Comments on: Bad gets worse, again

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:43:11 +0000

There's a few human-created scenarios that could do damage that even geological timescales won't heal, e.g. runaway nanotech "grey goo". But I remember first learning that the K-T asteroid that hit Mexico penetrated the crust to a depth of up to 60km. And we're here now; for now.

By: Caroline

Caroline — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:32:00 +0000

I’m inclined to think the planet’ll be fine too, a) because it’s the most logical inference b) Lovelock says so and c) I want to! But, as Bill Hicks cuttingly puts it, ‘we’re a virus with shoes’, and, as far as we know, the planet hasn’t suffered such a toxic ‘viral infection’ before (added to which it’s now in middle-age and a bit less resilient than it used to be.) Anyway, saving ourselves, or our “way of life”, is the most pressing issue for us, for sure. No sharp line exists between altruism and self interest in ecology – exactly. Genuinely giving a damn about the extinction of species etc. is what drives most people to want to “save the planet”, misleading and inane though that slogan may be. Personally I think that kind of gut-level impulse might need to be cultivated as a self-survival-mechanism too, if nothing else. We’ll find ourselves co-operating in some novel ways, when it comes to the crunch, I suspect. That was my point in my last comment really: crisis-as-an-opportunity for humans, through some novel form of symbiosis. I wasn’t suggesting that ancient bacteria were capable of anything like altruism, but spontaneous ‘collaboration’ does tend to suggest some innate awareness beyond the monad at least, added to the blind survival impulse. I really don’t see us vanishing without trace as a species, so I think that could be a useful parable.

Squandering fossil fuels on suburbs could be the biggest wasted opportunity in history, yes. But I’ve never been able to see a future for humans among the stars, I have to say. For me that’s a bit like trying to imagine a future for neurons outside a human body. The‘primitive’ concept of the human animal firmly embedded in a life-nurturing planetary matrix is the only one that makes sense to me. We have (or had) a Life-enhancing role to play, with the aid of technology, and I think physical life was designed to be pretty cool with our input. With respect, visions of the future involving escape from planet Earth, conceived as giant seed-pod (or, worse, ‘hostile womb’) were probably way off-beam anyway, I feel. The future will entail some ugliness, almost certainly, but if some boundaries can be dissolved in the process (inter-personal as well as inter-species) that could potentially provide some sublime compensations. At any rate, some radical psychic re-integration is in order for us, with survival in mind .. kicking off I suggest with an end to the ridiculous ‘sex war’?! ;)

By: Gyrus

Gyrus — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:05:55 +0000

I’ve always thought “Save The Planet” was an inane and misleading slogan. The planet’ll be fine. Environmentalism has generally been lumped in with “altruistic” causes, and it is to a certain extent; but the issues we’re looking at here are at least as much to do with saving ourselves (or our “way of life”) as anything else. And I guess that’s the point of ecology—there’s no sharp line between altruism and self-interest.

Anyway, I agree, crisis for us is probably opportunity for Life. Take a long enough timescale and Life’ll be dandy. Except when you take a long enough timescale to include the Sun dying. And then us squandering fossil fuels on suburbs instead of laying the foundations for an interstellar civilization looks suspiciously like the most wasted opportunity in history…

By: Caroline

Caroline — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:53:57 +0000

The juggernaut is NOT going to turn around in time to prevent massively destructive climate change unfortunately. So, in the absence of miracles, we are looking at a challenging future, to say the least. But planetary life is tenacious. At the end of the Archaean Age (about 2.5 billion years ago) there was a major crisis for the entire bacterial population living on the earth at that time. The oxygen given off by inumerable ‘successful’ single-celled organisms was more than could be absorbed by the rocks and it began to build up in the atmosphere. Oxygen is vital to life to us, but to them it was a deadly poison. The greatest pollution crisis life the Earth has ever faced (to date) ensued. But major crises require radical solutions. The outcome of the Oxygen Crisis was the development of the eukaryotic cell: a new compound cell with a nucleus involving close co-operation between different types of single-celled creatures within one cell. The resulting cells now form the basis of all animals and plants on earth. A hopeful story?