cycle would begin. But before that could happen, a simulation she and Karen ran of the influence of these same warm currents on the Arctic sea ice predicted increased precipitation over Canada and other northern lands, including Tengri's homeland of Finland and even the Culver family home in Chicago.

Either way, their new models of global climate change, refined and enhanced with data from the Q beyond any other models tried before, made it abundantly clear. The world would have snow.