Extinction of Man
by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
Introduction
This is not a particularly cheerful essay. It is about the probability of man’s
long term survival. Just how much longer will man be around on planet earth? Man
is a relative newcomer to the planet, but gives all signs he will be a bust, and
will soon be gone.
Our Heritage
Reading about our ancestors, you have to marvel at how they persisted through
extreme hardships. Man is a adaptable animal that managed to survive from the
arctic to the equator, in deserts and on the oceans. We have even survived ice
ages.
We lived in small groups where everyone knew each other, and where your loyalty
was to the group. There was no need ever to plan more than a year ahead.
Yet, even before we invented technology, we stripped the forests of Greece bare
and denuded her soils. The fabled Cedars of Lebanon were gone long before the
chainsaw was invented.
Our Predicament
Mankind faces a series of unprecedented threats. He is not capable of dealing
with them because they overwhelm his here and now focus. They require thinking
of the world as a whole. They require considering the effects on generations to
come, not just the next quarter bottom line. I will consider only four of dozens
of major problems threatening mankind: oil depletion, germ warfare, global
warming and nuclear war.
Oil Depletion
Mankind today depends on technology and oil for the green revolution to feed her
teeming billions. Oil is used to make fertilizers, pesticides and fuels for farm
machinery and food processing. Without that, the population of the earth will
have collapse back to under a billion — what it was before these things
were invented. According to Scientific American, by 2020
the flow of oil will have reduced to half what it was in 2000.
The price will far more than double, effectively cutting off the poorer half of
the world from having any. There is hope some new technology will help fill the
oil-gap, but so far it is just a trickle. However disruptive oil depletion may
be, it is not extinction.
Germ Warfare
Mankind has discovered how to create life, molecule by molecule. Even an
undergraduate geneticist can cook up a new form of AIDS or polio. The very first
thing man did with this new found knowledge was to create super bugs for germ
warfare — e.g. innoculation-resistant smallpox. If these pathogens are
ever let loose in error, by terrorists or by armies, they may kill billions, but
that is still not extinction. However, as understanding of human physiology
increases, it is only a matter of time until we learn to create pathogens
completely lethal to everyone. That is extinction. Humans, genetically, are
almost clones. We are much more susceptible than other species to this sort of
attack.
The USA and Russia foolishly did the research to make it easy for every two-bit
terrorist to destroy city.
Global Warming
Mankind is embarking on a strange ecological experiment. Over a couple of
centuries, man is burning the carbon accumulated over millions of years by
plants. The CO2 levels are now at the
level of the Permian extinction. There have been two mass extinctions in earth
history, the Permian, 230 million years ago, was the worst. 70% of all species
were lost. It was caused by natural global warming when volcanoes released
greenhouse gases. (The other more familiar to most people was the more recent KT
Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction event, 65 million years ago. It was caused
when an asteroid plunged into the earth at Chicxulub Mexico wiping out the
dinosaurs and half of earth’s species.) We are re-experiencing the same
global warming conditions that triggered the more devastating Permian extinction,
only this time it is man made. When it gets too hot, plants die. When it gets
too hot and dry, massive fires ravage huge areas. When plants die, insects and
herbivores die. When insects die, even heat-resistant plant’s don’t
get pollinated and die. Birds die without insects to eat. Carnivores die without
herbivores to eat, all triggered by what seems so innocuous — heat.
Similarly, in the oceans, when they get just a few degrees too warm, corals
expel their symbiotic algae and die soon thereafter. When coral reefs die, the
fish that live on them die, triggering extinction chains. Satellites can chart
the loss of vegetation over the planet. We are losing 4 species per hour, a rate
on the same scale as the Permian and KT extinction events. Man has no ability to
live without the support of other species. We are committing suicide and killing
the family of life on earth along with us. The question is, will we wipe
ourselves out along with the rest of the planet’s ecology? Man is very
adaptable. He will destroy his food supply on land and in the oceans as a result,
but some people will survive. That is not complete extinction.
Nuclear War
Mankind has discovered how to harness the atom. The first thing he did with that
knowledge was vaporize two Japanese cities. Now he has stockpiles of weapons
capable of killing everyone on earth many times over. Extinction becomes a
distinct possibility. All it takes in one person in the next 500 years with
access to trigger a war, and it is all over. Perhaps a handful of humans might
survive in some remote Amazon jungle, but man will have put himself back to the
stone age level of culture. Everything we have achieved will be lost.
John Kennedy estimated that the odds were between one in three, and one in two,
that he would start a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Except on
Star Trek, you can’t repeatedly do things that dangerous and live to tell
about them. The odds eventually catch up with you.
Even after nuclear war, some life will survive. We humans may all die, but some
species would survive, and evolution would continue its slow pace, eventually
bringing a new crop of creatures to earth.
Nanites
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
~ Farmer’s Almanac, 1978
This may sound like science fiction, but in the not too distant future we will
be creating microscopic robots called nanites by the
bucketful. Eventually we will create self-replicating nanites, ones that build
more copies of themselves all on their own. It is not hard too imagine a runaway
overpopulation process, much like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s
Apprentice. If anybody ever slips up in “birth control” for these
critters they could bury us all alive in great grey goo as they turned
everything on the surface of the planet into still more nanites.
This is not my private paranoid fantasy. It is shared by distinguished futurists
such as Raymond Kurzweil.
Lesser Assaults
“If
builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first
woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
~ Weinberg’s
Second Law
Technological societies are so finely tuned that they can collapse at the
tiniest provocation. There are only three days worth of food in the supermarkets.
Terrorists can blow up high voltage transmission lines, subways or freeways. A
single accident on the Mississippi river fouled up gasoline production in the
USA for a month.
Modern farming exposes the soil to erosion. We have lost more soil in the last
century than took hundreds of thousands of years to build up. You can’t
grow crops without soil. Every year Kansas loses 2 to 8 tons of soil per acre of
farmland. Yet, we refuse to address the problem.
Global warming will cause a dust bowl in the corn belt of the USA, ending its
agricultural abundance.
Corporate Capitalism
Man is naturally greedy and short-sighted, but the invention of corporate
capitalism (as compared with free-market capitalism) has magnified that tendency.
We have created powerful institutions who bribe government officials to do
things that help the short term profit of companies, but which hurt the health,
safety of citizens and long term profit of corporations.
Corporations are pseudo people with psychotic personalities, required by law to
be devoid of conscience. They are not permitted to be concerned with the
interest of the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the people living
where the corporation does business. By law they must consider only
profit for the shareholders.
They will do things like bribe the government to allow them to dump pollutants
such as pig manure into the water, then fob the cost of cleaning them up on the
public, rather than building them into the cost of the product, the way you
would in a true free-market economy. Lack of care of the soil is good for short
term profit, but soil loss is disastrous for the crops of future generations.
The problem is, these corporations are actively working as hard as they can
against the public interest. For example.
- They are trying to increase oil consumption.
- They are trying to increase research into ever more lethal germ warfare.
- They are trying to increase the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the
air.
- They are trying to increase the sales of nuclear weapons and home and abroad.
- They are trying to discourage space exploration in favour of military spending
where there is no clear deliverable.
Even without these corporate enemies of planet earth, our planet has little
chance of success. Yet their power grows daily through phony free trade
agreements like NAFTA and WTO.
Jehovism
In the Jehovist (extended Judeo-Christian) family of religions I include,
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Christian Science and Jehovah’s
Witnesses. I might exclude the Quakers. The Jehovists are weak in preserving
life on planet earth. This anti-life, anti-earth attitude has several roots:
- In Genesis is the source of the belief that man is a special animal with
dominion over all other species to do with as he pleases. Jehovists are so vain
as to imagine the creator of the universe prefers habitually take the shape of a
primate on an obscure planet in a remote corner of the Milky Way, named Homo
Sapiens. They pretend not to notice the other intelligent more peaceful species
on earth, the elephants, dolphins and whales.
- The emphasis on the unimportance of the physical world as unreal, just a test
for the afterlife, a temporary world until Christ returns, a source of
temptation from the spiritual life and the domain of Satan.
- Jehovists distinguish themselves from other religions that honour the earth,
trees, rivers etc. Jehovists are proud of the fact they do not honour the
environment. They consider that sacrilegious.
- The precise rules for various mandatory blood animal sacrifices consume most of
Leviticus.
- The stance that non-believers are inferior beings whose life has no value. Even
people in slightly variant sects treat each other as enemies.
- Jehovah himself is depicted as violent, bloodthirsty, arbitrary
and unjust. How can you expect his followers to behave any better?
In contrast, the Jains and Buddhists foster a reverence for all life. They are
supposed to avoid hurting even insects. So what does this have to do with
extinction? As science creates more and more ways for even one man to wipe out
the entire planet, you need extreme taboos to stop people from doing that.
Jehovists don’t have anywhere near enough inhibition. From my point of
view, they are like Vikings who have accepted violence and destruction as
perfectly normal. They don’t even notice what they are doing. Everywhere
they have spread they have stripped the planet bare, polluted its waters,
overpopulated, made war, enslaved others, exuded greenhouse gasses with abandon,
squandered the resources of earth in conspicuous consumption, exteriminated
species after species and generally behaved like the proverbial savages they
claim everyone else to be. They are far too vengeful to be entrusted with
dangerous tools like the atom and biotechnology. Too bad. They already have them.
The most powerful man on earth, George W. Bush is a fundamentalist Jehovist
whacko who imagines the voices in his head telling him to butcher and torture,
are God himself.
Do We Deserve To Live?
Mankind is like a monkey. He is clever but not wise. It is only a matter of time
until he kills himself with his cleverness and lack of caution.
Man has little concern for other species on the ecological health of the planet
as a whole. He ignores natural limits, simply because they are inconvenient. He
imagines his economic activity can grow without limit, he can burn oil without
limit, he can pollute without limit, he can extract resources from the earth
without limit.
He is fiercely loyal to his country, his company, his team, his tribe, his
family, no matter what evil things they have done.
Only a tiny fraction of the planet’s inhabitants see themselves as
citizens of planet earth first, and of some particular country second. Only a
tiny fraction of the planet’s inhabitants care about people outside their
immediate families. Only a handful of the planet’s inhabitants think
deeply about the effect they will have on generations to come. It seem unlikely
these altruistic survival traits will spread in time. Hanging on tenaciously to
the outmoded us-vs-them mentality and short-term greed seals our doom. We
deserve to die.
It may be a good thing man blows himself up before he develops the technology to
destroy an entire galaxy.
The Escape
Once man has colonised several planets, one planet could go up in a nuclear
conflagration without destroying the rest. The survivors would be stonily
shocked into giving up such foolish weapons. Until that point, if earth goes,
man goes.
Unfortunately, exploration of space has taken a back seat to military
exploitation of resource-rich third world nations.
The other escape would be nuclear disarmament. Man is too stupid. He would
rather see everyone die than his neighbour potentially take advantage of him.
The USA wants its nukes not for defence, but to intimidate and bully the nations
of the earth to bolster its economic exploitation. It won’t give up that
privileged position.
Rays Of Hope
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can
change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”
~ Margaret Mead
Young people are much clearer about man’s fragility than their elders. If
we are lucky, the old farts like George W. Bush will die off from cholesterol
poisoning before they have totally destroyed the planet.
Computers with the memory capacity and computing capacity of the human brain are
due about 2020. They will do some things amazingly
better than humans, just as now. Most likely, they will run circles around us in
logical thinking. If we are very lucky, they may be very good at simulating the
effects of various policies, and will be able to explain with 3D graphics
exactly what the effects of the politicians’ actions will be. If they are
sufficiently good salesmen, they may save earth. In the process though, we will
have become obsolete ourselves.
I have one other thread of hope. Back in 1969, I was
the only person on earth I knew of who felt that gays should be treated with
respect. Even my fellow gays seemed to think they deserved contempt. I started
my little gay lib project knowing it was completely futile. I thought, even if I
did seven lectures a week and managed to change everyone’s mind in the
audience, it would make only a tiny dent. Yet within three years we had the
first gay rights legislation in British Columbia. Perhaps it was not just a co-incidence.
I discuss this in my essay on quantum
miracles. It may be your personal choice whether you live in a world where
man goes extinct or in one where he prevails.
Overwhelm
The natural reaction of someone reading this essay is to go into overwhelm. This
is just too much bad news to digest at once. People have their own various
techniques for dealing with it. The most common is denial. Gloom and doom must
automatically be false. Folks will happily ignore the hard facts of global
warming, soil erosion and aquifer depletion, and glom onto any unscientific
crackpot like Bjørn Lomborg or George Bush so long as he paints a rosy
picture. Some will comfort themselves with wishful thinking. “God won’t
let things get that bad.” totally forgetting God has been quite happy to
permit even worse suffering in past. Some will simply put these issues out of
mind.
The problem is this denial makes the problems worse. Not only to people fail to
take action, they actively interfere with others taking action. So to be
optimally effective, you must upset and worry.
Summary
It seems unlikely man will survive the next hundred years. The question then
becomes, how many other species will man take down with him. Will the dolphins,
elephants and whales have to die too?
Does this mean you should just give up and die right now? No. Butterflies and
roses live only a day, yet they have value in the moment. If you were on a
sports team playing a much stronger team. Would you give up just because the
odds were against you? Of course not. Here the stakes are much higher than any
sporting event, namely the survival of our species and most of the other species
of our planet.
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