Challenging future: Crystal Lakes, Colorado, 2049

By Gary Raham
Science Writer

"Hey, Mom, look--a meteor," said Kent. His raised arm glowed in the flickering firelight.

"What a great birthday present!" Kaiah smiled at her teen son and daughter, Kay Celeste.

We certainly wouldn't see that anywhere near Denver, she thought to herself, imagining the seemingly infinite pinpricks of lights that speckled Colorado's entire Front Range from border to border. Their glow diluted the stars, essentially erasing their majesty from the thoughts of most of the seven million people living in the state.

"Great idea to come up to Crystal," Kent said, as he took a bite from his nearly blackened marshmallow. "When will Dad get here?"

"I heard from him just a few minutes ago," Kaiah said. He's on the new Maglev and is going to rent a SmartzCar in Wellington. That way he can get some work done until the PubTrans strip runs out at The Corners.

"Toast another 'mallow with us Mom," said KC. "Just make sure you save some for Dad."

Kaiah smiled. The MedAlert on her wrist glowed a reassuring green. Her sugar levels must be fine. She decided another marshmallow sounded just perfect. She settled down between her two teens and lowered a marshmallow near the glowing coals, sighing as she found a comfortable spot on the rocks.

"We going to have enough carbon credits to go to Greenland this summer?" asked Kent, trying to lick a glob of white from his upper lip. "I hear the skiing is going to be great!"

Kaiah remembered when Colorado was the place to be if you were a skier, although even when she was a kid the ski season kept getting shorter and shorter. "Dad and I've got it covered," she said to Kent.

"Cost us a summer at the reservoir," said KC. "I wanted to invite Theo."

"Reservoir's too low anyway, honey," said Kaiah. "The docks are high and dry and there aren't enough construction mechs to do the refitting before next year. I heard they converted a lot of them to help fight the Vail fire last year."

Kaiah looked at Kent with his marshmallow and saw the boy again in her young man's eyes. She hoped he would stay the course at University and not get drafted. With both the Mideast "Water Wars" in full swing and the military action in the Dead Zone after the New Delhi catastrophe, he was bound to end up some place that would give her more gray hair for sure.

Fifty is a good age for reflection, Kaiah mused. She'd had a good life until now and expected many good years yet to come, but wondered what it would have been like to grow up in a cooler, less crowded world like her parents--and especially her grandparents--a world when you didn't have to worry so much about basic things like fresh water, fresh air, room to live--and room to wonder.

Kaiah leaned back against the ponderosa pine behind her and enjoyed the moment. A bat's wing flickered past the moon and there--right there near the belt of Orion--another meteor flashed and died across the black, northern Colorado night.

Even science fiction writers find their crystal balls murky and imprecise, but the effort is worthwhile. A meander through the fictional exercise above will demonstrate what powers this particular glimpse of a possible northern Colorado future.

Seven million people in Colorado by 2049

This estimate comes from a publication called "Colorado's Population in 2050, A Road Paved with Good Intentions," by Leon F. Bouvier and Sharon McCloe Stein. Colorado's population grew from 1.3 million in 1950 to 4.3 million in 2000. Over this period, 38 percent of the growth was from Coloradans making more Coloradans, more than 50 percent was from net immigration from other states, and the remaining 12 percent was immigration from foreign countries. Assuming these trends continue, Colorado can expect around 6.4 million people in 2025 and reach the 7-million-person milestone by 2050.

Maglevs, SmartzCars and PubTrans strips

Maglev stands for "Magnetic Levitation," a wheelless mass-transit technology envisioned in the United States in the 1970s. They were first commercially built in Shanghai in 2002 with German engineering. Whether maglevs or something more traditional are actually built along Colorado's Front Range corridor, some sort of mass transit will make sense in an energy-starved world. It could use the existing railroad rights of way - especially if the railroad moves its tracks east, as some have speculated. Cars are already talking to drivers and refusing to let them drive drunk. In the late 1990s, prototype systems for "driverless cars" were built in Italy and the United States. Cars automatically steer themselves by sensing painted lines or magnetic monorails (PubTrans strips) embedded in the road.

MedAlerts, personalized medicine and the transparent society

The growth of the biological sciences, especially understanding in more detail how the human genome operates and varies from individual to individual, will most likely result in automated ways to monitor some of those medical conditions for which humans are genetically predisposed.

Another prospect, sincerely scary to those who grew up reading George Orwell's "1984," is a society that protects itself by insuring that no one has any privacy. This so-called "transparent society," proposed in a nonfiction book by sci-fi writer David Brin and fictionalized in his book "Kiln People," would place surveillance cameras everywhere and provide anyone access to communication devices and databases so that no single, privileged "Big Brother" could run the table.

Global warming and a world in climatic flux

The Earth is heating up, even though its inhabitants are still officially living within a warm interlude of one of her most recent Ice Ages. The evidence has been graphed, recorded and plotted for some time now and compared with the periodic rise and fall of prehistoric temperatures, as recorded indirectly by several corroborating techniques.

The rapidly rising spike in the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, recorded continuously since 1958 by sensors on the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa, parallels human population growth and technological prowess. Globally, CO2 has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) since 1850 to 380 ppm today. By 2100, under a business-as-usual approach, CO2 could conceivably reach concentrations not seen for 40 million years--500 to 600 ppm--a time that featured little or no ice, even at Earth's poles.

Paleontologist Peter Ward in his 2007 book, "Under a Green Sky," warns that such a warm world would not be a human paradise. In fact, he asserts that most of the major extinction events during Earth's prehistory--periods of time during which up to half of all living species disappeared--can now be associated with high CO2 concentrations and runaway global warming.

In the past, such high greenhouse gas levels have been associated with long and intense periods of volcanic activity that far exceed anything experienced during all of human history. Now, human activities appear to be a prime cause. Some even argue that the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago began the trend and has helped to delay the pulse of cold that has normally followed brief warm periods over the past million years of episodic glaciations.

An organization called The Rocky Mountain Climate Organization based in Louisville provides lots of helpful information about the potential for local climate warming on its web site at www.rockymountainclimate.org. Businesses and municipalities have begun planning for this change, taking a leadership role that some levels of government have ignored or shunned.

And while warming will occur, human action can ameliorate the trend and minimize some of the consequences. Ward contends if people begin to make sharp cuts now in carbon dioxide emissions, they could limit concentrations of greenhouse gases to around 400 ppm by the end of the 21st century.

Humans have been carrying out an uncontrolled experiment with the Earth's climate for centuries, if not millennia. Ward quotes climatologist Wally Broecker who said, "The climate is like a wild beast, and we're poking it with sticks." Ward emphasizes that counter action to reduce global warming during the next 50 years will be critical in blunting impacts that will surely occur as sea levels rise, ocean currents shift and their chemistries slowly alter from oxygen rich to oxygen poor and acidic. Rising sea levels will displace millions of humans and drown prime river delta farmland. Shifting ocean currents could make Europe colder while other parts of the world warm. Changes in ocean chemistry could ultimately poison the atmosphere with gases like hydrogen sulfide produced by oxygen-phobic microbes.

By 2049, humanity can expect an average worldwide temperature increase of somewhere around 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (with a range between 0.5 F and nearly 3 F). Coloradans can expect to see more episodes of drought and more extremes in weather as added heat energy stirs the atmospheric pot. This increased heat will lead to several consequences in Colorado: less snowpack, less water overall and more wildfires. These trends, in turn, will be exacerbated by population growth and impact Colorado's sources of income.

The good news is that a rich and meaningful future for today's youngest generation and their children is not an impossible dream, but it will require three things:

• Recognition of the problems generated by global warming and a growing human population
• A political willingness to act to insure that changes are made in the way humans live and work
• A view toward the future that takes heed of Earth's deep time past and some of the stresses that changing atmospheric and oceanic chemistry have placed on living things

Fulfilling these requirements will necessitate imagination to visualize a desirable future and the dedication and will to make it so. Some of that imagination and dedication will come from reconnecting with nature and recognizing humanity's place within it--somewhere between a ponderosa and a shooting star.