Earlier in this chapter, I described flavors of pessimism. There are flavors of optimism, too. There’s cosmic optimism, stemming from a belief that the universe, in its vastness, bends toward life and intelligence and that what happens here doesn’t really matter because “there’s plenty more where we come from.” There’s data-driven and historically based optimism, which focuses on positive indicators, of which there are many. Poverty, malnutrition, and infant mortality are in retreat globally. Levels of education are on the rise. Communication continues to become cheaper and easier. Population is plausibly heading toward stability. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and will continue to do so. These are all trends toward human freedom and environmental sustainability.
There’s pragmatic optimism: we really don’t know what is going to happen, so why not spread hope and encourage engagement? Exponential technological innovation is transforming our world in surprising and accelerating ways. Possibilities that until recently seemed magical are now imminent, rendering the future frightening and exhilarating but, above all, unpredictable. Where there is uncertainty there is also hope—and choice, and room for faith in ourselves. I believe we’re just getting started on this planet.
Nobody knows the odds of our being able to navigate the evolutionary obstacles before us, but there is a real hope, and it is this: that our evolving technological capacities can allow us to maximize our innate social prowess, equipping us to meet the novel threats we have accidentally created, and to become something new in the process. We have done this before.
In 1929, as a young man, British biologist J. D. Bernal wrote a book entitled “The World, The Flesh and the Devil” that Arthur C. Clarke called, “the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made.” It closed with the following question:
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires? Or is the recognition of our new power sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?
From this cosmic vantage point on our own evolutionary history and our current global situation, we have the option to choose the future we want and, with self-awareness, bravery, and humility, to reach for the wheel of history and steer a path toward infinite potential. Then the next Enlightenment can begin: when we learn how to live well within a finite world, with ourselves as its conscious shapers. We can embrace Earth as human beings: creative, cooperative, imaginative, storytelling, engineering problem solvers. We can care for our planet and begin to contemplate our galactic destiny.
A composite image of Earth assembled from data taken with NASA’s Suomi satellite in 2012.
Planetary changes of the first kind—an asteroid impact causes a mass extinction. Art by Don Davis.
Earthrise, as seen by Apollo 8 in orbit around the Moon.
The Korean Peninsula, taken by the Expedition 38 crew of the International Space Station, reveals that some national borders are now visible from space.
The geological time scale. Art by Aaron Gronstal.
“A Short History of America.” Art by Robert Crumb.
“Epilogue.” Art by Robert Crumb.
A global map showing four years of the geography of scientific collaboration.
Acknowledgments
The opportunity for me to write this book was made possible by a partnership between two great institutions. I did the research and began writing while serving as the inaugural NASA/Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the United States Library of Congress. This position, started in 2013, is meant to allow researchers to pursue questions at the intersection of Astrobiology and wider humanistic concerns. It is jointly supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library. I am extremely appreciative of both for supporting my work. Mary Voytek, who directs NASA’s Astrobiology program, has championed the Astrobiology Institute’s efforts to engage deeply with the humanities and was as supportive and encouraging as you could want your NASA officials to be. Carl Pilcher, former director of the Astrobiology Institute, was instrumental in spearheading these connections and provided me with good advice and useful references. I’m grateful to the late Barry Blumberg who exemplified the scientist as humanitarian, whose discovery of the Hepatitis B vaccine literally saved millions of human lives, and who later became the first director of the Astrobiology Institute. His energetic efforts to forge ties between Astrobiology and the Library bore fruit with the chair founded in his name.
My time at the Kluge Center was immensely enriched by the kind and capable directorship of Carolyn Brown and the expert help of Mary Lou Rekker, Jason Steinhauer, Dan Turello, Travis Hensley, Camila Escobar, and JoAnne Kitching. During my tenure there I was fortunate to overlap with many brilliant scholars. In studying various aspects of the human presence on Earth, I frequently found myself in territory beyond the normal purview of a research scientist and it was extremely valuable to be embedded within a community of people studying a vast range of subjects, including literature, history, theology, political science, and ethnomusicology. In particular, I benefited from conversations with Steven Dick, Jean-Francois Mouhot, Jane McAuliffe, Charlotte Rogers, Matthias Klestil, and Nathaniel Comfort. The Library is a seemingly infinite trove with no possibility of a complete, systematic indexing system. Tapping into it effectively depends on reference staff who have cultivated and preserved the knowledge of its navigation. In the Science Reference section, I’m particularly grateful for the wizardry and generosity of Margaret Clifton and Jennifer Harbster.
For being a sounding board and for sharing references, ideas, and a few beers, I’m grateful to the regular and occasional members of our “Washington Anthropocene Group,” including Scott Wing, Rick Potts, Odile Madden, John McNeill, Erle Ellis, Antoinette WinklerPrins, and Timothy Beach.
For enjoyable conversations, correspondence, or generously suggesting sources, I thank Jill Tarter, David Brin, Frank Drake, David Tatel, Vikki Meadows, Jeff Moore, John Spencer, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, David Catling, Colin Goldblatt, Dorion Sagan, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Natalie Batalha, Andrew Revkin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula Heise, David Biello, Seth Shostak, Ken Caldeira, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Gavin Schmidt, Diane Ackerman, John Perry Barlow, Curtis Marean, Ariel Anbar, Kirk Johnson, Kevin Zahnle, Johannes Lunderhausen, Peter Swirski, Kate McKinnon, Martin Bohle, Brian Toon, Ray Pierrehumbert, Jim Hansen, Jan Zalasiewicz, Will Steffen, David Baker, David Christian, Pamela Engebretson, Elise Bohan, Jim Gates, Peter Brown, Jon Erickson, Connie Bertka, Melvin Konner, Robin Lovin, Will Storrar, Ann Kruger, Aaron Goldman, Sara Walker, Julaine Rossner, Lori Marino, Alan Stern, Ellen Stofan, Bill McKinnon, Damon Santostefano, Susan Schneider, Martin Bohle, and Clément Vidal.
Thanks to my writer buddies Peter Heller, Helen Thorpe, Rebecca Rowe, Juan Thompson, Janis Hallowell, Lisa Jones, Florence Williams, Juliet Eilperin, Joshua Horowitz, Jacki Lyden, Eric Weiner, Tim Zimmerman, Maarten Troost, George Musser, and Michael Chorost for tea and sympathy, advice, and solidarity.
I thank the editors and staff at Sky & Telescope magazine for many years of support and patience. For the last seven years I’ve been contributing a short column called “Cosmic Relief.” Parts of chapters 3, 4, and 5 began as those columns, though none are reprinted here in whole. Similarly, chapter 6 incubated in a 2013 piece I wrote for Slate called “In Search of Planetary Intelligence” and chapter 7 in a December 2007 article I wrote for SEED magazine called “Who Speaks for Earth?”
I thank my editor, Lindsey Rose, for her excellent judgment, patience, encouragement, and good humor, all of which have made this book a pleasure to produce. Everyone I’ve worked with at Grand Central Publishing and Hachette has been kind, supportive, and extremely good at what they do. I also want to thank Mitch Hoffmann for his support, guidance, and key input into earlier drafts. I’m extremely grateful to my agent, Eric Lupfer, for his wise counsel an
d excellent instincts and for guiding me through the entire process, from proposal through publication.
For able assistance with all manner of tasks, I thank Julia DeMarines (aka T-Spoon) and Shana Hausman.
My brother Peter Grinspoon gave me detailed and valuable feedback on an earlier draft. I thank him and Liz, Josh, Lester, Betsy, Emma, Zach, Isabel and Audrey Grinspoon, and Jacob Leher for encouragement, advice, fun, love, and various forms of support.
Jennifer Goldsmith-Grinspoon has been an infinite source of encouragement, ideas, laughter, and inspiration throughout the process of writing this book. For all that and more, I am grateful.
About the Author
David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist, award-winning science communicator, and prize-winning author. He is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and adjunct professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Science at the University of Colorado. His research focuses on climate evolution on Earth-like planets and potential conditions for life elsewhere in the universe. He is involved with several interplanetary spacecraft missions for NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japanese Space Agency. In 2013, he was appointed as the inaugural chair of Astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, where he studied the human impact on Earth systems and organized a public symposium on the Longevity of Human Civilization. His technical papers have been published in Nature, Science, and numerous other journals, and he has given invited keynote talks at conferences around the world. Grinspoon’s popular writing has appeared in Slate, Scientific American, Natural History, Nautilus, Astronomy, SEED, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and Sky & Telescope magazine, where he is a contributing editor and writes the quasi-monthly “Cosmic Relief” column. He is the author and editor of several books, including Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life, which won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. Grinspoon has been a recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for Public Communication of Planetary Science by the American Astronomical Society and has been honored with the title “Alpha Geek” by Wired magazine. He lectures widely and appears frequently as a science commentator on television, radio, and podcasts, including as a frequent guest on StarTalk Radio and host of the new spinoff StarTalk All-Stars. Also a musician, he currently leads the House Band of the Universe. He resides in Washington, DC, with his wife and an imaginary dog.
Also by David Grinspoon
Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet
Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life
Art Credits
Chapter 1
Jim Pollack: photo by NASA; here.
Chapter 2
Lynn Margulis: photo by Javier Pedreira; here.
Chapter 3
Keeling curve: Wikimedia Creative Commons; here.
Graphs: graphs by Will Steffen; here and here.
Chapter 4
Mars rover tracks: photo by NASA; here.
Beach tire tracks: photo by Susan Bruce; here.
Fossilized animal tracks: photo by Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki; here.
Chapter 5
Moon footprint with fossilized ancient footprint; Right: NASA, Left: John Reader / Science Source; here.
Chapter 7
Dr. Grinspoon and Dr. Zaitsev: photo by H. Paul Shuch / SETI League Photo / SETILeague.org; here.
Bookshelf: photo by the author; here.
Photo Insert
Earth from space: photo by NASA; here.
Asteroid painting: artwork by Don Davis; here.
Earthrise: photo by NASA; here.
Korean Peninsula from space: photo by NASA; here.
Geological timescale: artwork by Aaron Gronstal; here.
“A Short History of America”: copyright © 1979 by Robert Crumb; here.
“Epilogue”: copyright © 1979 by Robert Crumb; here.
Global collaboration map: computed by Olivier H. Beauchesne & Scimago Lab, data from Scopus; here.
Notes
Introduction: A Planetary Perspective on the Human Predicament
1. Several of these recorded conversations can be found on the Center’s website https://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/.
Chapter 1: Listening to the Planets
1. We call it planetary “geology” because the science of rocks, landforms, and their evolution arose from the only planet we had access to until recently. Similarly, we talk about the “geography” of other worlds, avoiding the awkwardness of a separate prefix for each planet. Yet it does perhaps also speak to the difficulty of thinking of geology, biology, or any other -ology without some degree of Earth bias.
2. The rival volcanic hypothesis has not died off, however. There is a huge volcanic deposit in India, the Deccan Traps, that formed at the right time also to be implicated. A recent idea with some traction is that the impact event may have exacerbated the volcanic outpouring, so that some combination of the two is responsible. The timing is striking. Both the impact and the huge volcanic floods seem to be precisely timed to match the extinction event.
3. For this part of my thesis, Carl Sagan became my main adviser. He had worked on the climate effects of dust clouds on Mars, and nuclear winter on Earth (which I’ll describe shortly). Among the papers Carl asked me to read was a somewhat obscure 1967 PhD dissertation by a student at the University of Iowa entitled “The Atmosphere and Surface Temperature of Venus: A Dust Insulation Model.” It explored the possibility that the high surface temperature observed on our sister planet might be caused not by a thick carbon dioxide greenhouse, but rather by a planet-wide blanket of atmospheric dust holding in heat. Like many ideas in science, this turned out to be wrong, but in a useful way. It’s impressive that Carl remembered this work and saw that it would help me model the climate of dusty atmospheres. That’s how his mind worked, and why he was such a valuable collaborator on so many planetary science projects. He remembered everything he read (which was a lot) and was able to make unlikely connections. Oh, and the author of that obscure dissertation? It was James Hansen, who went on to become one of the leading climate modelers studying global warming on Earth—and definitely one of the most visible and effective public communicators on the subject. His popular book Storms of My Grandchildren is one of the best on global warming: clearly written, scientifically accurate, and passionate. For those who have studied comparative planetology, it is no surprise that Jim Hansen cut his teeth on the Venus climate.
4. Climatic Change: Evidence, Causes and Effects. Ed. Harlow Shapley. (Harvard University Press, 1953).
5. C. P. McKay, J. B. Pollack, and R. Courtin, “Titan: Greenhouse and Anti-Greenhouse Effects on Titan,” Science 253, no. 5024 (1991): 1118–21.
6. E. A. Petigura, A. W. Howard, and G. Marcy, “Prevalence of Earth-size Planets Orbiting Sun-like Stars,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 48 (2013): 19273–78.
Chapter 2: Can a Planet Be Alive?
1. Among his inventions was the electron capture detector, with which he made the first measurements showing that the chlorofluorocarbons we used for refrigeration were building up in Earth’s atmosphere, a discovery that led directly to the realization that we were harming the ozone layer.
2. Carl Sagan, “The Long Winter Model of Martian Biology: A Speculation,” Icarus 15 (1971): 511–14.
3. Margulis founded and managed NASA’s Planetary Biology Internship Program, which for decades supported undergraduate and graduate students exploring the “bio” side of exobiology.
4. Given our fundamental ignorance of where teleology resides and how it arises (or seems to) within us, I always take those confident critiques of teleological Gaia with a grain of biologically mediated salt. At the very least, this controversial aspect of Gaia theory raises interesting questions about how both homeostasis and intentionality may result from the complex interplay of subsystems. These are questions that we need to consider anew as we grapple with what it means to be a species that is accidentally altering our
planet and wondering how we should act, and even if we can act, on a planetary scale. A Darwinian approach suggests that teleology has not been a factor in Earth evolution for most of its history. Yet what about now, when we have entered the Anthropocene, this new time of supposed human control of Earth? Now people are making decisions that, whether they know it or not, are affecting the planet in major ways. So if we look at the Anthropocene as a transitional event in planetary evolution, it may be the time when teleology, intentionality, clearly becomes a part of the Earth story. Thus, the question of where, and at what level, a sense of identity and intentionality arises is quite relevant to the core predicament of humanity in the Anthropocene: Is our global human civilization, as a whole, capable of acting with intention? We will return to this question.
5. Norman H. Sleep, Dennis K. Bird, and Emily Pope, “Paleontology of Earth’s Mantle,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 40, no. 1 (2012): 277–300; see also Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).
Earth in Human Hands Page 48
