Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  7. The political process reinforces our tendency to take sides in order to win rather than seek a reasoned solution. Bertrand Russell captured this beautifully in an essay written in 1924: “A person imbued with the scientific spirit would hardly even examine these extreme positions. Some people think that we keep our rooms too hot for health, others that we keep them too cold. If this were a political question, one party would maintain that the best temperature is the absolute zero, the other that it is the melting point of iron. Those who maintained any intermediate position would be abused as timorous time-servers, concealed agents of the other side, men who ruined the enthusiasm of a sacred cause by tepid appeals to mere reason. Any man who had the courage to say that our rooms ought to be neither very hot nor very cold would be abused by both parties, and probably shot in No Man’s Land” (from Icarus, or the Future of Science).

  8. As Isaac Asimov, through his fictional scientist Hari Seldon, a “psychohistorian,” describes brilliantly in his Foundation trilogy.

  9. In the classic book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay writes about the tulip mania that gripped the Netherlands in the early 1600s, when, as a result of a positive feedback between perception and price, some varieties of tulip briefly became the most valuable objects in the world. Tulips can be extraordinarily lovely, but there is magical thinking and shared delusion in believing a single tulip bulb is more valuable than any building, home, or artifact. There’s an obvious continuum from this to today’s speculative bubbles in real estate or tech stocks.

  10. I don’t wish to get sidetracked into the somewhat masturbatory philosophical debate over whether or not we have free will or it is just an illusion. Some sophists argue passionately that there is no such thing as free will. If so, then perhaps there really is no fundamental difference between us and a bacterium, or even an orbiting swarm of rocks. Maybe we’re all just doing what we must do, following physical law, acting out predetermined scripts. Maybe we can’t help anything and therefore bear no responsibility for the changes we are causing on this planet. I don’t believe that. I believe we have responsibility for our actions. I declare that there is free will, and you cannot choose to disagree with me. Or if you do choose to disagree with me, you are proving my point. Q.E.D.

  11. A vivid description of these dual forces at work in the Egyptian revolution of 2011 can be found in the transcript of the talk “Let’s Design Social Media That Drives Real Change,” by Egyptian activist and computer engineer Wael Ghonim, at https://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_let_s_design_social_media_that_drives_real_change/transcript?language=en.

  12. Where I had the great good fortune to be as an undergraduate assistant at Jupiter, as a grad student at Uranus, and as a postdoc for the Neptune encounter.

  13. In an article in Earth Island Journal entitled “Anthropocene Is the Wrong Word,” environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore rejected the term as too self-serving. After reiterating the oft-repeated (and undeniable) environmental sins of humankind, she suggested that a better term for the age of human influence would be the Unforgiveable–CrimeScene Epoch or, simply, the Obscene Epoch.

  14. It must be noted, however—especially as an antidote to the tendency to romanticize the relationship that “primitive” humans had with nature—that forcing the extinction of megafauna, large mammals, is a human tradition that extends into the past long before most dates proposed for the beginning of the Anthropocene. Rhinos are among the few megafauna left in the human-altered Earth. If we change course and avoid causing the extinction of the remaining species of rhinos, elephants, hippos, and whales, it will be a sign that we have consciously evolved to transcend our deeply ingrained ancient “natural” tendencies.

  15. As of this writing, there is only one male individual left alive on the planet: a forty-two-year-old named Sudan, living in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

  16. I’ve noticed that in discussions of our future, both optimism and pessimism are employed to get the moral upper hand. If you express a view of the human future that someone else thinks is unrealistically or annoyingly hopeful, that person can always accuse you of obviously not caring about this or that undeniable tragedy. If you are being too much of a downer, you can be accused of being too much of a downer.

  17. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/what-do-we-do-when-we-know-the-world-is-ending.

  18. Our world is finite in some dimensions and infinite in others: physically finite, but infinite in the inventiveness of its life. Similarly, although as individuals we come to recognize our physical limits, and our mortality, we are also infinite in other dimensions: spiritual, intellectual, creative, and loving.

  19. Frederick Ferré, Hellfire and Lightning Rods: Liberating Science, Technology, and Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).

  20. Lederberg also coined the term exobiology and helped found the field that later morphed into astrobiology. Often microbiota is used to refer to the organisms, and microbiome to the DNA within them.

  21. Emma Marris, in her book The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (2011), a very good ecomodernist book that traditionalists love to hate, is quite eloquent on this point.

  22. The subtitle of the anti-ecomodernist volume Keeping the Wild is Against the Domestication of Earth.

  23. The very next year, British scientist/writer/futurist J. D. Bernal independently described a similar concept, writing, “Journeys would have to last for hundreds and thousands of years, and it would be necessary—if man remains as he is—for colonies of ancestors to start out who might expect the arrival of remote descendants.”

  24. Peter Zahler and George Schaller, “Saving More than Just Snow Leopards,” New York Times, February 1, 2014.

  25. An excellent book that explores this haunting possibility is World Wide Mind, by Michael Chorost.

  * Yes, we drank a lot of beer, too. It’s what geologists do.

  * A massive global undertaking in which the contributions of the Soviet Union were key. As with the space race, ocean mapping was motivated largely by the quest for Cold War advantage but left a priceless legacy for all humankind.

  * Almost unique in the solar system as being a significant fraction of the size of the planet it orbits. “Almost unique” because Pluto, too, has a giant moon.

  * Shapley was accused of being a Communist Party member by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  * And also by energetic particles caught in Saturn’s strong magnetic field.

  * As a result, it is usually positive feedback that has the most “negative effects,” as in “undesirable,” and vice versa.

  * When we explored the outer solar system, we discovered an important way that worlds can defy this rule. Many moons of giant planets are more active than we expected, and we learned that the gravitational tussle among bodies orbiting a Jupiter or Saturn can provide enough heat to melt interiors, ignite volcanoes, renew surfaces, and wipe away ancient craters.

  * Okay, in detail, the experiments were more sophisticated than this, but the approach was very much predicated on the idea that organisms similar to those found on our planet might be lying dormant in the soil, waiting for some drops of water to revive them.

  † Quite possibly these reactions were caused by the perchlorate compounds that were later found in the dirt around the 2008 Phoenix lander.

  * Note added in proof : Still don’t know!

  * Not yet. A truly self-sufficient, sustainable colony in orbit or on Mars would represent an act of biospheric reproduction.

  * Say what? Think about it. DNA is the molecule that copies itself and divides, copies and divides. It’s all the same molecule, in all organisms, going back billions of years to the common ancestor.

  * Gamow did the math correctly, but the decay rates of radioactive elements were not yet well known when his book was published.

  * Gamow had the wrong planet. It turns out that it is on Mercury where
much of global tectonics has been dominated by the cooling and shrinking of the planet.

  * We may even want to add the right combination of natural disasters to our list of “bioindicators” on distant planets. Only dangerous places will ultimately reward our searches for alien biology. As we explore the universe, we should seek other places that are comfortable for life—but not too comfortable.

  * There were also substantial extinctions at 34, 37, and 57 million years ago that did not make the Big Five.

  * A minority (but not crazy) opinion among scientists is that this extinction was actually caused by an extraterrestrial gamma ray burst.

  * “The community” is appropriately stubborn, curmudgeonly, conservative, and not easily swayed.

  * The Paleoproterozoic distinguishes it from a few other “snowball Earth” episodes that happened much later in Earth history.

  * Those who are paying attention.

  * Remember, “dilution is the solution to pollution”—until it’s not anymore.

  * The troposphere is roughly the lowest ten miles of the atmosphere, although in the polar regions it extends only four or five miles up, depending on the season.

  * Remaining populations exist only in two research facilities (we hope), one in Russia and one in the United States. The decision to finalize this extinction would be a political one.

  * Roughly twenty meters in diameter.

  * The joke is often made, at least among those in my line of work, that the difference between us and the dinosaurs is that they did not have a space program.

  * A duration that itself has greatly increased since we were hunter-gatherers.

  * This is true on most other issues, but often less obvious. In the long run, what’s good for the biosphere is good for us.

  * Occasionally, due to “chaotic obliquity variations,” it may increase up to sixty degrees.

  † You’ve heard that correlation is not causation, but that is not always the right assumption. A correlation can be so detailed and precise as to render the idea of lack of causation so unlikely as to be absurd. That is the case here.

  * John also possesses the most extensive personal science-fiction library I have ever seen, and an encyclopedic knowledge of “hard,” science-based science fiction, which clearly came in handy for this project.

  * Surely, in just a few years, there will be no more DVDs and your child, slightly older, will be the only one who understands your new technology.

  * Although the appearance or disappearance of some is used to mark geological stages.

  * Though the Sun was not here, in galactic orbit, for the first two-thirds of that time.

  * Which reminds me of the inscription on Karl Marx’s tombstone in London’s Highgate Cemetery: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.”

  * Here Tsiolkovsky was addressing a question that many decades later would become known as the Fermi paradox, which I’ll discuss in chapter 6.

  * Or do we err again in making the distinction?

  * An ecomodernist might ask, “Do you care more about your self-willed reserves than helping the poor in Africa achieve a decent standard of living?”—to which I would answer that we must have both. There is a global population level at which we can. I don’t know exactly what it is, nor does anyone else, but I would wager it’s a hell of a lot less than eleven billion.

  * And not just because of the inherent sexism of “man-made.”

  * This is the plot of the movie Galaxy Quest.

  * No, not like in Planet of the Apes !

  * Just enough to design and drive factories and cars, not enough to seriously consider how much of that is a good idea.

  * Based on this paper, astronomer Frank Drake described Simpson as “… perhaps the most eminent person ever to have misunderstood totally the foundations of SETI.”

  * If Sagan had written this ten years later, he could have deleted the word “possible,” and shown yet another conceit to have fallen.

  * I spoke to my parents on the phone while writing this section, reminiscing with them about the Morrisons. When I mentioned the Disarmament Conference, my mother said, “Oh yes, that’s when you got a haircut and took your earring out!” These were not the details I remembered, but I guess it speaks to how seriously I took my role in this event.

  * Later found, like so many “life on Mars” discoveries, to be a mistaken interpretation born of wishful thinking.

  * Here, by mentioning in passing honeybees and crows, Shapley ingeniously pointed out that evolution on Earth has produced more than one kind of complex life with some version of intelligence.

  * Another way to think of it: Imagine if the birth rate stayed the same but people lived for only one month on average. Earth would be much more sparsely populated. Think how little e-mail you would receive.

  * We are not currently broadcasting signals for other listening species to pick up. Sure, there’s an expanding sphere of our radio plays, game shows, sitcoms, and automobile commercials. Yet our century of leakage is quite weak, and dissipating rapidly as it expands, fading into the background hiss and crackle of the galaxy.

  * Some cosmologists will tell you that we know it’s not going to last forever. I think it would be more accurate to say “according to current cosmological ideas…”

  * It would also be nice to see the Denver Nuggets win an NBA championship some decade, but now I’m really dreaming…

  * There is one famous example of such a tantalizing but nonrepeating pulse being observed, from the Big Ear telescope at Ohio State in 1977. It looked for all the world like a genuine alien radio pulse, and the telescope operator who first saw the printout recording the event circled it and wrote, “Wow!” in the margin. Despite years of searches of this same swath of sky, it has never been seen again. It is known, appropriately, as the “Wow! signal. ”

  * True fact: Seth was once Bachelor Number One on the TV show The Dating Game.

  * Hedging bets, since nobody knows which language aliens will speak.

  * Borrowed, of course, from Sagan’s brilliant Cosmos episode with this title.

  * Any such effort would be rightfully critiqued as not reaching or representing all the people of Earth. It would be necessary to counter this creatively and aggressively, with effective worldwide outreach.

  * That stereotypical stoned college student asking, “Hey, have you ever really looked at your hands?” is actually on to something.

  * Because the red light you are seeing comes from all the sunsets circling the Earth at that moment, the exact shade and color depend on the weather around the planet at the time of the eclipse.

  * More recently revised downward to perhaps 50 percent.

  † That is, a large fraction of your cells is not “you” in the way we thought. By mass, your microbiota is a much smaller fraction of you, about 1 percent.

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