This is not just on of the most important issues of humanity, it is a lot of money on the table:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1352392678177034242

You don’t want to start off with $100 million to build a public good? Allow me to explain how everyone wins.

So, right now atmospheric carbon is at 420 ppm. By mass, there’s ~895 petagrams (PgC) of atmospheric carbon, or 89,500,000,000,000,000 kilograms, or 895 billion metric tons, or 895 gigatons. So for simplicity’s sake, we’re going with gigatons (also it sounds cooler). Biomass, on the other hand, constitutes 550 gigatons of carbon, of which land-based plants constitute 450 of those gigatons. Fun fact: the Amazon rainforest contains 10 percent of all biomass on Earth, so roughly 55 of those gigatons.

Marine biomass, on the other hand, constitutes only 6 gigatons, of which marine animals constitute 2 of those gigatons. And the ocean happens to cover 70% of the Earth’s surface, which means 70% of the solar fuel that is harnessed to fixate carbon.

Here’s the thing: carbon and life on Earth are in the same cycle, extremely interconnected by the fundamental chemistry of life. If I were to pick out the most scalable way of changing the equilibrium between atmospheric carbon and living carbon, it would have to be a geoengineering hack where there is more vacancy for potential gain in biomass. I like the degen question “does my idea break the laws of physics or by extension, chemistry, biology, & ecology?” and its followup “if not, how do we implement it?”

Here’s an example of something that breaks the laws of physics: how much gold is in the ocean? By the linked study, seawater concentration is roughly ~33 picograms per liter (ignoring margin of error, and you’ll see why). There’s roughly 1.35 billion trillion liters of seawater, so let’s say there’s 45 billion grams, or 1.6 billion ounces of gold. Current price of gold is $1,827 per ounce, so that’s roughly 2.9 trillion dollars worth of gold in seawater. Obviously, this is completely insane. Gold exists in seawater as a dissolved species (part of a chloro-complex), and even if we had a zero-cost method of extraction, it just wouldn’t be possible for a plethora of other issues. The net value of extracted gold from seawater is actually close to zero.

Here’s the thing, though. Just because there are elements in the ocean that are impossible to extract, doesn’t mean there aren’t elements in the ocean that are impossible to manipulate. Consider the concentration of iron in seawater. Here’s the TL;DR excerpt for why I am so goddamn excited by seawater iron:

Iron is a dietary requirement for most organisms, and plays an important role in natural processes in binary and tertiary form. Oxidized tertiary iron cannot be applied by organisms freely, except at very low pH values. Still, iron usually occurs in this generally water insoluble form. Adding soluble iron may rapidly increase productivity in oceanic surface layers. It might than play an important role in the carbon cycle. Iron is essential for nitrogen binding and nitrate reduction, and it may be a limiting factor for phytoplankton growth. Solubility in salt water is extremely low.

Okay, what sort of soluble iron can be added to seawater to induce more phytoplankton growth? It has to be a combination of something like ferrous sulfate and other nutrients like phosphate (will write another article about this as well)

Well, it turns out some non-crypto degens have been doing just that:

It’s a frustrating science, though, because nature does things in its own time. We know the chemistry, and we know the ecology, but for some reason there just isn’t a common understanding of the global rate of carbon emission and the rate of carbon fixation that we need to artificially induce at scale to keep it balance. According to scientific consensus, we need to trap 12-18 gigatons of carbon to keep pace with increase in global temperature.

So what’s the most effective delivery? Scientists recommend:

• dispersion of iron dust at high enough altitudes to take advantage of wind patterns that maximize distribution over the ocean (like how the Sahara feeds the Amazon, dust particles range from <10 μm to >200 μm, the majority are in the 10–50 size range)

• For agricultural spraying done at low altitudes (crop dusting) the requirements are to maximize coverage of particles, while reducing drift; however for dust distribution, the goal will be maximize drift. Research has shown particle sizes in the 50–100 μm range are optimal for many crop dusting applications

• The most controlled means for delivery of materials via aircraft is through the use of rotary atomizers that create a spray or mist of wet chemicals. Rotary atomizers are capable of producing droplet sizes below 10 μm

• In terms of effective altitudes for dispersion of biogenic oxides, the upper reaches of polar (12 km) and subtropical (16 km) jet streams are within the operational range of modern aircraft, but not for cropdusters

• Alternatively, low altitude, more focused applications could be done from helicopter's operating directly from ships. Agricultural helicopters operating from a single ship would be capable of delivering iron dust at altitudes of up to several thousand meters and covering hundreds or thousands of square kilometers of ocean per day.

  This is great, but it’s a costly endeavor, and many in web3 that have money to burn have no interest in this sort of project. The attention really goes to the carbon credit market, which has a few issues. I’m not writing this article about problems, the focus really should be on the actual solutions. So how do we incentivize degens to scale up carbon fixation at a profit?

  Well, one of the economic problems we can solve is overfishing. The best way to accomplish that is through farming. The funny side effect of scaling up the growth of plankton is the scaling up of a food supply for marine animals like the fish we eat.

  Logically, if we’re launching aircraft for dispersing iron dust, especially helicopters, then we also have ships in the proximity of our plankton farming, which also means we have an opportunity to set up other structures, for farming a steady supply of protein for populations in dire need of sustenance, in the epipelagic zone in regions where the ocean has vacancies

And this is where the potential flaw of plan needs to be considered. Experimentally, scientists that have fertilized marine habitats with iron dust have noticed a spike in growth of diatoms. In other words, the ecological impact would be very similar to algae blooms, which suffocate fish populations on the coastlines when they accidentally occur. This also depletes other nutrients like phosphorous and would hypothetically change the the population of large marine animals like whales. We need to look at a map and qualify which regions need which method of fertilization before anyone jumps the gun.

Such an effect would be expected, for example, in the tropical Pacific, but not in the Southern Ocean where the surface water, as a rule, only remains at the sea surface for a relatively short time, and quickly sinks again before the macronutrients are depleted. Because these water masses then remain below the surface for hundreds of years, the Southern Ocean appears to be the most suitable for CO2 sequestration.

As stated previously, this is an experiment that requires not only active supervision, but also vertically stacked system that can process the resulting biomass and convert it into other products that can be immediately used further. It’s a tall order, but the economic growth resulting from such a stack would be tremendous. We might also see another massive source for generating biofuel. One of the key benefits here is the world running on solar fuel. Everything lives because of solar exposure, but in the case of iron-poor oceanic regions, there isn’t normally a lot of biomass, because there’s not enough seawater iron to sustain a lot of autotropism for the rest of the typical biome.

When I think about how to scale something to cosmic proportions, I don’t consult the works of H.G. Wells. I think about the universe as it currently is perceived to work. The same goes for Earth machinery. If there is a massively scalable technology for carbon fixation, chances are the best machinery is the kind that can naturally reproduce and survive with minimal intervention in the intended environment. This is moonshot that we need, and it’s much more effective than what we’ve tried in web3 to address carbon emissions. More importantly, it’s upstream of the paper profits and deals with the real world.

In the coming days and weeks, I will be formulating a plan for how web3 should develop further into this ecosystem, and possibly introduce an entirely novel, materials-based economy in the process. This is a project that requires no casino, and no ponzinomics whatsoever. Just good old coordination, logistics, and solarpunk development. We can make this the defining silver lining of the bear market, and if successful, end it completely. But we’ll see where this ends up going.

If you want to get involved, the best first step is collecting this post. The best thing about mirror is that we can set up very powerful organizations without depending on plutocratic voting, and I have every intention of using these ideas to spur further conversation and further coordination.