Are we safe? Maybe, sort of…

“Are we safe?”, I was asked last week. The question was a discussion starter for an enjoyable panel which closed the Oxford Literary Festival’s Saturday afternoon look at science and the future – an event which ranged from cosmology to climate change.

The event was a conversation (with the always apocalyptically cheerful Anders Sandberg and writer Sara Wheeler)– generally a  better way of doing these things than getting panellists to speak separately. But, in the way of conversation, it provoked some second thoughts. So here are a few of the things I said, or thought I might have said, in some sort of order.

Are we safe?

No, of course not. We are mortal. We live in a peculiarly fortunate culture where, for quite long spells, many of us can forget about this. But, in Larkinesque fashion, it is a truth which always comes back.

But what of existential risk – in the sense of threats to the whole of humanity? Individual responses to this tend, in my view, to be determined by a combination of temperament and circumstance.

How so? Well, we are talking about the probability of lots of inevitable individual deaths happening all at once, adding up to the death of a species (ours), or extinction.

We do have some information that bears on that, but not enough to give a very clear answer on how likely it is. So the way we feel about it tends to reflect our intuition about some related questions: is human life fragile or robust, the cosmos friendly or unfriendly, hospitable or inhospitable?

At the moment, we can find reasons for answering that question about equally convincingly either way.

Good things: the constants of the universe are tuned to just the right combination which allows life to exist. (The Goldilocks principle). We seem to live in a cosmos which is disposed to allow the emergence of  complexity – in ever more wondrous forms. In some sense, perhaps, we are meant to be here. In Stuart Kauffman’s phrase, we’re at home in the universe.

Notsogood: one of the main processes which allows that complexity to emerge – natural selection – is rather scary when you look at how it works. I don’t mean Nature red in tooth and claw: evolution has a place for co-operation as well as competition. However, although natural selection sounds neutral, or even benign, the agent of selection is death – of individuals and, on the larger scale, the death of species. Extinction is just what happens to species, in the end. Endurance beyond a few tens of millions of years is very much the exception, and those species that have lasted for a few hundred millions years are heroic survivors. (Afterthought to the afterthought – I wonder if that is true if you include the microbial world, where the concept of species is in any case pretty hard to apply…)

Of course, a species can leave descendents on the path to extinction, as we may do. But in its original form it has still quit the scene. At our current point, where culture – in the shape of technology – is a more powerful evolutionary force than natural selection, that seems an increasingly likely outcome. Whether you terribly much mind that idea depends on whether you think Homo sapiens in our present form are such an adornment to the cosmos we ought to be around for ever, or if it is OK we are just a stage on the way to something else. That something has a post-human form we cannot quite define. But we’ll know it when we see it.

Aside from how evolution actually works, other features of the cosmos suggest that a middle of the road position is justifiable. The universe is more or less hospitable, but risky.

It is interesting to contemplate the latest results on star systems with planets, for example. Amazingly, our observations now have such fine resolution that we can detect planets orbiting distant stars, and not just gas giants but even smaller, possibly Earth-like ones. It looks more and more as if there are an enormous number of solar systems out there, and a heck of a lot of Earth like planets. That surely makes it more likely that there is complex life spread, however thinly, through the galaxy, maybe all galaxies in the observable universe.

Then consider gamma ray bursts. We don’t understand them very well, but we do know by observation that, occasionally, there are absolutely enormous energy releases, with no warning that we know how to register, that rip through large regions of space.

So if life, even intelligent life, is ubiquitous, every now and again one of these gamma bursts takes out a civilization. (Oliver Morton wrote about this eloquently in Prospect a decade or so ago, when the search for extra-solar planets was less well on than it is now.) The universe, if you like, is welcoming to life, then takes random shots at it for sport.

Against that background, the risks we face on Earth at the moment seem relatively manageable. Bad things will happen. Perfectly terrible things may happen, in the future as in the past. A person who predicted that the sky would fall 65 million years ago, before an asteroid impact caused a mass extinction, would have been right. A person who predicted crop failure, pandemic and the death of between a third and a half of the population of Europe in the 14^th century would have been right. Those who foresaw a a terrible conflict in Europe in the late 1930s (read Louis MacNiece’s Autumn journal for the atmosphere) were correct.

On the other hand, plenty of possible dire events did not come to pass. No nuclear holocaust (yet). No billions starving before 2000, pace Professor Ehrlich.

So, there will be good and bad. But, assuming gamma ray bursts are not coming our way, the end of humanity is not coming any time soon, probably…

(Thanks to Georgina Ferry for the invitation to Oxford.)

Related articles

• We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction (theatlantic.com)

Surviving the future – with computers…

A recently aired documentary about the future from CBC is now accessible on the net (there isn’t a YouTube link to the whole thing which I can find, but someone cleverer than me has embedded it here).

Surviving the Future a fascinating document, beginning with a focus on the tension which grabbed me when I first started thinking about the Rough Guide to the Future – rather a long time ago. That is, isn’t it strange to live at a time when the two opposed discourses of apocalypse and utopia are both so prominent. Sure, they are both perennials, but in their current forms – climate catastrophe versus techno-optimism which will both solve global warming and usher in an age of abundance and, possibly, unlimited lifespan or even computer-mediated paradise – the opposition seem especially pronounced.

It is short (40-odd mins) and packs a lot in, so there’s plenty of TV-doc compression to make fun of. But to do these topics more justice you’d need something much longer, like a book (even). The first half, at any rate, does a pretty good job of laying out the futures landscape, emphasising the stark polarity of views, and with the likes of Jamais Cascio and Paul Saffo giving good soundbite – Cascio in particular on screen quite a lot.

Once it has you hooked, it even allows Saffo to say that “visions of the future are always more dramatic than reality”, which sounds hopeful in the context.

The narrative unravels a bit in the second half, I think. Having dealt rapidly with climate change, regenerative medicine, and in vitro meat (uncritically in all three cases – again no time), it turns to computers as both the harbingers of bad news and the potential saviours.

How does that work? Well, the computers, not the people who wrote the models, “began to bring us bad news” around the time of The Limits to Growth. Now, they have got more powerful, natch, so they can give us “ever more detailed models of the coming ecological catastrophe”.

We deal with “evidence gathered by the most powerful computers”, again – rather oddly – granting them agency – and this is what makes the “new futurism” all about survival.

There is a whole progamme here on the topic they canvas in brief, namely predictive simulation as an extension of the human mind. I’m sensitised to that because I’ve just been trying to write a feature piece for a UK newspaper on modelling and policy-making, and been reminded just how much of it is going on., But even without digging around in flood control, epidemic planning, climate models or even economics it is pretty clear there is a lot of computer simulationhappening in crucial areas of science and policy.

The doc then  takes a slightly odd turn, though, after a good bit on the Chevy Volt, by arguing that the change which will really matter is something called the “cognitive computer”. This will, apparently, “give us the best chance of survival”. And it will go along with sensor networks which mean “the planet itself will function as a computer interface”. That will just give us better information, surely? No doubt that is a useful adjunct to better handling of global problems, from managing ecosystems to more efficient agriculture and monitoring and perhaps charging for carbon emissions – maybe even a prerequisite, But here it ends up sounding like a straghtforward technical fix. I suspect that is because the demands of a major channel documentary in North America call for an upbeat ending rather than because there is any very persuasive logic to it.

Still, an interesting document, and well worth watching all through. I see the same outfit have just made one on geo-engineering but not sure if that is available outside Canada…

Human extinction: appalling or appealing?

The Australian author Clive Hamilton’s recently published a book-length analysis of the roots of resistance to the truth about climate change, and why this makes it harder to do anything about it. It is a pretty convincing look at the reasons for denial. But Hamilton’s sobering essay is marked by one key miscalculation, its title.

He calls it Requiem for a Species. That is a misjudgement not because it is over the top (though it is) but because, it seems, some of us quite like the idea. The extinction of Homo sapiens is a gloomy prospect, on the face of it. Yet there is plenty of evidence just now of its appeal.

The end of all things, or just of all humans, in a flaming finis, is a fictional staple with recognisable roots in myth and religion. But the titillation of extinction is not quite the same thing as apocalypse as entertainment. I have in mind stories in a rather different mood, in which the end is, usually, more gradual. The long fade allows a few protagonists to stay around and animate the story, but this is a distraction from the main interest, which is depicting what the world would be like if we went away.

This tradition of, if you like, Last Man novels (Mary Shelley’s being the first notable example) is epitomised by George R Stewart’s great science fiction tale from the 1940s, whose titles evokes just the mood I am trying to pin down: Earth Abides. Strictly, it is not about extinction, but about the removal of civilization by a disease which does for the vast majority of humanity. But what stays in the mind are the elegiac descriptions of what happens to the world with hardly any people in it, related from the point of view of the ecologist who is the main witness of what follows.

This ambiguous mood, a kind of dark euphoria to borrow a phrase from the futurist Bruce Sterling, is also found in, for instance, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, where there are some people left but it is pretty clear their days are numbered. And it animates the attention-grabbing thought experiment of Alan Weisman’s (sort of ) non-fiction book of 2007, The World Without Us. As one reviewer put it, Weisman’s book is a kind of pop-science ghost story, in which the haunted house is the Earth. The same idea was explored soon after in a two-hour documentary for the History Channel in the US, Life After People.

All these stories fascinate. And those who try and stir us to action by warning of the danger of extinction, or near-extinction – as when Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner asserts there is “no hope for humans” or James Lovelock envisages humanity reduced to “a few breeding pairs” by extreme climate change – need to consider that some may embrace the vision they want us to react against. But what, exactly, is the appeal?

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The most recent depictions of Earth after human extinction tend toward the Edenic. The moral of such tales appears to be that an intelligent, upright primate that uses technology to reshape its environment is an unwelcome intrusion in a natural world that would get on much better without us.

But this contemporary twist, understandable at a time when anxiety about human-induced global change is high and we are shamefaced but mostly passive witnesses to the end of innumerable other species, is a variant of an older story. That is still modern, I think – no need to go back to Ecclesiastes, or even Mary Shelley. It begins with the Victorians, and with Charles Darwin.

There were two great blows to Victorians’ belief in progress and the pointfulness of life. One was the second law of thermodynamics, put forward by Sir William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) in 1852. Its inescapable implication was that the universe would move gradually toward “heat death”, becoming old, cold and inhospitable to life. Although this dispiriting prospect was unimaginably far off, it still set a cosmic limit to progress.

Within a decade of Thompson’s unwelcome announcement Darwin put extinction in a new light in The Origin of Species. Fossils had already shown that there were creatures roaming the Earth in the past which no longer exist. Darwin made their disappearance a cornerstone of his work. Evolution by natural selection, biology’s grand unified theory, is an essentially tragic framing of the story of life. Although Darwin himself figured evolution as progressive, on occasion, others were quick to point out that it ain’t necessarily so. At best, it is a theory of creative destruction. New species supplant old ones, and the price of their appearance is extinction. Speciation can occur simply via expansion into a new niche. But equally often success of one type is at the expense of some competitor. In time, now estimated at around ten million years on average, new species become extinct in their turn. Some go on far longer than this, but overall simply disappearing is a constant possibility.

This was not an immediate threat to human hopes, but was certainly closer to home than the heat death of the universe. Darwin’s most eloquent disciple, Thomas Huxley, put the point forcefully in his classic lecture on Evolution and Ethics in 1893. There, he described human existence as precarious in a way which combined the thermodynamic and evolutionary hazards: “nature is always tending to reclaim that which her child, man, has borrowed from her and arranged in combinations which are not those favoured by the general cosmic process.”

One of Huxley’s students, H. G. Wells, showed what this meant a few years later in his great evolutionary fable The Time Machine. The most striking scenes today are not the battles between the degenerate future Morlocks and Eloi, but the glimpses of the far future of Earth which the time traveller explores when he escapes from their era. In ten intense paragraphs Wells offers snapshots of a desolate world, populated first by monstrous crab-like creatures wading through algal slime, then flashing forward to a time when even they have vanished and all that is left on an otherwise deserted beach are lichen and liverworts and “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about”.

It is an unforgettable vision, dark and peculiarly enjoyable. Is that because it shows the ultimate futility of it all? Maybe. There can be relief in the idea that there will be an end to human striving. But there is also comfort in imagining things going on after us. That has led to many more such visions, whether of worlds where we are simply absent, or have been succeeded by creatures no longer recognisable as human. To take just one example, consider Kurt Vonnegut’s great Galapagos, another evolutionary fable shot through with his trademark black humour and featuring an aquatic species, descended from a remnant of humanity that escaped a global plague, happily bereft of higher intelligence.

Whatever the details, all these variations on extinction have one thing in common. They play on the thing we all have to try and imagine, hard as it may be: how the world will carry on after our own death. But they expand it to a larger vision of the future, in which there is a time after the death of our species. Good or bad, imagining human extinction partakes of a particular, bittersweet quality which needs a name – post-Darwinian tristesse seem to fit.