Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to The big problem escaping most SF writers about Time Travel..

Eutrophication aggravation and its implications to the bogosphere.
ER — (archived)

I remember one story where this problem was actually addressed, and solved in a plausible fashion (I regret I cannot recall the title or author). However, the time traveler is not a person, or even a physical object, it is a message from the future encoded with simple Morse code in a tachyon beam. The future is attempting to warn our time about an easily-avoided (if stopped soon enough) ecological disaster.

How the tachyon beam is targeted on the moving earth is quite ingenious, and scientifically reasonable. The ecological disasaster is also quite clever (I figure this doesn't count as a spoiler since I can't remember how the book turns out):

Unauthorized use of powerful agricultural insecticides in South America results in runoff of these chemicals into the Pacific, which turn out to be unexpectedly lethal to marine crustaceans even in tiny concentrations. Pretty soon, these creatures disappear from the seas altogether, causing their food, phytoplankton, to bloom uncontrollably. The huge floating mats of dead plankton rot on the surface, depriving the oceans of oxygen and poisoning them with hydrogen sulfide and the sea gradually turns into a fetid, rotting bog, and oxygen levels in the atmosphere start to drop precipitously.

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