All-Natural Geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune

Summary

Science fiction understood something fundamental before science caught up. Frank Herbert’s Dune imagined the Fremen attempting to terraform Arrakis. They succeeded technically but discovered too late (though Paul Atreides and the God Emperor Leto knew exactly what they were doing) they’d destroyed the desert ecology their entire civilization depended on. The sandworms died. The spice disappeared. Their power evaporated. Half a century after Herbert, The Expanse imagined the Protomolecule, alien biotechnology designed to hijack existing “self replicating systems” and reorganize it into building the Ring Gates. Both stories grasped the same insight: life is technology. Self-replicating, self-maintaining, infinitely adaptable. Deploy living systems at planetary scale and you’ll discover reciprocal dependencies you can’t escape.In 1965, James Lovelock proposed this same idea as scientific hypothesis while working for NASA’s Viking missions. Earth’s atmosphere appeared too far from chemical equilibrium to be explained by geology alone. Life wasn’t simply adapting to planetary conditions. It was actively regulating them as much as it was responding to them. The Gaia hypothesis suggested that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to maintain conditions suitable for life, effectively operating as a self-regulating system at planetary scale (though shocks like giant meteors and system disruptions can still collapse it).ShareWe see this with other creatures besides ourselves. Beavers are recognized as quintessential ecosystem engineers, with remarkable abilities to modify ecosystems profoundly through dam construction, altering river corridor hydrology, geomorphology, nutrient cycling, and ecosystems. The southern Amazon rainforest triggers its own rainy season using water vapor from plant leaves, providing observational evidence that forests actively create their own weather systems.On the practical sense? Citizens already pay environmental costs whethe...