Copyright © 2013 by Annalee Newitz
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53592-2
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-385-53591-5
Portions of Chapters 3, 6, and 16 are adapted from pieces originally published on io9.com.
Book design by Michael Collica
Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Jacket illustration by neilwebb.net
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newitz, Annalee, 1969–
Scatter, adapt, and remember : how humans will survive a mass extinction / Annalee Newitz.
pages cm
1. Survival. 2. Extinction (Biology) I. Title.
GF86.N485 2013
576.8′4—dc23 2012042409
ISBN 978-0-385-53591-5
v3.1
To Charlie for the words
To Chris for the sounds
To Jesse for the stars
Utopian speculations … must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.
—Norman O. Brown, from Life Against Death
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Are We All Going to Die?
PART I A HISTORY OF MASS EXTINCTIONS
1 The Apocalypse That Brought Us to Life
2 Two Ways to Go Extinct
3 The Great Dying
4 What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs
5 Is a Mass Extinction Going On Right Now?
PART II WE ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT
6 The African Bottleneck
7 Meeting the Neanderthals
8 Great Plagues
9 The Hungry Generations
PART III LESSONS FROM SURVIVORS
10 Scatter: Footprints of the Diaspora
11 Adapt: Meet the Toughest Microbes in the World
12 Remember: Swim South
13 Pragmatic Optimism, or Stories of Survival
PART IV HOW TO BUILD A DEATH-PROOF CITY
14 The Mutating Metropolis
15 Disaster Science
16 Using Math to Stop a Pandemic
17 Cities That Hide
18 Every Surface a Farm
PART V THE MILLION-YEAR VIEW
19 Terraforming Earth
20 Not in Our Planetary Backyard
21 Take a Ride on the Space Elevator
22 Your Body Is Optional
23 On Titan’s Beach
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Large Map Images
INTRODUCTION: Are We All Going to Die?
HUMANITY IS AT a crossroads. We have ample evidence that Earth is headed for disaster, and for the first time in history we have the ability to prevent that disaster from wiping us out. Whether the disaster is caused by humans or by nature, it is inevitable. But our doom is not. How can I say that with so much certainty? Because the world has been almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been survivors. Earth has been shattered by asteroid impacts, choked by extreme greenhouse gases, locked up in ice, bombarded with cosmic radiation, and ripped open by megavolcanoes so enormous they are almost unimaginable. Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions, during which more than 75 percent of the species on Earth died out. And yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive under the harshest of conditions.
My hope for the future of humanity is therefore not simply a warm feeling I have about how awesome we are. It is based on hard evidence gleaned from the history of survival on Earth. This book is about how life has survived mass extinctions so far. But it is also about the future, and what we need to do to make sure humans don’t perish in the next one.
During the last million years of our evolution as a species, humans narrowly avoided extinction more than once. We lived through harsh conditions while another human group, the Neanderthals, did not. This isn’t just because we are lucky. It’s because as a species, we are extremely cunning when it comes to survival. If we want to survive for another million years, we should look to our history to find strategies that already worked. The title of this book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, is a distillation of these strategies. But it’s also a call to implement them in the future, by actively taking on the project of human survival as a social and scientific challenge.
In the near term, we need to improve one of humanity’s greatest inventions, the city, to make urban life healthier and more environmentally sustainable. Essentially, we need to adapt the metropolis to Earth’s current ecosystems so that we can maintain our food supplies and a habitable climate. But even if you’re not worried about climate change, Earth is still a dangerous place. At any time, we could be hit by an asteroid or a gamma-ray burst from space. That’s why we need a long-term plan to get humanity off Earth. We need cities beyond the Blue Marble, oases on other worlds where we can scatter to survive even cosmic disasters.
But none of this will be possible if we don’t remember human history, from our earliest ancestors’ discovery of fire to our grandparents’ development of space programs. Fundamentally, we are a species of builders and explorers. We’ve survived this long by taking control of our destiny. If we want to survive the next mass extinction, we can’t forget how we got here. Now let’s forge ahead into the future that we’ll build for ourselves, our planet, and the humans who will exist a million years from now.
Evidence for the Next Mass Extinction
Over the past four years, bee colonies have undergone a disturbing transformation. As helpless beekeepers looked on, the machinelike efficiency of these communal insects devolved into inexplicable disorganization. Worker bees would fly away, never to return; adolescent bees wandered aimlessly in the hive; and the daily jobs in the colony were left undone until honey production stopped and eggs died of neglect. In reports to agriculture experts, beekeepers sometimes called the results “a dead hive without dead bodies.” The problem became so widespread that scientists gave it a name—Colony Collapse Disorder—and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the syndrome has claimed roughly 30 percent of bee colonies every winter since 2007. As biologists scramble to understand the causes, suggesting everything from fungal infections to parasites and pollution, farmers worry that the bee population will collapse into total extinction. If bees go extinct, their loss will trigger an extinction domino effect because crops from apples to broccoli rely on these insects for pollination.
At the same time, over a third of the world’s amphibian species are threatened with extinction, too, leading many researchers to call this the era of amphibian crisis. But the crisis isn’t just decimating bees and frogs. The Harvard evolutionary biologist and conservationist E. O. Wilson estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year.
Are we in the first act of a mass extinction that will end in the death of millions of plant and animal species across the planet, including us?
That’s what pro
ponents of the “sixth extinction” theory believe. As the term suggests, our planet has been through five mass extinctions before. The dinosaur extinction was the most recent but hardly the most deadly: 65 million years ago, dinosaurs were among the 76 percent of all species on Earth that were extinguished after a series of natural disasters. But 185 million years before that, there was a mass extinction so devastating that paleontologists have nicknamed it the Great Dying. At that time, 95 percent of all species on the planet were wiped out over a span of roughly 100,000 years—most likely from megavolcanoes that erupted for centuries in Siberia, slowly turning the atmosphere to poison. And three more mass extinctions, some dating back over 400 million years, were caused by ice ages, invasive species, and radiation bombardment from space.
The term “sixth extinction” was coined in the 1990s by the paleontologist Richard Leakey. At that time, he wrote a book about how this new mass extinction began 15,000 years ago, when the Americas teemed with mammoths, as well as giant elk and sloths. These turbo-vegetarians were hunted by equally large carnivores, including the saber-toothed cat, whose eight-inch fangs emerged from between the big cat’s lips, curving to well beneath its chin. But shortly after humans’ arrival on these continents, the megafauna populations collapsed. Leakey believes human habitat destruction was to blame for the extinctions thousands of years ago, just as it can be blamed today for the amphibian crisis. Leakey’s rallying cry has resulted in sober scientific papers today, where respected biologists detail the evidence of a mass extinction in the making. The New Yorker’s environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert has tirelessly reported on scientific evidence gathered over the past two decades corroborating the idea that we might be living through the early days of a new mass extinction.
Though some mass extinctions happen quickly, most take hundreds of thousands of years. So how would we know whether one was happening right now? The simple answer is that we can’t be sure. What we do know, however, is that mass extinctions have decimated our planet on a regular basis throughout its history. The Great Dying involved climate change similar to the one our planet is undergoing right now. Other extinctions may have been caused by radiation bombardment or stray asteroids, but as we’ll see in the first section of this book, these disasters’ most devastating effects involved environmental changes, too.
My point is that regardless of whether humans are responsible for the sixth mass extinction on Earth, it’s going to happen. Assigning blame is less important than figuring out how to prepare for the inevitable and survive it. And when I say “survive it,” I don’t mean as humans alone on a world gone to hell. Survival must include the entire planet, and its myriad ecosystems, because those are what keep us fed and healthy.
There are many ways we can respond to the end of the world as we know it, but our first instincts are usually paralysis and depression. After all, what can you do about a comet hurtling towards us through space, unless you’re Bruce Willis and his crack team of super-astronauts on a mission to blow that sucker up with a bunch of nukes? And what can you do to stop global environmental changes? This kind of “nothing can be done” response is completely understandable, but it rarely leads to pragmatic ideas about how to save ourselves. Instead, we are left imagining what the world will be like without us. We try to persuade ourselves that maybe things really will be better if humans just don’t make it.
I’m not ready to give up like that, and I hope you aren’t either. Let’s assume that humans are just getting started on their long evolutionary trek through time. How do we switch gears into survival mode?
Survivalism vs. Survival
Many of us already have concrete ideas about how we’d survive a disaster. Survivalist groups build shelters stocked with food, preparing for everything from nuclear attack to super-storms. Most of us are survivalists in small ways, too, even if we don’t build elaborate mountain hideaways. I live in San Francisco, where it’s common for people to keep big jugs of water and food supplies in our homes just in case we’re hit with a major earthquake. Our city government recommends that we all stash away enough supplies for a week, including fuel and water-purification tablets. Living here, I’m always aware of the possibility that my city might be in ruins tomorrow. It’s such an ever-present danger that I’ve worked out a quake contingency plan with my family: If a large quake hits and we can’t reach each other by phone, we’re going to meet in the southwest corner of Dolores Park, an open area that’s likely to be relatively safe and undamaged. We picked this location partly because over 100 years ago, people who survived San Francisco’s last great quake met in Dolores Park, too.
One reason I decided to write this book is that I’ve spent so much time thinking about future disasters. I don’t just mean the quake that’s going to wreck my home. For most of my life I’ve been obsessed with stories about the end of the world. The whole thing probably started with the Godzilla movies I watched as a kid with my dad, but by the time I was an adult I’d consumed every story about the apocalypse I could get my hands on, from cheesy movies like Hell Comes to Frogtown to literary novels like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. When I was getting my Ph.D. in English, I wrote my dissertation on violent monster stories, exploring why people are drawn to the same tales of disaster over and over again. Eventually I left academia to become a science journalist, which didn’t exactly curb my appetite for destruction. I produced stories about everything from computer hacking to pandemics. While I was at MIT doing a Knight Science Journalism fellowship, I was first exposed to the idea that planetwide mass extinction is a vital part of Earth’s history, and an inevitable part of our future, too. Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.
And so, a few years ago, I set out to write a book about how we are all doomed. I even printed out a brief outline of what I would research, then scribbled at the bottom: “Life is still nasty, brutish and short.” With this idea in mind, I immersed myself in the scientific literature on mass extinction. But soon I discovered something I didn’t expect—a single, bright narrative thread that ran through every story of death. That thread was survival. No matter how horrific things got, in geological and human history, life endured. I began to experience a kind of guarded optimism; perhaps billions of creatures would die in the coming mass extinction, but some would live. I reexamined my assumptions, and started to research what it would take for humans to be part of that bright narrative thread. I interviewed over a hundred people in fields from physics and geology to history and anthropology; I read about survival strategies in scientific journals, engineering manuals, and science-fiction novels; and I traveled all over the world to find evidence of humans’ quest to survive in ancient cities and modern-day labs. I emerged from my research with the belief that humanity has a lot more than a fighting chance at making it for another million years.
Human beings may be experts at destroying life, including our own, but we are also tremendously talented at preserving it. For all the stories about human selfishness and bloodlust, there are just as many about people putting themselves in mortal danger to rescue strangers from burning houses or oppressive governments. Our urge to live spills over onto everything else around us: We don’t want to live alone. During terrible disasters, we try to save as many other creatures as possible when we save ourselves. The urge to survive, not just as individuals but as a society and an ecosystem, is built into us as deeply as greed and cynicism are. Perhaps even more deeply, since the quest for survival is as old as life itself.
It’s hard to convey in words what it’s like to experience a change of heart based on gathering scientific evidence. I found hope in the historical accounts of human survival that Rebecca Solnit presents in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and I found a scientific basis for that hope in Joan Roughgarden’s The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness. These thinkers and many more suggest we
possess the cultural and evolutionary drive to help each other survive. Put another way, I gained a new appreciation for movies like The Avengers, where our heroes unite to save the world.
All survival strategies, however small, are signs that we harbor hope about the future. The problem is that most of our strategies, like my earthquake plan, are focused on personal survival. I’m only prepared to help myself and a few close companions make it through the coming disaster. Stashing away a week’s worth of canned goods isn’t a plan that scales well for an entire planet and all the human civilizations on it. Though it’s not a bad idea to stock shelters with supplies for our families, we aren’t going to survive a mass extinction that way. Our strategies need to be much bigger.
We have to move from survivalist tactics, aimed at protecting individual lives in a disaster, to survival strategies that could help our entire species make it through a mass extinction.
Learning from the Past
Though this shift in strategy sounds like a daunting task, we can take comfort in knowing that our early ancestors faced near-extinction too. In part one of this book, we’ll plunge into geological deep time, and explore how life has endured through some of the most terrifying mass extinctions that have hit the planet over the past billion years. Then, in part two, we’ll turn to the history of human evolution, and all its perils. Some anthropologists believe Homo sapiens struggled through a population bottleneck that brought our numbers down to thousands of individuals less than 100,000 years ago—possibly due to climate change, or simply from the hardships we faced as we migrated out of Africa. Regardless of what caused the population bottleneck, both the fossil record and genetic analysis suggest that humans were at one time rather sparse upon the Earth. To survive, we adopted strategies similar to other species that lived through centuries of poison skies and gigantic explosions. And one of those basic strategies was adaptability.
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