Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself. When Dr. Frankenstein meets his creation on a glacier in the Alps, the monster claims that it was not born a monster, but that it became a criminal only after being left alone by his horrified creator, who fled the laboratory once the horrible thing twitched to life.
A similar case for responsibility comes from Donna Haraway, the theorist behind the pioneering feminist Cyborg Manifesto (1985), in her more recent Staying with the Trouble, subtitled Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)—after Chthulu, H. P. Lovecraft’s many-faced monster of cosmic malevolence.
“human futilitarianism”: Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Tropical Depressions,” The Baffler 36 (September 2017). “Climate change means, quite plausibly, the end of everything we now understand to constitute our humanity,” Kriss and O’Hagan write. “Something about the magnitude of all this is shattering: most people try not to think about it too much because it’s unthinkable, in the same way that death is always unthinkable for the living. For the people who have to think about it—climate scientists, activists, and advocates—that looming catastrophe evokes a similar horror: the potential extinction of humanity in the future puts humanity into question now.”
“species loneliness”: “If the most common causes of individual suicide are depression and psychic isolation, the cause of our accelerating and collectively willed suicide may be despair over the failed system of capitalism and commodity-driven meaning, as well as the crippling condition that psychologists call ‘species loneliness,’ ” Powers told Everett Hamner of The Los Angeles Review of Books (April 7, 2018), in an interview published under the headline “Here’s to Unsuicide.” “We will always be parasites on plants. But that parasitism can be turned into something better—a mutualism. One of my radicalized activists makes this proposal: We should cut trees like they are a gift, not like they are something we a priori deserve. Such a shift in consciousness might have the effect of slowing down deforestation, since we tend to care for gifts better than we do for freebies. But it would also go a long way toward treating the suicidal impulse in people caused by species loneliness. Many indigenous people knew this for millennia: thanking a living thing and asking for its pardon before using it goes a long way toward exonerating the guilt that leads to violence against the self and others.”
The Anthropic Principle
rudimentary understanding: Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” The American Journal of Science and Arts 22, no. 46 (November 1856). This paper, in which Foote describes the effect of carbon dioxide on global temperature, was first presented at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856—where it was read by a male colleague, Joseph Henry. John Tyndall published his work several years later, in 1859.
“Where is everybody?”: In 1985, Los Alamos published a history of the conversation; see Eric M. Jones, “Where Is Everybody?: An Account of Fermi’s Question,” www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5746675.
For the entire historical window: Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this is the xkcd web comic “A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature,” September 12, 2016.
“the great filter”: Hanson first published his thinking on this subject in a 1998 paper, the ominous last line of which is “If we can’t find the Great Filter in our past, we’ll have to fear it in our future.” Robert Hanson, “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?” September 15, 1998, http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html.
“Is it inhabited?”: This comes from Archibald MacLeish’s beautiful account, published on the front page of The New York Times, December 25, 1968—the day after Apollo 8 orbited the moon—under the headline “Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold.” The case MacLeish made was that seeing the planet from a distance could profoundly change how we saw our place in the universe: “Men’s conception of themselves and of each other has always depended on their notion of the earth,” he wrote.
Now, in the last few hours, the notion may have changed again. For the first time in all of time men have seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depth of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small as even Dante—that “first imagination of Christendom”—had never dreamed of seeing it; as the Twentieth Century philosophers of absurdity and despair were incapable of guessing that it might be seen. And seeing it so, one question came to the minds of those who looked at it. “Is it inhabited?” they said to each other and laughed—and then they did not laugh. What came to their minds a hundred thousand miles and more into space—“half way to the moon” they put it—what came to their minds was the life on that little, lonely, floating planet; that tiny raft in the enormous, empty night. “Is it inhabited?”
The medieval notion of the earth put man at the center of everything. The nuclear notion of the earth put him nowhere—beyond the range of reason even—lost in absurdity and war. This latest notion may have other consequences. Formed as it was in the minds of heroic voyagers who were also men, it may remake our image of mankind. No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself.
the Drake equation: Drake himself saw the equation as something very preliminary and tentative, a list of factors that would influence the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, which he sketched out in advance of a small conference to discuss the issue in 1960. In 2003, Drake recounted the story in Astrobiology Magazine under the title “The Drake Equation Revisited” (September 29, 2003).
literally closed themselves off: Dyson first proposed this possibility in a 1960 paper, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” (Science 131, no. 3414 [June 1960], pp. 1667–68), though as a concept it appeared earlier in the 1937 sci-fi novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.
“the astrobiology of the Anthropocene”: Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). In this book, Frank writes, “Our technology and the vast energies it has unleashed give us enormous power over ourselves and the world around us. It’s like we’ve been given the keys to the planet. Now we’re ready to drive it off a cliff.”
“thinking like a planet”: The phrase also recalls Aldo Leopold’s “thinking like a mountain,” which first appeared in his Sand County Almanac of 1937, and which provided the title of an excellent meditative essay by Jedediah Purdy on nature writing and our changing relationship to the natural world, published in n+1 in 2017.
Personally the perspective strikes me as too Stoic—a mountain would not much care if humans, a single species, suffered tremendous setbacks, and the same is true for the planet as a whole. As those scientists kept reminding me, “The earth will survive; it’s the humans that might not.” And indeed, commentators have traced a prehistory of Leopold’s phrase through the ancient philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius.
an unconventional recent paper: Gavin A. Schmidt, “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would It Be Possible to Detect an Industrial Civilization in the Geological Record?” International Journal of Astrobiology, April 16, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1473550418000095.
anyone trying to “solve” the Drake equation: One especially notable effort was Anders Sandberg’s et al., “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, June 6, 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404.pdf.
“Now I am become death”: An account of this—including the fact that Oppenheimer first quoted the line twenty years after the event—appears in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage, 2006).
“It worked”: Frank Oppenheimer told this story in the 1981 documentary The Day After Trinity, directed by Jon H. Else.
forty-two scientists: Connor Nolan et al., “Past and Future Global Transformation of Terrestrial Ecosystems Under Climate Change,” Science 361, no. 6405 (August 2018): pp. 920–23.
James Lovelock: His “The Quest for Gaia” was first published in New Scientist in 1975, and over the years Lovelock became less and less sanguine. In 2005, he published Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet, in 2006 The Revenge of Gaia, and in 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He has also advocated geoengineering as a last-ditch effort to stop climate change.
“spaceship earth”: Buckminster Fuller popularized the term, but it appeared originally almost a century before him, in Henry George’s 1879 work Progress and Poverty—in a passage later summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier:
The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
In 1965, Adlai Stevenson managed to give a more poetic treatment, in an address before the United Nations Social and Economic Council in Geneva:
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
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The Uninhabitable Earth Page 34