What Now?
An Inquiry
Astronomers have been gazing off into deep space for a number of years now, looking for exoplanets, planets outside our own solar system, and they’ve found over 4000 of them so far; it seems as though almost every star has at least a few but we’ve not found one that we’re certain actually has life onboard. There is no direct corollary to this solar system in any of them. This place, Earth – our home – seems to be an incredibly rare and precious jewel in the Universe….and yet, we seem to be doing our level best to destroy it.
Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the famous Drake equation states that we ought to be able to look out into the Milky Way and find it teeming with intelligent species, literally billions of them, just in our own galaxy. There are close to 10 billion stars very much like our Sun in this galaxy alone and as many as a trillion planets, habitable or otherwise. Yet we see nothing, hear….nothing, but crickets. This deafening silence is so profound it even has a name, the Fermi Paradox, after Enrico Fermi who posed the question, ‘If they’re there, why don’t we see them? Where are they hiding?’ Somebody has to be out there.
If you’re like me, then you’ll see other life as an inevitability. I believe life ‘wants’ to exist, external to any interaction from sentient beings, and will wherever it can find a foothold; that there is a Jedi lifeforce.
But I also find myself wondering if, like us, these races rise to a level of dominance on their home planets, learn to use its resources the way we have, invent fire and the wheel, industrialize the way we have but then, destroy their own habitats in exactly the same way we’re doing… and that’s as far as they get; they just die off. You can insert the Dark Side here, Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader. Perhaps it’s inevitable, an unhappy law of nature, a planet as a unit of universal consumption; any planet lasts precisely as long as it takes the dominant species to consume it. That’s humanity’s next massive hurdle, learning to overcome our own worst instincts before we destroy everything. We need, then, to find a way to survive not our environment but ourselves. There would seem to be a specific missing quantity within the Drake equation that factors in human greed and our innate divisiveness. Perhaps there’s a natural ceiling, a point at which the dominant species on any planet expires due to their own profligacy and failure to adapt. Without the ability to countenance that truth, you don’t get to the next evolutionary phase.
We are not a race that knows yet how to co-operate for the greater good; more things drive us apart than unite us. We’re divided by country, by race, by religion, by political affiliation, and by wealth. Simply put, we just haven’t learned how to get along. I have a sneaking suspicion that this will change only once we’re confronted, really confronted with near certainty that we are going out altogether, when the thumbscrews of imminent extinction are liberally applied.
One alternative possibility is that other races have already seen how self-destructive we are, what poor stewards of our own precious habitat we are and have concluded that we’re best left alone to die in isolation. Why would anyone want us visiting their planet when we were so hell-bent on obliterating the one we just left? Anyone with a brain would see us as an invading force, looking for a new home because we’ve left the old one a glowing, lifeless cinder. Perhaps we’re the nightmare neighbors in this neck of the cosmos, unwitting pariahs. Everyone’s talking, just not to us. They’ve employed their Klingon cloaking devices so we can’t see them. I find it interesting that we so long to find anyone else in the Universe, to finally know for a certainty that we are not alone in the vastness and yet we don’t seem to be able to find consensus among ourselves about how to better our existence here. I half suspect that we’re unconsciously hoping for a savior to arrive in a magnificent silver starship and show us, in a flash, how to fix all our ills. But before that happens, we ought to make ourselves more presentable for this alien ambassador, clean up the living room, stop killing each other and maybe, quit smoking.
Peter Davies, in his thought-provoking book, The Eerie Silence, posits that highly evolved species out there may regard us much as we regard microbes. Their technology may be so advanced we don’t even see it for what it is, incapable of even comprehending it. It may not even have any physical form. It’s a humbling thought. They may be just sitting back, waiting to see whether we annihilate ourselves or begin to exhibit signs of coming to our senses. So far, the odds are not good. Think of yourself as vermin for a second. The question they may well be asking themselves is, are we adequate to the task of saving ourselves? At the moment, the answer would appear to be a resounding no. Perhaps there’s a club of nearby civilizations and we’re just not in it. You have to be demonstrably smarter than we are to get past the velvet rope. For starters, giving up on weapons that could turn the planet into a charcoal brickette and start cooperating in order to get through that next phase of evolution, might just allow us access to the stream of galactic chatter that’s going on right under our noses.
My question is, if we keep plundering the Earth’s resources, what do we expect the future to look like? As much as heads of industry would have us believe otherwise, there’s no such thing as an infinite resource. What happens when we have no clean air or drinkable water left? What then? Just 2.5% of all the water on Earth is fresh and less than half of that is readily available. By 2025 two-thirds of the population on Earth will have water scarcity issues. How many ‘advanced’ species have preceded us into oblivion that we have no knowledge of? Is there any reason for us to believe we have the wherewithal to avoid the same fate? There is no do-over when you screw up a planet. If there’s a plan to fix the problems we’ve created I’m yet to hear it. And yet we seem to be incapable of imagining a different way of living that honors Mother Nature and ensures our continued existence. We have surrendered sustainability in the name of convenience. Our lives can be more comfortable in the short term as long as we give up on any semblance of a livable future. We’ve surrendered our bodies to processed foods and got obesity and diabetes in return. We’ve surrendered clean air to power stations that supply the electricity for the appliances we don’t really need but keep us blithely occupied so we don’t see the mess we’re in. We’ve surrendered clean oceans to the plastics products that are literally choking their denizens to death. We’ve surrendered our peace of mind to a nuclear weapons arsenal that kills us without even being used in anger. And we’ve surrendered our thinking to smartphones which have clearly given us an acute rash of ADD. Sitting on any New York subway train will show you just how serious this condition has become; we’ve already given up a good portion of our intellects to a device we carry in our pockets.
We’ve also commodified everything, including the misery of others, in the form of for-profit prisons, while decreasing the intrinsic value of our lives. Are we happy? We’re left with an overarching feeling of inevitability, of resignation, that we’ve created a huge set of insurmountable, ugly problems that there’s nothing we can really do about it. We might as well just carry on, happily anesthetized in the short term, and pray that these incredibly thorny vexations will magically vanish tomorrow, “Some mythological entity smarter than me will fix it”. But if it – any of it – is fixable then why are the best and brightest minds on the planet planning on leaving it behind?
Could it really be that Elon Musk’s proposed colony on Mars ends up as the final repository for the human race? I have to say, it feels like a leaking lifeboat, a Hail Mary for a desperate people who’ve essentially run out of ideas. There have to be better options. Indeed, there are better options. Surely, the greater technological challenge lies right here on Earth. Bring this planet back to the pristine state that it was in before we industrialized. Admittedly, it’s not as sexy as huge rockets on a months-long voyage to another planet that requires terraforming to make it livable, but it has infinitely greater pay-off on the far end. Mars is half the size of Earth, has a thin, poisonous atmosphere and is awash in the Sun’s deadly radiation. Would not that money be better spent on gigantic atmospheric scrubbers, on filters that would clean the oceans of particulate plastic that is devastating sea life and entering the food chain, without removing plankton, and on massive solar farms that would finally put paid to fossil fuels? Abundant, breathable air, enough food, and water to sustain everyone, regardless of where they live and how much money they make, how about that? Wouldn’t that be better than staring at your flat-screen image of someone else on a far-away planet? It can be done. We have the ability, now, today, to make this a reality. The march of time insists we go forward but all common sense suggests we need to look to our past in order to learn how to proceed in a way that makes sense and enables us all to stay alive. We all know these things need to happen but there are sufficient numbers of evil people in power that would rather see most of us living in squalor and poverty.
Citarum River, Jakarta
Clearly, the way we’re living is the very opposite of sustainable; we’re poisoning the atmosphere, clearing the forests, choking the oceans with plastic and fracking the land which, by the way, releases masses of additional methane into the atmosphere, worsening global warming. The World’s permafrost is thawing on a massive scale, releasing untold amounts of frozen methane and hastening us toward a runaway greenhouse effect that will be impossible to reverse. We’ve even managed to pollute our immediate environment outside the atmosphere with millions of pieces of space junk. It seems there’s nowhere we can go and leave it in the condition we found it; we leave a trail of destruction in our wake. It’s what we’re best at. Just getting off the planet poses serious hazards.
We are now in the Anthropocene epoch in which we humans are having profound, irreversible effects on the planet. Coincidentally or not, we’re also in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction. Two-thirds of the world’s wildlife is projected to disappear before this decade is out due to human encroachment into their habitats. Yes, we’ve learned how to use the Earth’s resources in amazing ways to advance ourselves, to better our living conditions, but ultimately the result is a huge net negative on the environment and we are moving inexorably toward a broken tomorrow in which our home planet can simply no longer sustain us. We may have become masters of everything we survey but we can’t even be sure that we will survive through to the end of the next century. All indications are to the contrary.
The question has been posed, “is the human race a keystone species?” and the answer has to be an emphatic no. If we disappeared tomorrow absolutely no-one would miss us and the planet would unquestionably benefit from our absence. Both wolves and whales have been proven to be species that are essential to the ecosystems they reside within; they actively benefit their environments. Remove them and things start to go seriously sideways. We’ve seen this. When we stop hunting these creatures, balance is restored to the system; they are an essential element in an environment that requires their input to maintain equilibrium. Human beings are the polar opposite, a detriment in almost every imaginable way, not only to ourselves but all other inhabitants of the planet. I’m constantly confounded by the oft-repeated assertion from many scientists that we are, by far, the superior species on Earth. What “superior” species so willfully destroys its own habitat, I ask? We are the problem. The ONLY problem. We are the only ones who regard Nature as the Enemy.
As I write we are blowing through the 2ºC temperature rise designated by climatologists as a tipping point for our atmosphere. Truth be told, we’ve already entered into a runaway feedback loop which will see sharp upward changes in global temperatures and previously unseen worldwide upheavals as vast numbers of people are forced to move inland from coastal areas. Ice-free seas soak up more heat and promote faster melting of ice, raising sea levels ever more quickly. Climatologists like John Englander and James Hansen are in accord and foresee a time, not too distant when the planet is entirely free of ice and most coastal cities are 100ft underwater. They believe that there is too much momentum to atmospheric warming and so little chance of stopping it without a concerted global effort orders of magnitude larger than the Apollo programme. Without it, we can say goodbye to London, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Venice, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, and a host of other major cities around the planet. In fact, all of Florida will disappear below the waves according to projections. Mr. Trump’s Mar A Lago will vanish along with it. High tides already slosh around downtown Miami streets. It’s impossible to find insurance for waterfront property now.
Imagine coming South into the lower Hudson Valley and only being able to see the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, but not the island. Much of Brooklyn, Queens, all of Staten Island underwater. Elsewhere, deserts will expand, further squeezing populations in many already arid countries. This is the reality to come, beginning perhaps twenty years from now.
What will we do with any industry situated on the coast? Most nuclear power stations are situated there because they need ready access to that water. How do we move every power station on the planet? These are questions we need to be asking now, not building new ones but decommissioning and moving the ones we already have.
My aim is to create a series of documentaries that show, in stark relief, what the problems facing the human race truly are, how we’re adversely affecting the planet but, more importantly, my hope is to erect signposts towards a more sustainable future for our kids and grandkids. Unless we start thinking as a species about how to begin solving problems that affect us all, we’re not going to last much longer.
Viewed in isolation, it’s easy to dismiss many of these problems but gathered together in one place I think the true magnitude of the task we have in front of us will become clearer and hopefully galvanize some heads of state but also ordinary people around the world into acting, not in their personal interest, but in the Planet’s interest.
The first episode in the series of documentaries will concentrate on one of the most enigmatic structures ever devised by man, a dome in the remote Pacific, on a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands called Enewetak. It looks, for all the world, like a crashed flying saucer. Between 1948 and 1958 the US conducted no fewer than 43 separate nuclear tests on this atoll, within an area about the size of greater Los Angeles, resulting in massive radiological contamination. The test program actually began two years earlier, on Bikini. In total, the US exploded 67 bombs on the two atolls, the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima-sized weapon, every day for twelve straight years. Bikini is hopelessly contaminated to this day.
I want to go to Enewetak, speak to the few people who still live there, see how they feel about this impending disaster and see if we cannot get the US government to take ownership of the mess that it left so cavalierly in its wake, have them move the contents of the dome before it irrevocably poisons half the World’s oceans. The aim is to record how they cope with a ticking time bomb on their doorstep. Their lives have been torn apart, purely because of the geography of the Marshall Islands, their remoteness and the physical attributes that made the atolls ideal for the type of testing the US needed. Their fate was sealed once the US found them in the midst of WWII.
Now Enewetak and the wider Pacific is in imminent, severe danger of being contaminated by the contents of the Cactus dome, enough highly radioactive material to fill a small football stadium.
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Albert Einstein
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