The World Will Not End

Something is missed in the arguments between environmentalists and climate deniers. Either the world will end really soon or the world is doing just fine. Both are wrong, but for different reasons that have to do with flaws in their perspectives.

Mossy Rock Hanging in Space

Environmentalists are wrong because the threat is not that the earth will end. Look at the fossil record and you’ll find that large-scale die offs occur with regularity. And yet life flourishes because the Earth has plenty of time for the natural forces of evolution to replenish yet another configuration of life in the shadow of what was lost.

Even if humanity were to annihilate itself, wipe out most other life, and irradiate the entire globe, even then the Earth will do just fine. There are life forms living deep beneath the earth that subsist not on sunlight, but on radiation. That’s how tenacious life is. Absent direct sunlight, some life can evolve to make use of other power sources.

That’s why the old 60′s conceit that humanity is a plague incarnate is so quaint. It’s also wrong. We’re just tenants; we’re the fleas on the dog that think they’re the masters. We can do as much damage as we want; there’s no security deposit to pay. But neither are there any guarantees that we’ll be here over the long haul. That’s for us to manage.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.

(From How to Destroy the Earth by Sam Hughes)

Glass Houses

Those who think environmentalists are wrong shouldn’t throw stones, though. They mistakenly think that everything will be hunky dory for humanity. Even if our industrial/technological society created virtually no harmful emissions, we would still be at risk over the long term. The reason is that absent humanity, the environment would still change because it’s always changing.

It has to. The history of life on Earth begins in a soup so different from our current world that virtually nothing alive now would have survived then. That’s the nature of life. It’s a part of evolution that is often lost in the noise. Life evolved alongside all those other changes happening in geology and the atmospheric makeup of the Earth.

If you took the history of the planet and played it from its beginning to the present, you’d see its molten formation followed by the roiling motion of rock. Once the oceans formed, you’d note something else: the rising and falling of the ocean level relative to the land. Accompanying that, you’d find the encroachment and the withering of the ice-caps.

Back and forth, back and forth. To us, it would feel like a cataclysm, but to something as old as the Earth, it’s more like an organism breathing in and out. At high speed, what seems so permanent is actually quite transitory. Change happens whether we like it or not.

The picture of Earth that we see all the time is an illusion. It is a single frame in a movie with literally billions of frames. The shape of the continents is just how it appears now. All of human history fits in a scant handful of those billions of frames.

The Cosmic Calendar is a conceptual tool popularized by the late Carl Sagan. Imagine that all of history could be mapped against a large wall calendar in a single year. If the Big Bang took place on January 1st at midnight and today's date and time is December 31 at midnight, then all of human history has taken place within the last minute of the last day of the last month. Against this backdrop, we are quite young.

Is There Life on Earth?

Months ago, over at Charlie’s Diary, there was a great post that examined what the odds would be that an alien intelligence would even be able to tell if our world was not just inhabited but habitable.

So the question heading this section is only sort of right. Clearly there is life here. There’s intelligent life here (of a sort), but for how long? When you think about long-term matters these become very important concerns. I’m not awaiting some religious rapture nor am I expecting a great cataclysm. Those are the religious and secular dreams that shut down reasonable long-term questions in their tracks.

Like it or not, we have to learn how to persist in an environment that will change dramatically even under the best of circumstances. All organisms have evolved to live within a very particular set of environmental variables. When those variables change too much, we either adapt or die.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. - Douglas Adams

Ultimately, our sun is going to start changing into a red dwarf in around 3 billion years. The thought of humanity existing for that long makes my head spin. And if we haven’t destroyed ourselves by then, we will need to make some creative travel arrangements.

Whether the environmentalists or climate changers like it or not, the challenge is different than their pre-conceived notions would indicate. What’s at stake is one hell of a game of Russian roulette. In the end,there is – at best – more to worry about than we like to think.