The history of my own field of planetary exploration illustrates this. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the separate Soviet and U.S. space programs were locked in furious competition to be “first” at every goal, the scientists who started sending out interplanetary spacecraft in the 1960s would share information with their “adversaries” whenever they could—because, really, what sense is there in having two separate, disconnected efforts to explore Mars and Venus? When the Russians were designing their next Venus probe, American scientists would find a way to share the results from our last probe (and vice versa), to help improve the design and maximize the probability of success. In chapter 6, I describe how the most important book in the history of SETI was written by Sagan and Shklovsky as a product of such defiant cooperation, hampered but not stopped by the mutual paranoia of their governments. Science is inherently global. And today, even in our factious, conflicted world, we routinely have international conferences that function more or less as meritocracies, where contributions are welcome from anyone who can further our understanding. [A global map showing four years of the geography of scientific collaboration is shown here of the photo insert.] The World Health Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are modern examples of effective global organizations that spring from the reality that urgent, collective problems such as epidemics and climate change do not restrict themselves to artificial national borders. Except for local and (one hopes) temporary cases of collective insanity, such as the Taliban attacking workers trying to distribute vaccinations in Northern Pakistan, enlightened self-interest pulls all parties toward cooperation.
The noösphere we have been building, and becoming, is now extending beyond Earth and into the surrounding space. In chapter 4, I describe the start, in 2014, of the European Space Agency’s Copernicus program, which will provide continuous scientific observations of the health of our planet. We’ve had uninterrupted weather monitoring for decades, but scientific measurements have been more ad hoc and spotty: one satellite is up for a while, and returns some data until it fails. Our data and our records have been discontinuous, but the plan now is to keep things going. It is assumed that satellites will fail, and when they do, a replacement will be launched. Continuity of observations is built into the program. Is this planetary self-monitoring activity now a permanent feature of Earth? If it ever ceases completely, it will be because something has gone terribly wrong with our civilization. Such a termination would be one viable definition of the end of the Anthropocene. Yet I believe our orbital self-examination is here to stay. It’s a new and hugely constructive development, perhaps even an early physical manifestation of the coming of Earth’s Sapiezoic Eon.
Electronic connectivity and the increasingly obvious commonality of our environmental challenges are binding us together. We don’t need world government, just effective global governance, something that is, out of shared necessity, slowly manifesting. A gradual change to a planetary worldview is aided by the proliferation of views of Earth from orbit, and the experiences that some human beings have had of actually physically going into space, gazing down upon our world, and reporting back. Many who have been there have reported a common and profoundly transformative experience. The number of people who have had this experience is as yet very small, but their influence is outsize. Stimulated by the sight of Earth looking alive, fragile, and achingly beautiful, framed by the blackness of space, they report a powerful sense of identity with the entire human race, the entire biosphere, and the entire planet.
The first to fully articulate this, and still the best, in my view, was American astronaut Rusty Schweickart. In March 1969 he got much, much higher than a kite, and had a much trippier time than anyone at the Woodstock festival of five months later when, on the Apollo 9 mission, he was one of the first to float freely, outside a space capsule, with only an umbilical cable connecting him to any other human creatures and artifacts, and only his helmet window separating him from the vacuum of space. As he floated in orbit and gazed down on Earth, he experienced an overwhelming moment of awareness of not only identity with the entirety of Earth, but also his role as a sensor for humanity.
When humans go into space, the biosphere is extending a fragile eye and looking down on itself. At that moment, Rusty felt acutely aware of experiencing this not just for himself but for all of us, and a sense of responsibility to communicate his experience. In the five decades since that moment, he has dedicated himself to speaking out about the space perspective, and in particular he has become a prime mover in the movement to get humanity to prepare for planetary defense against dangerous Earth-crossing asteroids. There is no way to talk about that problem without promoting a global, long-term view of ourselves as citizens of the planet who, through our special skills, have an obligation to care for it.
We’re early in the space age, and the space perspective is still slowly infiltrating our consciousness. Two generations have grown up with images of the whole Earth. Now, with the recent launch of NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Japanese Himawari 8 satellite, stunning high-resolution views of our always-changing planet, from multiple hemispheres, are continuously available to the growing percentage of our planet’s people with connectivity. I recognize that awareness of and excitement about this imagery is at its highest in my own community of space geeks, but I also see these images of Earth’s shifting beautiful wholeness steadily diffusing outward, seeding messages of unity.
The world is stitched together more tightly than could have been imagined two hundred years ago. Compared to sailing ships and wagon trains, we now travel at warp speed. With electronic communication becoming an established form of social interaction, our virtual relationships and experiences are getting both more real and quotidian. We are evolving new kinds and categories of relationships, and new protocols and modes of behavior to match. I’m not in any hurry for the boundaries between the real and virtual to disappear, and I don’t think we’re in danger of that, but as virtual experience improves and we find new ways to share, it becomes an augmentation to awareness. As bandwidth increases and machines are more closely integrated into our communications and our very thought processes, and as immersive visualization and engagement of other senses proceeds, we gain new access to shared experiences and forms of communion.
One of the downsides of moving to Washington from Denver has been less contact with big clear western skies. During the “blood moon” lunar eclipse of April 2014, I had a new and different kind of experience—I had been hoping to watch it from a nearby park, but the sky was hopelessly overcast. Yet, late that evening, I found myself vicariously enjoying the eclipse in real time through a multitude of pictures, videos, explanations, clever simulations, and reactions from my virtual friends viewing it across North and South America and Hawaii.
The previous lunar eclipse I had found memorable was a very different experience. On winter solstice 2010, I lay on a rooftop in North Denver, on a couple of layers of blanket and a bunch of pillows, huddling against the winter breeze in a pile of friends and one very large and heavy dog who didn’t quite know what we were up to but who very much wanted to be part of the pile. We lay there for hours, watching Earth’s shadow slowly pass over the Moon, rendering it a deep, smoky red. It was a mesmerizing, slowly shifting spectacle that none of us will ever forget. Lunar eclipses are not as rare or spectacular as solar eclipses. You don’t have to travel to see one. Just wait a year or so, and one will come to you. Still, they are lovely and moving, and each one is different in unpredictable ways.* Up late into the night, out in the elements, seeing it with your own eyes with friends close at hand—there is nothing like that.
For this one in April 2014, I didn’t have that option, but even though I was stuck in DC with thick clouds and rain, it ended up being thrilling in a different way. It would not have been the same if I had never seen one with my own eyes, but having done so many times, I felt connected to all those tweeters and posters sharing thei
r views and their joy. It became a spontaneous global online celebration of the celestial. We experienced it together.
Now I’ve learned I can expect something similar anytime I get clouded out of a sky event, or even when I don’t. On February 20, 2015, there was a close triangular convergence of the Moon, Mars, and Venus, and even though it was again overcast here, I “saw” it along with everyone, in a wave that followed the dusk, starting in Europe, crossing the Atlantic, and sweeping westward across this continent. I viewed this magnificent trio peeking through a stand of trees in Frankfurt; over a lake in Orlando, Florida; over a space shuttle replica at Kennedy Space Center; and over Ottawa, Canada. I tweeted, “So many stunning pics of young crescent moon consorting with Venus and Mars as evening sweeps across. At its best this thing is wonderful.” Then my virtual/real friend astronomer Natalie Batalha tweeted a video loop shot from the International Space Station by astronaut Terry Virts, showing the moon settling down and softly disappearing into the cloudy curving edge of Earth, with the words “As if the #moon could be any more beautiful, here she is setting over Hokkaido and Vladivostok.” Something new is happening here.
We planet people have been doing a version of this for a while, out of a need to share the experiences of our robot craft on other planets, but the recent New Horizons flyby of Pluto felt like a breakthrough. At the time, I called it the “first post-human spacecraft encounter,” because of the way so many people spread around the globe were able to experience it together. The sense of real-time global participation and multiway communication was very real.
Even though Pluto is by far the most distant planet we have visited, and the pictures and data took more than four hours to reach Earth at the speed of light, there was still something wonderfully immediate about the experience and our ability to share it. It had been twenty-five years since the last flyby of a never-before-seen planet. The Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune in 1989 had been a formative experience for me and for many of my friends on the New Horizons team. We were all students or postdocs then, and now are… well, slightly less young. There was a familiar feeling about the accelerating approach, over several days seeing a planet expand from a dot to a disk with barely discernable features. Then, all of a sudden, you’re there and the details are revealed with startling quickness and clarity. And then—zoom—it’s over—a last few shots of the bright crescent fading into the distance, and we are left with images and data to treasure and pore over for years.
Yet this Pluto flyby was very different due to changes that had happened in the intervening quarter century. With Voyager there was a certain inevitable elitism, a feeling that to participate fully you had to be in the right place at the right time. The few best pictures went out in press releases and made it into the New York Times or were flashed briefly on the evening news, and eventually showed up in their full glory months later in National Geographic. But, if you wanted to see all the pictures in real time, you had to be there, in the small room with the imaging team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, looking at the big fat, curved screen monitors.12
For New Horizons you didn’t have to be there. It was cool to be present at Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, where the mission was run, with scientists and engineers who had put decades into the mission, the gathered crowd of enthusiastic space nerds, the press circus, celebrities, and politicians. Pluto didn’t disappoint. There was the genuine relief from anxiety that the damn thing worked, didn’t hit anything and die. And there was the sheer joy at how mysterious, strange, complex, and lovely a world Pluto turned out to be—worth the trip. Yet even there at APL during the heat of the encounter, people were spending a lot of time online, looking at their screens, sharing images, information, and impressions in real time with a worldwide community that was seeing it all, and chiming in, as it happened.
During the moment of the actual flyby, I participated, from there in Maryland, in a multisite live broadcast organized by Carter Emmart, the astrovisualization guru at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. We were all connected with cameras and microphones, watching what was happening at Pluto and sharing the experience simultaneously with crowds gathered in Buenos Aires, Bolzano, Hamburg, Ghana, Tokyo, Singapore, Brisbane, and several American cities. We could see and hear the people in all these places and respond to their questions. Strangely, even though the events were taking place five billion miles away, much farther than any planetary encounter had ever been, it seemed as though we were able to cheat the speed of light and expansive scope of our planet. It really felt as if we were all there together, riding along with New Horizons as it swung close past the icy dwarf planet and slid into its shadow. Times had changed, and you could watch and participate from everywhere. You no longer have to be there. If you are connected, you are there.
Our evolutionary history shows that we have reinvented ourselves several times. Often in response to climate turmoil, we’ve found completely new ways to live, and have redefined our relationship with the rest of the world. We came down from the trees; invented language and story; learned to make tools and plans and to hunt in groups; discovered fire; invented agriculture, cities, books, the Internet, and Earth-observing satellites. The rest is history, but it doesn’t lock us into any mode of being.
During the last ice age, we huddled around campfires and told stories, solidifying our identity as social, collective problem-solving beings. Today the world is being woven together rapidly, and we’re building distributed electronic campfires and gathering around them, struggling to find a newly enlarged sense of identity and purpose. We are a global force now. We are not going to relinquish this capacity, so we need to finish what we started in the East African savannahs and Pleistocene caves. We have new tools at our disposal that may allow us to change again to meet new challenges. Don’t write off our potential to wake up, to grow up, to “human up” to our responsibilities and our capabilities. If we are going to live up to the sapiens in our name that Linnaeus optimistically gifted us with, then we need to become fully human. We have to remake our world and ourselves. We have to create Terra Sapiens.
The Power of Negative Thinking
We’ve all heard perhaps a bit too much about the power of positive thinking, but I am concerned about the power of negative thinking. Pessimism is easy, but certainty is uninformed. Our situation is shocking but not hopeless. We don’t know enough to draw that conclusion. Yet, with the shock of the new, the shock of the now, a pessimistic outlook seems to be almost reflexive. Sometimes I think this knee-jerk pessimism, so prevalent in discussions of our future, is its own kind of irrational “magical thinking.” It may be more dangerous and destructive than the rose-colored New Age magical thinking so often decried by skeptics. This reflexive pessimism can be contagious and corrosive.
People love to talk about how human beings suck. There are many who insist that there is no positive outcome to be imagined from the human presence on Earth, that any other thought is delusional. A persistent current of misanthropy has crept into many present-day environmental narratives. There is an awful lot of this human bashing, a repeated message about how awful the human race is, how the world would be better off without us.13 It seems to push some satisfying self-righteous button to say this kind of thing. We can get stuck in this chorus of self-deprecation that, oddly, sometimes contains a strange note of gleeful exoneration. In a perverse way, this trash talking of humanity seems to make people feel good. Do they feel that by making it clear how much they personally hate humanity they can dissociate themselves from these crimes and somehow be excused or forgiven? It’s as if we can become exempt from judgment if only we repeat loudly and insistently that we know how truly horrible we are.
Look at the metaphors we use most often to describe our global role, negative and violent images of disease and crime. Humanity is a scourge upon Earth, a cancer, a virus, a rapist, a mass murderer, a killer asteroid. Now, these comparisons are not without value. Clearly there are some da
rk truths here about our nature, our collective behavior. When we view ourselves from above, in satellite or aerial images, our patterns of construction and destruction do often appear ugly, metastatic, unhealthy, or stressed. As Edward Abbey said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The implicit warning is that we could kill off our host or force ourselves into rapid decline.
And yes, we have committed horrific crimes. When I hear of some of our accomplishments, such as the current near extinction of the northern white rhinoceros to supply traditional doctors in China and Vietnam with medicines of dubious efficacy, it pisses me off.14 It fills me with shame that Homo sapiens is doing this to such a magnificent species that, as of this writing, is believed to be extinct in the wild, lost to habitat destruction, hunting, and poaching.15
Yes, these are crimes. Yes, we have been a cancer. But what shall we be now? Once we experience the shock of waking up and finding ourselves in the midst of committing these horrifying acts, well, then what? Cancers do not wake up and decide to stop being cancerous. I worry that repeating these self-descriptions can concretize them and limit our options, hampering our ability to move beyond the behaviors they emphasize.
There are many flavors of this pessimism. There’s the sometimes gleeful misanthropy just mentioned: we are the species we love to hate. There is the self-righteous pessimism that makes us feel morally superior to the rest of the harmful entity we see ourselves as the better part of.16 Closely related is guilty pessimism: by confessing our sins, are we exonerated? There is well-informed quantitative pessimism, by far the hardest to counter. If you take a look at the various indicators of the Great Acceleration, you can certainly muster a credible case for doom. Yet it’s not the whole story, as we are also the only exponentially changing phenomenon (at least on this planet) actively engaged in studying its own patterns and reimagining its future.
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