This is the fourth and final installment in my series of articles for the holiday season. The first installment asked, “Are we Alone in the Universe?” The answer seems to be, for all practical purposes, yes.
The second installment was, “The Legacy of Space Exploration,” which was a celebration of the Moon flights and Lunar landings of 50 years ago. The irony of looking out into space was that it turned all the space explorers’ attention back towards Earth.
The title of my third installment was, “The Lunacy of Space Exploration,” with my premise being that finding anything of value, especially a new place to colonize, is futile. The distances, time and costs make this impossible. The current crop of space explorers may do some great science but there isn’t anything of real value to mankind in space.
Save the Earth?
The obvious conclusion is, the Earth is our lifeboat in the vastness of the universe and there is no land and there are no other lifeboats. Fellow humans, we’ve got to make our stand here. No superior race of aliens is going to save us and there is no place for us to colonize if we screw up Earth so badly we can’t live here.
Having said that, we better take seriously saving the Earth, right? Actually, no, the Earth does not need saving. We’ve been looking at this all wrong. Nothing we can do will kill the Earth. The Earth has suffered far worse than anything humans can do to it.
At times in the past, Earth has been a sweltering jungle planet. At other times the entire surface of the planet was covered in ice miles thick.
The universe has been around for over 13 billion years. Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. Life has existed on Earth for only about one billion years. Single-celled organisms consumed solar energy; their waste was oxygen. They created so much oxygen that they couldn’t survive in the environment they created but they made complex life possible.
Ten million years ago the age of mammals began. Modern humans have been around for 200,000 years. Our species, homo sapiens, have been around for only 100,000 years. Our civilization, using agriculture, has been around for about 12,000 years. Our ability to send radio waves into space (the ability to communicate with other worlds) has been around for about 120 years.
In other words, our reign on Earth has been a veritable blink of an eye. Earth and its amazing biosystem will continue its experiments in random creation and natural selection. You don’t have to recycle your paper and you don’t need to hang up your towel in the hotel in an effort to save the planet. The Earth does not need saving. That’s the good news.
The Bad News
The bad news is that there probably isn’t a place for us in that next version of Earth. Humans are currently experiencing a what biologists call a breakout (think tent caterpillars in certain years). All breakouts end. Will this one end in extinction or a drastic reduction in our numbers? None of us will be here to see what happens; the end, if there is one, isn’t imminent.
Humans’ reign on Earth could be extended if we would treat our home, our Mother, our Earth better than we have. We would probably need to drastically reduce our numbers and those remaining would need to learn to live in harmony with their environment. (That would be a more productive way to spend your money, Misters Allen, Bezos, Musk and Branson.) That might extend mankind’s reign on Earth, maybe for quite a long time. Or it may already be too late. We may have sown the seeds of our own extinction as a species.
Is that a depressing holiday message? Maybe, but I also find it strangely comforting. Earth’s biosphere has hosted roughly 50 billion species of which we are just one. And each of us is but one of seven billion of our successful species currently on the planet.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Enjoy the holidays; we’ve had a great run.
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