Scatter. Adapt. Remember. This is how the upbeat new apocalyptic book by science writer Annalee Newitz, the lead editor of the engaging tech/science/entertainment Web site io9, summarizes the strategies that could allow the human species to persist if faced with the kind of epic disruptions to Earth’s environment that have periodically erased the majority of living things.
Click here for an audio sample from the book on organisms that unleashed planetary catastrophes in the past (along with the usual array of super-volcanoes and asteroid impacts).
As I first wrote in 1992, an organism — Homo sapiens — is jogging important Earth systems right now, but unlike the cyanobacteria that transformed the atmosphere through the great Oxygen Catastrophe some 2.4 billion years ago, we’re aware (to some extent) of what we’re doing with the greenhouse buildup.
Can we survive ourselves?
I explored this and other questions about planetary hard knocks with Newitz by video hookup the other day. I think you’ll enjoy the discussion:
I thought of Newitz’s book quite a bit late last week when I was listening and speaking at a fascinating meeting at the Library of Congress exploring “The Longevity of Human Civilization: Will We Survive Our World-Changing Technologies?” The meeting was organized by David H. Grinspoon, the first Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the library’s Kluge Center.
Read this Live Science post on the meeting by Tanya Lewis to get a sense of the discussion. I’ll wait to post on the symposium
until the video of the sessions, involving a cast of characters ranging from the climate scientist Ken Caldeira to the science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.
But here’s the central question that Grinspoon used to frame the event, followed by an answer that Newitz offered me when I sent it to her by e-mail:
The question:
Will human civilization on Earth be imperiled, or enhanced, by our own world-changing technologies? Will our technological abilities threaten our survival as a species, or even threaten the Earth as a whole, or will we come to live comfortably with these new powers?
Here’s Newitz’s answer:
If there is any kind of tool-making skill that humans excel at most, it’s creating dual-use technologies. Often, our greatest technological achievements — say, trains in the nineteenth century or computers in the twentieth — can be used to improve our environments and to degrade them. As we look to the future of our civilization, we have to bear in mind that our tools will never lead to an either/or proposition in terms of progress. There will always be ambiguities. The burgeoning field of geoengineering, which could one day help us draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere and improve the environment, could also be appropriated by the military to wage war with weather. Synthetic biology could be used to enhance the health and abilities of our species, or to launch a racial purity movement.
And this isn’t a new story. Humans have made dual-use technologies since our ancestors began chipping out flake tools — which are great for making food and clothes, but also great for murdering. There is a kind of grim hope to recalling this story from our early evolution. Despite our worst instincts, we have made it this far, often fumbling, but always solving our problems with tools. We are not perfect, and sometimes we make horrible mistakes like relying on fossil fuels for energy, or building atom bombs.
Now, we are on the brink of understanding how to use the Earth itself as a machine to solve the problems our industrial technologies have created. As I said, our history offers a grim hope. With each new error, we build tools to remediate what we’ve done (though admittedly we then make more mistakes). It’s important to remember that there is no one thing we can do, nor any one technology we can deploy, that will guarantee all humans will use their powers wisely. Still, we can invest our efforts in new development as wisely as possible, choosing solar over coal and biodiversity over factory farms. In coming centuries, I believe we’ll strive to make the anthropocene comfortable for as many species as possible, if only for the selfish reason that it will make us comfortable too. My hope is that in the very act of inventing tools to improve the environment, we will come closer to understanding our place on the planet, as well as in a global society of creatures like ourselves.