Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  Likewise, for a wide range of global environmental problems, recognition, at least, is on the rise, if only sometimes out of shocking necessity. Chinese leaders might like to keep on burning their vast coal reserves, damn the consequences for climate, but the air in Beijing is now often frighteningly thick with smog, and they are working hard on alternatives. Yet the need to stop burning fossil fuels collides with some of the largest economic interests in the world. Our current global economy runs on coal and oil. How are we going to change that? We’re not going to end capitalism or instantly end coal, but we can bend capitalism to make coal a losing bet. There are paths forward that we can see, some combination of solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and possibly nuclear energy can replace fossil fuels as the international community slowly musters the will to address the growing threat of climate change. And there is now no technical problem with a bigger incentive for innovation than the need for breakthroughs in energy technology. There will be breakthroughs. It might be successful nuclear fusion or some fancy biotech invention that makes solar power hugely cheaper and more efficient, but revolutionary change in this area is coming.

  In the meantime, our “modes of thinking” really are changing. There is a new global conversation going on now about climate change and energy choices. Our sense of ourselves as global actors evolves with the changing cognitive capacities of humanity augmented by satellites, woven in the Web. As I discuss in chapter 5, human social and political systems also go through tipping points every bit as dramatic and unpredictable as those of planetary climate and other complex physical systems.

  If we make it through the next few centuries it will be because we’ve honed our survival skills and adapted them to work on a planetary scale. Once we achieve that, we’ll have done much more than ensure our own persistence against near-term self-induced challenges. We will have unleashed the power of reason and foresight in permanent defense of Earth’s biosphere.

  In Our Hands

  Vladimir Vernadsky wrote his prescient papers about the noösphere in the 1940s, as World War II raged. He was describing his vision of the long-term transformation of Earth toward reason and intelligence, but all around him the world was burning. Still, he saw that there would be a world left after the war and that, as horrible as that time was to live through, the cosmic evolutionary trends he was describing would be only momentarily interrupted. He wrote:

  Now we live in the period of a new geological evolutionary change in the biosphere. We are entering the noösphere. This new elemental geological process is taking place at a stormy time, in the epoch of a destructive world war. But the important fact is that our democratic ideals are in tune with the elemental geological processes, with the law of nature, and with the noösphere. Therefore we may face the future with confidence. It is in our hands. We will not let it go.

  To perceive our place in cosmic and terrestrial evolution, we need to look beyond the immediate problems of this year and this decade—not to avoid them, but to try to see where we’re headed as we engage them. We’ve steered our civilization into unsafe waters, and now climate change is coming at us like a giant wave. We can’t avoid it, but we are going to buckle down and steer through it. We’ll get to the other side—not unscathed, but still sailing.

  Harlow Shapley, writing in 1952—before plate tectonics, before global warming, before space exploration or Gaia—said, “Climate and continental changes usefully force us inhabitants of this sun-controlled planet to evolve in adaptability.” As it has in the past, climate change must catalyze a new phase in human history. The difference is that this time we see it coming. In the past, we adapted to climate change as it was happening or after the fact, by inventing new tools, by moving to new lands. This time we know that it is headed our way. To whatever degree we can’t prevent it, we’ll again have to adapt. I believe we will be able to forestall and even reverse much of the damage.

  We are already behaving differently from that bacterial colony in a petri dish, deviating from the fatal S-curve, using our limited but growing global cognitive capacities to anticipate and soften or avoid the crash. We are waking up, and we can see the trends starting to turn. We are slowly rounding the corner on the related problems of poverty and overpopulation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, perhaps a trifle optimistically, now claims there will be no countries left mired in poverty by the year 2035. It is undoubtedly true that the fraction of desperately poor people is declining globally. As standards of living are raised, and in particular as education and options for women are increased, fertility rates decline. Population is going to level off by the late twenty-first century. Birth rates already have. If we continue trends in intensification of agriculture, we may well reduce the amount of land needed to feed the burgeoning population, taking pressure off stressed biomes. Some studies indicate that the rate of deforestation has reached its peak, and the reforestation of Earth can soon commence.

  There is plenty of energy available, in the form of sunlight reaching Earth, to power our civilization many times over. We are going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels—not as fast as we should, but by century’s end our energy production will be dominated by cheaper and cleaner alternatives. Our carbon emissions will slow and then basically cease, and we will probably be pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, bringing it back within a safer range.

  The best science now seems to say that it is perhaps fifty-fifty as to whether the global average temperature will be three degrees hotter by the year 2100. This is not a comfortable place to be. If we end up in the high end of the range of uncertainty, there may indeed be terrible times ahead for a few generations. Climate disruptions could make the twenty-first century as bad as the twentieth century, with its tragic famines and world wars that uprooted massive regions and cost hundreds of millions of lives, but it will not be the end of our civilization. It may be the beginning.

  Much less likely are worst-case scenarios where unforeseen positive climate feedbacks induce more severe global changes. If that comes to pass, the coming centuries could be as bad as the great bottleneck our species suffered through over one hundred thousand years ago, when most of us perished and the only survivors were those who found a fundamentally new way to be human. Either way, we will survive. We will get by, and the real question is: how do we best equip ourselves to meet the challenge and, within the wide range of possibilities, to realize the most benign future? As I said above, we humans learn from both disaster and foresight. The more we can, collectively, anticipate and meet the future, the less we’ll have to learn the hard way.

  The temperature will not rise in a smooth fashion. Things will shift gradually, then shift back, then shift farther in the original direction. There will likely be, in the next fifty years, a year or several or a decade that seemingly bucks the global warming trend as long-term cycles of heat and motion fluctuate. It’s to be expected even as the world warms. We could even get lucky. A variation in solar output or a few major volcanic eruptions could cool things down for years or decades, giving us time to catch up with our energy transition. We certainly shouldn’t count on it.

  By century’s end, arctic sea ice may be completely gone. This is worrisome because we don’t know what other effects this will have on global circulation of the atmosphere and ocean or what ripple effects it may have on weather, precipitation, and agriculture. There may be several feet of sea level rise, in which case, some large coastal areas and low-lying island countries may need to be abandoned. Climate systems and ecologies are both inherently hard to predict, and our knowledge of some key factors is still sketchy, so it can go better or worse than our predictions, maybe much better or much worse. By century’s end, coral reefs may be disappearing. Or, with luck and ingenuity, we may yet be spared a world without reefs. Recent results suggest that some species of coral are more adaptable, so with some help from us, they may survive the worst of it. The cascading effects on marine ecosystems cannot really be predicted. I think we need to get lucky here—or
not unlucky. Gaia is tough, and the ecosystems will work it out; they will recover from these insults, rebuild their webs, and carry on. Yet what we don’t know is how these readjustments will affect the marine and terrestrial webs that we depend upon for food. These unpredictable changes in the oceans are the aspect that, frankly, worry me the most.

  Many species will have gone extinct, but the worst of the potential mass extinction can be averted. As we stabilize population, we can also stabilize and then decrease the amount of land we use for agriculture. Our cities will be smarter, greener places. Over the centuries, we’ve made a lot of progress in learning how to urbanize. We invented plumbing and sanitation systems, learned not to stain our cities brown with coal ash, realized we don’t want polluted urban rivers. We are still learning how to live well in cities. I bet twenty-second-century cities will be nice places to live.

  Our civilization will be running mostly on solar power and/or nuclear fusion. The ozone layer will be largely restored and on a path to full recovery. The pacific garbage patch will be gone. We’ll look back on the wave of destruction we caused in the same way today we look back on World War II and say, “Never again.”

  Science will rush forward, illuminating the world, including our role in it, with increasing depth and clarity. The exoplanets will start to come into view, revealing something of where we, our biosphere, and our noösphere stand. Climate modeling of that day will make our current efforts seem quaint. By century’s end, we’ll be undertaking the gentlest form of geoengineering: finding ways to reverse our injection of CO2, largely by various forms of enhanced photosynthesis. We’ll have realized that we need to set the thermostat—we can’t avoid that responsibility—and found ways to do so with subtle tweaks to existing Earth processes, those “high precision negative feedbacks” that Sagan and Pollack wrote about in 1993.

  A planetary defense system will be in operation. People will be living, still in small numbers, multiple places in the solar system. Our first robot probes will be on their way to planets around nearby stars.

  Now, against my better judgment, having made some predictions, let me reiterate that I don’t think anyone knows what the world will look like in one hundred years, let alone one thousand. A century or a millennium is nothing in the life of our species or our planet, but for reasons I have described, this century will be pivotal for both. Among the game changers that could completely alter the world of the next century we can list new energy technologies, new forms of connectivity, machine intelligence, or discoveries about alien life. Since I was a teenager in the 1970s, fusion power has always been twenty years off in the future, but one of these days it will arrive. Cheap, abundant power would change a lot. It would not only allow us to reduce our carbon effluence, but would have other beneficial environmental effects, perhaps permitting us to further intensify agriculture, reducing the amount of land we need to feed people, and to make freshwater from seawater wherever it is needed.

  Global connectivity may be the biggest game changer of all, one whose effects are just beginning to play out. A revolution is under way that may ultimately dwarf in impact the invention of the printing press. We are in the early days of this. If, as some think is likely, we eventually are able to connect our minds more directly to machines and to one another, the effects may be multiplied by some huge factor.25 Machine intelligence might change things in unimaginable ways. Much has been written on this, so I won’t elaborate here, but it is fair to say that the most extreme scenarios, which cannot be ruled out, would end our civilization completely, transforming us into something currently unimaginable. There are no guarantees. We may not be human beings at century’s end—or we may be more than human. Is this something to fear, or mourn, or welcome? Who can say? Our individual cells resemble bacteria. Do they mind not being bacteria and instead being part of human beings? In the same way, we may not mind, or even fully notice, our transformation into something else that may be equipped with the skills for global self-management.

  If inhabited worlds or radio-friendly civilizations are out there in large numbers, we may soon be able to find them. Nobody knows what the effect of such a discovery would be. It might lead us toward a less divided view of ourselves.

  I don’t know if all this sounds optimistic or pessimistic. People want to be one or the other. Either the world is all going completely to hell in an orgy of waste and destruction, or we are about to experience the techno-utopian Rapture and live in eternal post-human bliss. I don’t buy either picture.

  On much longer timescales, prediction is even more pointless and futile, except insofar as knowing that the laws of physics cannot be broken (although we will likely discover that our current understanding of them is pitifully incomplete). One galactic year from now, if sentient technological life exists on this planet, we can be sure that climate will be managed, that population and energy use will have stabilized, and that the economy, such as it is, will not depend upon continued growth in use of resources.

  We are going through an awkward and destructive phase, but there is another role we could play on this planet: wise guardians, protectors of the biosphere against long-term threats and destructive changes. If we handle the Anthropocene well, it could be the first epoch of the Sapiezoic Eon. You and I will not know this in our lifetimes. It will not be clear within the lives of any of our immediate descendants. It may be millions of years before enough time has passed for an eon boundary to be obvious. In the proto-Anthropocene, we have, without knowing it, become a major geological force. Without self-awareness, such a force is dangerous and unstable, but the mature Anthropocene is when we realize what we are doing, and as that realization becomes incorporated into the way it functions, this human geology becomes a stabilizing force. If this self-conscious negative feedback becomes integral, in a sustained way, the planet will have entered its Sapiezoic Eon. Then we and our planet together will have become Terra Sapiens.

  Eyes of the World

  Here in Washington, DC, in the springtime, with bees flitting about in a riotous orgy of magnolia and cherry, it is obvious that flowering trees and their pollinators have evolved to need each other. In a way that was less obvious at first, and that becomes clearer the more we learn, life and the planet have coevolved to need each other as well. They are inseparable. That is the insight of Gaia. Now what we call intelligence is becoming a major influence on Earth. Can this last? Can it, can we, become a symbiotic part of the way the planet runs?

  Thoughtful control of Earth is now a skill that, under threat of catastrophe, we are forced to learn and master. The hardest part of that, it seems, will be mastering ourselves. Rising to this occasion means accepting a new role on the planet. When we step back and examine current trends against the long sweep of planetary history, it becomes clear that our world is now being rapidly remade by changes we have inadvertently caused. How should we respond to this unsettling realization? Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t just stop what we’re doing. Because by now we’ve made our world of seven billion (and rising) people fully dependent upon and deeply desirous of world-changing technology. So we need to find a way to finish what we’ve started, to more fully embrace our role as world-changers and learn to get good at it. Then, safely beyond today’s reckless adolescent planetary joyride, this self-destructive techno-tantrum, we’ll find that we are no longer at the whim of deadly climate fluctuations and asteroid strikes. There may be a large rock that has Earth’s name written on it, but we’ll erase it, give the interloper a little nudge, and watch it hurl harmlessly past, on into the void.

  The planetary perspective can help us. We now know that change, even catastrophe, is in the nature of planets. Habitability for even one species is fickle, and even for an entire biosphere there is a certain timescale over which, without intelligent technological intervention, life will be toast. On a much shorter timescale, without intervention, mass extinctions will occur. So, obviously, it is the responsibility of intelligent life to learn how to shape a planet.
Yet that is not yet our task. First we need to learn to stop being a menace. As an initial step, we have to halt the wave of extinctions and climate havoc we are causing. When we consider the long history of catastrophic changes on Earth, we find the novelty of our situation jumps out. We are facing a challenge not remotely like what any other species has faced. Accepting our role as planetary engineers means, most immediately, recognizing our obligation to reduce our ignorance of the Earth system. It’s not just curiosity now that motivates us to study the workings of Earth and the other planets. It’s survival. Planetary exploration itself, now entering its second half century, is a long-term, transnational, intergenerational technological project—exactly the kind of activity we need to move toward a world guided by planetary changes of the fourth kind, intentional global change.

  Right now the subject of the future is rife with anxiety. Visions of apocalypse dance in our heads. The topic of the Anthropocene is often associated with doom and gloom, with an “Is Earth fucked?” mentality. This is understandable, but it’s not the whole story. Let’s not dwell on these prophecies to the point where they become self-fulfilling. I propose that, on the contrary, the true Anthropocene is something that should be welcomed. Though it is yet only in its infancy, it can be glimpsed. Don’t fear it. Learn to shape it. It is the awareness of ourselves as geological change agents that, once propagated and integrated, will provide us with the capacity to avoid doom and take our future into our own hands. Understandably, we are uncomfortable with our role as reluctant planetary engineers. Discomfort sometimes manifests as self-loathing and denial, but this is our task, and we can’t afford to wallow. It’s time to human up. We have to stand and face it. Get up on our big bipedal frames and look in the mirror. Wake up to find out that we are the eyes of the world.