Of all the challenges facing humanity, the plainest and most daunting is anthropogenic climate change - a process driven by the accumulation of (largely) carbon-containing atmospheric gases created by just about everything we do in modern life. And yet, at the same time, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era of human industry where the many forms of carbon will increasingly become the dominant material by volume, radically expanding technological potential in ways that may change how we live. On the one hand, a grim future of ever-retreating expectations; on the other, a dizzying techno-utopia where atmospheric pollution has become an industrial feedstock. With all points possible between, where does our future lie?
First, I want to credit the CNET article cited above for bringing this to my attention - I particularly enjoy the author's historically-focused title "The Carbon Age: Dark element, brighter future," although he spends far more time on specific technologies than on sociological implications. Nevertheless, this would not likely have occurred to me independently, so I am obligated to give credit where due.
As is appropriate for a practical-minded source like CNET, the focus of the article is primarily on existing applications that will be improved in the short-run by advances in carbon processing, such as:
- Lithium ion batteries
- Carbon fiber
- Capacitors
- Fuel cells
- Natural gas storage
- Hydrogen storage
However, one of these things is not like the others - indeed, is arguably far more important in the long-run, although seemingly less relevant to addressing climate change: Carbon fiber. This is a technology that takes basket-weaving to its molecular extreme, creating ultra-strong nets of linearly-crystallized carbon for use in composites and other lightweight, high-strength materials. But as the state of the art progresses, carbon fiber is increasingly becoming an industrial staple rather than a specialized application, and I see no obvious limitations to its potential.
So why is this more important than fuel cells, batteries, and clean fuel storage? In a word, volume. Under the vague heading of "carbon fiber," whose applicability the CNET article understandably glosses over, we can include materials - both extant and under development - with the long-term potential to make concrete and steel obsolete. Take a moment to let that sink in. It won't get to that point quickly, but carbon is literally in the air we breathe - granted, at relatively small concentrations, but easy enough to accumulate - and the energy needed to both access and crystallize it would seem to be trivial compared to that invested in making steel or concrete.
But then, you may ask, what's the holdup? Why are we not already there, if the economics are so obvious? Very simply, the bottleneck is not the supply of accessible carbon, but rather the quality and volume of fiber manufacturing - two factors that have experienced accelerating advancement in recent years. The cheapest, least demanding applications were quite naturally the first ones to adopt the industry - things like golf clubs and tennis rackets, where a haphazard mesh would suffice to outperform metal. But the technology kept improving, new methods of making better fiber in larger volumes at lower cost were developed, composites were more broadly adopted, and a virtuous cycle of incremental advances begun.
Provided that this cycle continues - and I see no major obstacle - the price per unit performance (not weight or volume) of some carbon materials is going to undercut that of concrete and steel in the next few decades. In fact, it's entirely plausible that manufacturers of these and related products could use both the waste heat and exhaust CO2 from their operations as a feedstock into carbon plants, which would allow them to gradually transition rather than having to lose money first. From that point onward, a lot of things would begin to look increasingly different.
I won't speculate on the relative timing of such changes, but it's not much in the realm of science fiction to imagine clothing, automobiles, disposable packaging, retail products, and a growing proportion of construction materials consisting largely of carbon in various molecular and structural arrangements: That much has already happened. What remains is simply a scaling-up, and the realization of implications.
Now, if this is too vague, allow me to be more explicit: Carbon roads, carbon sidewalks, carbon streetlight posts, carbon telephone poles, carbon windows (transparency is just a matter of crystal structure - diamonds are transparent), carbon shoelaces, carbon toothpicks, carbon _____: The economies of scale from bulk uses will make it so cheap that people will apply carbon to things that don't even need to be improved, as has already happened several times before when economies have become totally saturated with some material.
There are plenty of ready sources of carbon/graphite in the ground, and they will certainly dominate in the near future, but eventually the companies that mine it are going to find it easier to just suck it out of the air on a massive basis rather than keep expanding their mines at great up-front cost. Further out, it may not even be worthwhile for manufacturers of products to buy their carbon from a wholesaler - they may simply suck it out of the air themselves, and feed it straight into their production line.
This is the mind-bogglingly utopian future that immediately sprang to mind when I read the CNET article: With high-quality, high-volume carbon fiber replacing steel, and perhaps eventually being cheaper than lumber - and even more renewable, since it can come right out of the air - buildings are basically as tall as the owner wants them to be and zoning regulations allow. Skyscrapers so damn tall the penthouses need to be pressurized; suburban houses 10 stories high that can laugh off major earthquakes or hurricanes that would smash older, shorter buildings; bridges so wide and long they support their own gas stations, restaurants, and hotels; light, strong walkways connecting skyscrapers into a network; and, hopefully some day, the ultimate realization of the potential of carbon, the space elevator.
Nothing is guaranteed, but from what I can see the economics are plain. The question that only time will answer is how quickly and in what order these things come about - which will determine their ultimate significance, either as the belated but hopeful recovery of a badly climate-devastated world, or the awesome U-turn away from looming disaster into an unforeseen domain of new possibilities. There are many other things that need to happen for humanity to deal with the consequences of its own success - progress in ecosystem management, recycling, efficiency, water desalination, clean energy, etc. etc. But it seems that within the danger is the kernel of an amazing opportunity.
As so often happens with technology, we have found with the emergence of climate change that our solutions to life's problems have contained the seeds of new problems, but the cycle does not end there: Every problem also contains the seeds of a further solution, cycling with each iteration toward a boundless and unknowable future where humanity is master of its own destiny. Some day, we or our descendents may be staring out the pure diamond windows of 10-mile skyscrapers at the boundless blue sky of an Earth secure, at least in broad terms, from runaway climate change, and we will have built that amazing world brick by brick from the waste pollution of three centuries of industry. Sometimes irony can be quite optimistic.