The Future of Timbuktu

THIS PROJECT PREDICTS FOR AND PLANS THE FUTURE OF 10,000 SUPER ECOFRIENDLY CITIES ACROSS THE GLOBE. THIS WEEK, WE FOCUS ON THE AFRICAN CITY OF TIMBUKTU.

Timbuktu's Golden Age of Learning

Some 800 years ago, Timbuktu was one of the wealthiest cities in Africa, with gardened glades and waterways and a grand trading bazaar.

It was also the home of great learning centers and courtyard libraries, only a very few of which survive today.

In European countries, Timbuktu was regarded as mystical and splendid but maybe that’s because it was a long way away from Europe and European travelers, as non-Muslims, were generally prohibited from entering the city.

Since then though, Timbuktu has become a desert city, made worse by over-grazing and global warming. Though sites of past grandeur remain scattered around today, the city has become generally economically impoverished.

The Future Rise of African Geo-Engineering

Some governments around the world — Russia, China, and India, for example — are starting to believe that we don’t have to give in to climate change but should develop even more powerful technologies to fix it with, using something they call 'geoengineering'.

So, in the mid twenty-first century, they spray millions of dense plumes of white dust into the global atmosphere, across vast swaths of barren land, and onto huge zones of polar ice, believing that this will cause excess solar energy to be reflected back into space.

By the end of the century, nobody really knows whether or not this has worked. The climate disasters of drought and mega-storms continue to manifest in Russia, China and India, and the weather systems of the northern hemisphere seem no less stable and actually more extreme and unpredictable. The national leaders (and the engineers) assert that climate change disruption would be even more severe if they hadn’t sprayed white dust over every inch of relevant landscape.

All this mucking about with the global weather ends up being a cataclysmic disaster for sub-Saharan Africa, including the Sahel grassland margin around Timbuktu since the air there becomes noticeably drier and the rainfall completely disappears, save for the occasional devastating floods once every decade, thus impoverishing the region’s people even further.

Once, the Sahel grasslands drifted south from Timbuktu at just a quarter mile per year. But after all the geoengineering, they now vanish at a staggering dozen miles annually. As a strange form of apology, Russia, China, and India set up even more outlandish geoengineering experiments, establishing their labs and facilities right in Timbuktu.

University of Geo-Engineering, Timbuktu, circa 2121

The people of Timbuktu are certain that the grand promises of geoengineering are mostly useless and won’t do much for Africa’s future, but they’re willing to go along with it since the project brings money and jobs to the city. The investment also revives Timbuktu’s legacy as a center of learning with the creation of a new geoengineering university, open to residents free of charge.

While engineers pour resources into costly and ultimately pointless schemes to make rain fall over the growing Sahara or trap carbon dioxide deep in its rocks, locals quietly keep tending their livestock, onto the hope that someday their children might land good jobs in another city.