Thank you for writing this interesting piece and sharing your thoughtful musings! Directly addressing what I think is the central question you’ve proposed, “If we can build something like Jdub, why can’t we solve global warming?”… this may sound like a trite answer but I believe it’s a matter of scale and complexity.

Getting a relatively small team of motivated experts and professionals to build something, even as complex as Jdub, is far easier than getting a majority of a species to do something. Especially when that something is essentially a terraforming project. The Industrial Revolution has been an exercise in accidental/unintentional terraforming. At least I hope it was accidental and unintentional, my conspiracist mind can’t help but entertain alternative explanations.

To solve global warming, we need an understanding of an entire planetary ecosystem, our biosphere. While we know a lot, I don’t think we know enough. Whatever solution we try, it’s going to be experimental and I don’t think we know enough to begin fathoming all of the repercussions; feedback loops, cascading systems failures, etc…

Let’s hope the lessons we learn in the next century doesn’t kill us all. I don’t think it will come to that, but… 🤷‍♂️