Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

by Newitz, Annalee

  Though it’s popular to imagine that humans will be exploring the galaxy in Star Trek style over the next couple of centuries, this leap may take a little longer. And that’s good news. By the time we’re ready to set up tourist resorts on Titan, we may have reached the point as a civilization that we won’t “fuck everything up,” as synbio designer Daisy Ginsberg so succinctly put it.

  It’s not very popular to suggest that the future could happen slowly, or that tomorrow’s scientific innovations might take as much time as they have historically. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil are fond of suggesting that the pace of discovery is “accelerating,” and that change will move at a blindingly rapid clip over the next century. While anything is possible, we shouldn’t expect immortality, superintelligence, and faster-than-light travel in our lifetimes. Anticipating instantaneous, radical change diverts us from investing time in long-haul projects like building safer, sustainable cities and planning for food security. These are the kinds of scientific endeavors that can help us survive while we’re waiting for somebody (or something) to invent upload technology. I’m not suggesting that we should slow down the pace of scientific discovery. Quite the opposite. I’m saying we should focus our scientific and technological energies on problems that are solvable in the near term, while always keeping our eyes on the long-term goal of exploring and adapting to worlds beyond our blue marble.

  If we’ve learned anything from the survivors among our ancestors, it’s that staying put and fighting change are not good tactics if we want to live. Survivors range over vast regions. If they encounter adversity in one environment, they try to escape and adapt to a new environment. Survivors prefer the bravery of exploration to the bravery of battle. But present-day humans differ dramatically from most of Earth’s survivors in one crucial way. We can make plans for the future. And with the help of scientifically informed models, we can also consider how we would deal with many possible future scenarios. What if an asteroid hit? A flood? A plague? A drought? Right now, we have many excellent ways of figuring out how each of these species-ending disasters might unfold—and we have ways of preventing most of them from killing us all.

  Surviving is partly a matter of implementing what we already know. But it’s also about planning to deal with disasters we know for certain aren’t survivable right now. Those are the kinds of disasters that require us to build cities on Mars, Titan, Europa, the Moon, asteroids, and any other uninhabited chunk of matter we can find. The more we explore, the more likely it is that our species will make it.

  The Right Path

  Perhaps no research plan expresses this idea better than the 100 Year Starship, a project run by the doctor and former astronaut Mae Jemison. The project, initially funded by the U.S. government, is now a nonprofit organization whose goal is to develop a starship capable of bringing humans to another star system. It’s called 100 Year Starship because Jemison and her colleagues estimate that it will take roughly a century to develop the technology. Though this time period is short compared with the million-year view I was just describing, it’s still longer than pretty much any other scientific project currently under way. I asked Jemison why she had set a goal beyond her lifetime and that of anybody working on the project now. It was both pragmatic and necessary, she said. The technologies needed are far beyond our current levels of development. And, she added, we need time “to create a movement here on Earth, imbuing society with the aspiration to get this accomplished.” Calling the mission “optimistic,” she added that she and the scientists associated with the project will be developing several technologies along the way to their goal which could be useful in themselves. Perhaps they’ll create a better kind of propulsion, or new hydroponic systems for growing plants in space. “Weightlessness could be a platform,” she mused, where we could stage any number of experiments before taking off for the next habitable star system. Her point also holds true for the science we’ll develop as we prepare to build a space elevator and an asteroid-nudging fleet—it may help us back on Earth.

  One of the scientists already studying what life might be like elsewhere in our solar system is the planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol. She conducts missions for the SETI Institute, where she studies remote environments on Earth that are similar to environments we might find on Mars, Titan, or Europa. In the rocky peaks of the Andes mountains, where the atmosphere is thin, she and her team dive deep into lakes whose chemical compositions are rare for earthly bodies of water. There, Cabrol told me that they look for the kinds of life that could thrive on another world; they also try to figure out what would survive if Earth underwent a radical environmental change. Cabrol’s team is making discoveries that are relevant for the near future and the far future. And in the process, they may discover something totally unexpected.

  Cabrol explained that one of her current projects is to develop a robotic rover that could land on an unexplored world—like, say, in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa —and figure out what it should be studying. Because the robot would be on a totally new world, it would need to be able to get a baseline for what was normal there, and then judge what aspects of the environment were extraordinary or worth studying in greater detail. To explore Europa, in other words, we have to build a robot that can think like a scientist, taking in data and deciding which pieces of that data are salient. Work like Jemison’s and Cabrol’s led the celebrated science historian Richard Rhodes to speculate at the space exploration conference SETICon in 2012 that one unintended consequence of space exploration might be the emergence of artificial intelligence. So Nick Bostrom’s intelligence explosion could happen on Europa rather than on Earth.

  What’s important is that the move into space sets humans on a journey that’s survivable. And it’s one that might yield many incredible discoveries along the way. Jemison, who told me she’s a fan of Octavia Butler’s writing, emphasized that she hopes the 100 Year Starship project will help humanity grapple with social as well as scientific issues. “What does it mean to be an interstellar civilization?” she asked. “What are the philosophical implications?” When I pushed her to answer those questions, however, Jemison did something very unexpected. She refused to speculate.

  “The reason why is that if I speculate now, I can’t keep a blank whiteboard in front of me,” she explained. “As a person who is leading this, I don’t want to say, ‘When we get there it has to be this way.’ It may be totally different from what we expect.” By keeping her whiteboard blank, as it were, Jemison provides a model for what it means to plan for the future without foreclosing any possibilities. We can create maps and guides without locking ourselves into any particular outcome. The journey to the stars may take many forms. It may take centuries. But while we’re waiting and researching and designing our starships, we can build a civilization that’s sustainable back on Earth.

  What Will They Remember About Us?

  As we start our journey into the next million years, it’s useful to ask what you hope your progeny will remember about Homo sapiens. What do you want it to mean when they call themselves “human”? When I think about my post–Homo sapiens offspring, frolicking with their robot bodies in the lakes of Titan, I hope they remember us as brave creatures who never stopped exploring. What unites humans of the distant past with our possible future kin is an ability to survive adverse conditions by splitting into distant but connected bands. And what makes us human is our ability to build homes and communities almost anywhere. We should treasure this skill, because it is the cornerstone of our best survival strategy. We’ll strike out into space the way our ancestors once struck out for the world beyond Africa. And eventually we’ll evolve into beings suited to our new habitats among the stars.

  Things are going to get weird. There may be horrific disasters, and many lives will be lost. But don’t worry. As long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of the most amazing parts of writing this book was getting a chance to
discuss the future of humanity with so many scientists, engineers, philosophers, historians, technicians, and sundry brainiacs. That over a hundred people would take the time to share their ideas with a stranger, about everything from geological history to space exploration, is testimony to the basic awesomeness of humanity.

  Thanks to my fantastic agent, Laurie Fox, for making all of this happen, and to my benevolent editor, Gerald Howard. Thanks to Hannah Wood for tons of editorial help, and to artist Neil Webb (who created the gorgeous cover).

  I could not have written this book if my boss, Nick Denton, hadn’t given me the time to do it—thanks, Nick! And thanks to the io9 crew for always inspiring me: Charlie Jane Anders, Cyriaque Lamar, Esther Inglis-Arkell, George Dvorsky, Lauren Davis, Meredith Woerner, Robbie Gonzalez, Rob Bricken, and Steph Fox.

  Thanks to members of the unnamed writing group: Claire Light, Sacha Arnold, Nicole Gluckstern, Lee Konstantinou, and Naamen Tilahun.

  Many friends and strangers read early versions of the manuscript and gave me feedback: Deb Chachra, Tom Levinson, Maggie Koerth-Baker, Ed Yong, Terry Johnson, Dave Goldberg, Matthew Clapham, Peter Eckersley, and Daniel Rokhsar. None of the factual errors in this book are their doing.

  Most important, thanks to three wonderful hominins, Charlie, Chris, and Jesse, who put up with all kinds of nonsense while I was writing this book, and whose love makes me the luckiest person in this limb of the galaxy.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: ARE WE ALL GOING TO DIE?

  1. 30 percent of bee colonies: See U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Colony Collapse Disorder Progress Report” (2011), in which the Colony Collapse Disorder Steering Committee reports, “Annual surveys clearly show that overall colony losses continue to be as high as 30 percent or more since CCD began to be reported,” http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ccdprogressreport2011.pdf.

  2. amphibian crisis: D. B. Wake and V. T. Vredenburg, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 11466–73.

  3. E. O. Wilson estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year: I should note that Wilson’s estimate has been extremely controversial in the conservationist community, with some scientists strongly disagreeing with the way he reached this number. Still, most biologists who disagree with the size of the number do not disagree with the notion that we are seeing a rise in extinctions. The estimate comes from E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992).

  4. coined in the 1990s by the paleontologist Richard Leakey: See Richard Leakey, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Anchor Press, 1996).

  5. Elizabeth Kolbert has tirelessly reported on scientific evidence: Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction?” The New Yorker (May 25, 2009): 53.

  6. when you meet Earth scientist Mike Benton: Personal interview, November 2010. Previously quoted in my article “How to Survive a Mass Extinction,” io9.com (Nov. 29, 2010), http://io9.com/5700371/how-to-survive-a-mass-extinction.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE APOCALYPSE THAT BROUGHT US TO LIFE

  1. Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old: For a more detailed account of the origins of life on Earth that I summarize here, see Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  2. and Roger Summons is one of them: Personal interview, August 22, 2011.

  3. asked his student Dawn Sumner: P. F. Hoffman and D. P. Schrag, “The Snowball Earth Hypothesis,” Terra Nova, vol. 14, no. 3 (2002): 129–55.

  4. I visited Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology: Personal interview, October 11, 2011. You can read Kirschvink’s groundbreaking paper on Snowball Earth, “Late Proterozoic Low-Latitude Global Glaciation: The Snowball Earth,” in J. W. Schopf and C. Klein, eds., The Proterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). It’s also available online here: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/users/jkirschvink/pdfs/firstsnowball.pdf.

  5. Bill McKibben, who argues in his book Eaarth: Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010).

  6. In a remarkable paper published in Nature: Anthony Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471 (March 3, 2011): 51–57.

  7. The statistician and paleontologist Charles Marshall: Personal interview, October 18, 2011.

  CHAPTER TWO: TWO WAYS TO GO EXTINCT

  1. Peter M. Sheehan, a geologist with the Milwaukee Public Museum: Peter M. Sheehan et al., “Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE): Influences of Paleogeography, Paleoclimate, or Paleoecology?” GSA Today, v. 19, no. 4/5 (April/May 2009).

  2. “We are seeing a mechanism that changed”: Young said this through a press release from Ohio State University about his NSF-funded research. See Pam Frost Gorder, “Appalachian Mountains, Carbon Dioxide Caused Long-Ago Global Cooling,” Ohio State University Research News (October 25, 2006).

  3. Adrian Melott, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas: Personal interview, September 27, 2011. For more information on the gamma-ray theory and the 63-million-year cycle, you can read A. Melotte et al., “Did a Gamma-Ray Burst Initiate the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction?” International Journal of Astrobiology 3 (2004): 55, and Robert A. Rohde and Richard A. Muller, “Cycles in Fossil Diversity,” Nature 434 (March 10, 2005): 208–10.

  4. Donald Canfield conducted a study of the atmosphere: Donald E. Canfield, et al., “Devonian Rise in Atmospheric Oxygen Correlated to the Radiations of Terrestrial Plants and Large Predatory Fish,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107 (October 19, 2010): 17911–15.

  5. Alycia Stigall, has a theory that could explain: Personal interview, September 22, 2011. See also Alycia Stigall, “Invasive Species and Biodiversity Crises: Testing the Link in the Late Devonian,” PLoS One 5(12) (2010): e15584.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE GREAT DYING

  1. Paul Renne, the center’s head geologist: Personal interview, October 4, 2011. See also Paul Renne et al., “Synchrony and Causal Relations Between Permian-Triassic Boundary Crises and Siberian Flood Volcanism,” Science 269 (September 8, 1995): 1413–16.

  2. Jonathan Payne, a geologist at Stanford: Personal interview, November 7, 2011. See also Payne and his colleagues’ paper on this topic: Jonathan L. Payne et al., “Calcium Isotope Constraints on the End-Permian Mass Extinction,” PNAS 107 (May 11, 2010): 8543–48.

  3. The Permian expert Mike Benton: For a terrific account of what happened during the Permian mass extinction, see Michael J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003).

  4. For answers, I visited Peter Roopnarine, a zoologist: Personal interview, November 21, 2011. See also P. D. Roopnarine, “Ecological Modeling of Paleocommunity Food Webs,” in G. Dietl and K. Flessa, eds., Conservation Paleobiology, The Paleontological Society Papers 15 (2009).

  CHAPTER FOUR: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE DINOSAURS

  1. “It is very hard to imagine what happened”: Personal interview, February 1, 2012. For more about what might have happened directly after the bolide impact, see Jan Smit et al., “The Aftermath of the Cretaceous-Paleogene Bolide Impact,” Geophysical Research Abstracts 13 (2011): 12724. And for Smit and his colleagues’ original groundbreaking paper about the bolide impact, see Jan Smit et al., “An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary,” Nature 285 (May 22, 1980).

  2. Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction: Though most mass extinctions are usually referred to using the geological periods they ended (such as the Permian mass extinction, or the Ordovician mass extinction), the K-T mass extinction is known by a name that refers to two geological periods, the Cretaceous
(which follows the Jurassic) and the Tertiary. These are two names for roughly the same period of geological time, which was ended by a mass extinction. Welcome to the weirdness of geological nomenclature, which is a confusing mix of older and newer names, some of which refer to overlapping stretches of time. Making things even more complex are the many names for geological periods used in Asia and other regions of the world. Some paleontologists prefer to call this extinction the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-P) mass extinction, because the Paleogene is the period that comes after the Cretaceous. However, you’re more likely to hear the mass extinction called K-T, so I’ve chosen to call it that here.

  3. “iridium anomaly”: See the Alvarezes’ first paper on this subject here: L. W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, F. Asaro, and H. V. Michel, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Science 208 (1980): 1095–1108.

  4. Princeton geologist Gerta Keller began publishing papers: Personal interview, September 23, 2011. See also her papers about the discoveries she made in India: G. Keller et al., “Deccan Volcanism Linked to the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Mass Extinction: New Evidence from ONGC Wells in the Krishna-Godavari Basin,” Journal of the Geological Society of India 78 (2011): 399–428; and G. Keller et al., “Environmental Effects of Deccan Volcanism Across the Cretaceous–Tertiary Transition in Meghalaya, India,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 310 (October 2011): 272–85.