Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  And now, in the latest ticking of the last cosmic year, as the Sun completed the last couple of degrees in its most recent arc around the Milky Way, another type of evolution evolved here on Earth, one perhaps again as profoundly new as the origin of life: the origin of culture, a meta-biological way for ideas to propagate, accumulate, persevere, and evolve. Under this influence the biosphere has been morphing into something else entirely: something with electric lights and angst about the future; something that does comedy, chemistry, and cosmology and asks a lot of questions.

  One of those questions is whether, in similar fashion, the story has kept going elsewhere, on planets in other warm stellar pockets. If not, what is so freakishly special about Earth? If so, what do we have in common with our sister stars?

  Another is what makes us so different from the rest of the life of this planet? Since our last galactic go-round, matter has woken up in human form. This world is now seething with machinery and cattle, surrounded by thousands of satellites, searching its own history and the rest of the universe for answers. A new mechanism of change has appeared and taken over the planet, and yet another is beginning. Against the backdrop of our slow galactic turning, how should we regard this new transition where, by our own hands, this planet has been metamorphosing, first unconsciously and then, perhaps, starting to take notice. Might this, too, be a type of transformation that sometimes happens to other planets? We’ll return to that question in the next chapter.

  Will this new kind of planetary change catch on, take root, and persist? Will there be any sign of it the next time the Sun comes jogging around this way? One galactic year from now, when our star, orbiting in its nearly circular path, rhythmically bobbing slightly above and below the flattened plane of the galactic disk, returns again to this quadrant of space, what will the Anthropocene be then?

  The Noösphere

  At the inception of the Industrial Revolution, when the first steam engines began adding the tiniest wisps of CO2 to the air, nobody had any way of seeing where we were going—or almost nobody. Some forward-looking individuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century seemed to see what was coming. In 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed that the growing influence of humans was causing the “Anthropozoic era,” but this was largely ignored by scientists of his day. In 1877, physiologist Joseph LeConte described a similar concept, calling it the Psychozoic era. In the 1920s the French Jesuit priest Tielhard de Chardin spoke of the rise of the “noösphere” (pronounced “NEW-o-sphere”), the sphere of thought, the nascent realm of human influence enveloping Earth. The word comes from the Greek nous, meaning “mind.” Tielhard may have used it first, but some accounts suggest he heard it from mathematician Edouard Le Roy, who had been listening to lectures by pioneering geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, who had been toying with the same concept.

  When I learned about the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis, I was drawn to the history of ideas about life as a planetary process, and that led me to Vernadsky, the Ukrainian geochemist and polymath who, in the 1920s, developed the concept of the biosphere, which predated and anticipated the Gaia hypothesis and today’s earth system science. When they first formulated and published the Gaia hypothesis, neither Lovelock nor Margulis was aware of Vernadsky’s work in this area, but later they recognized him as a seminal contributor to the theory of Earth as a living system.

  The Iron Curtain and the world wars that preceded it kept many in the West ignorant of Vernadsky’s contributions, but in Russia he is rightfully mentioned alongside Darwin and Einstein as one of the architects of the modern scientific worldview. In 1996, I was asked by the publisher to provide a prepublication review for the first full English translation of Vernadsky’s influential seminal book The Biosphere, which was originally written in 1926. I was astonished to learn that this important book, which I had read in abridged form and seen referenced and excerpted so many times, had, until then, never been translated in full.

  Vernadsky described life as a geological force that creates a continuous living layer, enveloping the Earth, transforming solar energy into the motion and organization of matter. He recognized that oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in the air all result from biological processes, and described how these and numerous other properties of Earth, including the chemical composition of the oceans and continents, are completely transformed by life in ways that differ radically from the qualities we should expect on a nonliving world. He saw that the role of life is so deeply embedded in the physical functioning of Earth as to be inseparable.

  In other words, fifty years before Lovelock and Margulis, Vernadsky largely described Gaia. Furthermore, he hinted at a fundamentally new stage in the life of the biosphere that was being brought about by the actions of humanity. In his later life he became obsessed with the idea of the noösphere. In a 1938 essay entitled “Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon,” he wrote:

  The rise of the central nervous system has increased the geological role of living matter…

  You might say that within the last five to seven thousand years the continuous creation of the noösphere has proceeded apace, ever increasing in tempo, and that the increase of the cultural biogeochemical energy of mankind is advancing steadily… There is growing understanding that… it is an elemental geological process.

  In this same essay, he referred to this new stage of Earth history as “the anthropogenic age.” Vernadsky’s vision of the noösphere concerned not just the human transformation of Earth but our transcendence of Earth. He recognized that the movement of our activities into the surrounding space and out to other worlds would be a vital part of this transition.

  Vernadsky and de Chardin both saw the Noösphere as a fundamental new phase of the evolution of matter, toward which geological and biological processes had been tending. The lithosphere had given rise to the biosphere, and now the biosphere had birthed the noösphere. Earth had become alive and then developed a mind.

  The noösphere is the planetary realm of collective human action. Appropriately perhaps, the origin of the word cannot be clearly traced to any individual. The concept almost seems to have sprung from the Earth at a certain time when the zeitgeist was right, as a melding of de Chardin’s cosmic Christian worldview with Vernadsky’s cosmic geochemistry, with the whole steeped in the philosophy of Russian cosmism.

  As a college student studying the history and philosophy of planetary science, I discovered the Russian cosmic philosophers, who, in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, developed a sweeping, scientifically informed, spiritually inspired view of human existence as a stage in the development of planet Earth, itself a small step in the development of the cosmos from diffuse, inchoate origins and toward a more organized, complex, and sentient state of existence. The most forward-looking of these cosmists was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft.

  Though he had no formal education, for a time as a teenager Tsiolkovsky lived in Moscow, spending his free time at the public library. There he met and was tutored by the brilliant and eccentric philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, one of the founders of cosmism. Fedorov, who urged a merging of ethics and natural philosophy, wrote:

  Philosophy must become the knowledge not only of what is but of what ought to be, that is, from the passive, speculative explanation of existence it must become an active project of what must be.*

  Tsiolkovsky is remembered today almost wholly for his prescient engineering designs and ideas about space technology, but he also developed a cosmic, evolutionary philosophy in which he saw both human life and intelligent alien life as part of the inevitable development of matter from simple structures to more complex forms producing biology and then mind.

  Fortunately, he recorded his philosophical ideas
in expansive writings, but during his life his main audience was the students in the remote country schoolhouse where he earned his living as a teacher. One of his former students recalled walking home from school with his teacher as he raved enthusiastically about interstellar travel:

  He would say goodbye to us beyond a bridge where, in impossible mud, lay the street at the end of which his house stood. Rain poured, dust thickened, but we were reluctant to start back for our homes, for this meant no more of that afternoon’s inspired miraculous monologue about mankind’s future.

  In his own life, he experienced poverty, isolation, and cruelty. He was not impressed with the state of human civilization, yet he viewed it as a necessary stage, something to endure for the sake of what was to follow. Tsiolkovsky envisioned early spaceflight, which he helped to realize but did not live to see, as the first step in the advent of the era of “Star Culture.” This, he believed, would carry our descendants far beyond Earth and eventually allow all sentient beings to become free from suffering through an ultimate understanding of the physical universe, which includes the understanding of one’s own nature.

  In 1928, he summarized many of his philosophical ideas in The Will of the Universe, writing:

  Some day, time itself will make man a master of the Earth. He will be in command of the lives of plants and animals, even of his own destiny. He will transform not only the Earth, but living beings as well, not excluding himself.

  He saw humans as an early, primitive stage in the evolution of intelligence but was certain that, in the future, our descendants

  will control the climate and the Solar System just as they control the Earth. They will travel beyond the limits of our planetary system; they will reach other Suns, and use their fresh energy instead of the energy of their dying luminary.

  Tsiolkovsky and his fellow cosmists believed that technological progress would merge with spiritual progress to the betterment, and ultimate perfection, of mankind. He suggested that the reason we had not been contacted by advanced aliens was that in all likelihood they would not see us, in our current form, as worthy of their attention.

  We are brothers, but we kill each other, start wars, and treat animals brutally.

  How would we treat absolute strangers?… Mankind, in its development, is as far from more perfect heavenly beings as lower animals are from people. We would not visit wolves, snakes or gorillas… In the same manner, higher beings are not able to communicate with us for the present.*

  Tsiolkovsky was the first one (as far as I know) to express a thought that has become commonplace among futurists and space enthusiasts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: that we ultimately face a choice between spaceflight and extinction. It is a thought echoed by H. G. Wells, Arthur Koestler, Arthur C. Clarke, and Octavia Butler.

  That is what I believe—and not because I think we are going to leave Earth after we mess it up and find another unspoiled planet. That’s a cop-out, an escapist fantasy. Rather, it is because the kind of society that will thrive sustainably on Earth is one that embraces space technology for wise stewardship, for Earth observations, for asteroid deflection, for continued planetary exploration and the Earth wisdom it brings, and eventually for resources that will allow us to stop depleting our home planet. Perhaps, in the very long run, if we manage to stick around, we’ll use space resources for climate management and—yes, eventually, in several billion years, when even the Sun proves to be nonrenewable—for escape. Tsiolkovsky’s most well-known quote expresses this sentiment: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever.”

  Awakenings

  Scientists, philosophers, naturalists, and science-fiction authors have been pointing out for a century at least that we were approaching a time when human activity would be remaking Earth faster than any “natural” process. The visionary rocket designer Tsiolkovsky, the evolutionary priest de Chardin, and the biospheric geochemist Vernadsky—they all saw what was coming. In the mid-1960s, Polish science-fiction author and polymath Stanislaw Lem wrote about the “psychozoic era,” the era of human influence, and also discussed the “psychozoic era of the galaxy,” in which he imagined Anthropocene-like transitions occurring on many planets around different stars, perhaps communicating and helping one other through the transition.7 So the Anthropocene is not really a new concept, but a new name, useful for sparking widespread conversation on an idea that has been around, within some communities, for quite some time. Yet now there is an important difference. Throughout most of the twentieth century it may have seemed like just a conceptual reframing, an approaching state, a cool way to think about the future. Now, sixty-five years into the Great Acceleration, it is something that is happening, something that we need to deal with. Smart people have been warning us for a while, but it is our generation that is approaching so many global limits. What is new is a sense of urgency.

  Today the noösphere is not just an abstract concept. The transgenic chickens have come home to roost. The seas are rising and acidifying. The Arctic ice is melting. Mass awareness of the vulnerability of natural systems to human perturbations has often arrived in reactive waves of shock: to Silent Spring and pesticide poisoning, to the smogging up of our biggest cities; to nuclear fallout, acid rain, ozone destruction; and now to climate change. Note that for every item on this list there is a common progression: the issue sneaks up on us, an initial alarm is sounded, followed by public distress and activism, and then mitigation through education, innovation, treaty, and regulation. None of these problems is completely solved, all are works in progress, but all show this pattern of movement following propagation of widespread concern.

  These are stirrings of a mature Anthropocene, when our actions (meaning here humanity’s collective actions) become modulated by a realization of global consequences. We may have a long way to go before this mode dominates our behavior, but there are many examples that show we have this capacity.

  One watershed moment was the limited atmospheric nuclear test ban of 1963, when most of the major nuclear powers, even in the midst of their life- and civilization-threatening competition, took their hands off each other’s throats long enough to sign a treaty eliminating an obvious threat to everyone’s health and safety.8 Another came two decades later, with the publication and dissemination of the theory of nuclear winter. That was the moment when it became undeniable that warfare, aided by technology, had transitioned from being local or regional to global, when we realized that, because the “theater” of conflict is finite, in vanquishing our enemy we would be vanquishing ourselves. When destruction becomes globalized, all fire is “friendly fire,” and the whole world is the front line. Disarmament then became less a matter of pacifism, idealism, or altruism and simply one of enlightened self-interest.

  The TTAPS nuclear winter paper (discussed in chapter 1) was published in Science in December 1983. At the time, my father, Lester Grinspoon, a psychiatrist interested in the neuropsychological aspects of the big issues of our times, was the scientific program chair of the American Psychiatric Association. For their annual meeting in May 1984, he organized a large symposium, Nuclear Winter: Some Psychosocial Implications, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This gathering was moderated by Carl Sagan, and participants included biologist Stephen Jay Gould, psychologist Erik Erikson, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, and Catholic priest Bryan Hehir (who won a MacArthur “Genius Grant” that same year for his work on the ethics of nuclear strategy). It was a heady group and not exactly a “fun” topic, but due to Sagan’s star power, the giant convention center was packed. Everyone gets accustomed to the trappings of their upbringing, however atypical, so I was used to seeing my dad on TV and to being around such people. Still, that was an occasion of real pride for me, seeing my father gather this impressive bunch to discuss such a vital topic in front of that massive crowd. Sagan began with a typically masterful presentation of the science of nuclear winter. It was a teachable moment, and he seized it, present
ing a little climate science and a little comparative planetology and laying out the case, clearly and rigorously, for how, even with the inevitable uncertainties, we knew enough to know that nuclear war would be mutually suicidal. The other speakers discussed the moral, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of this realization.

  This was during my second year of grad school, when I was just starting to learn how to model the climates of dusty greenhouse worlds, and it really sank in that this science was also connected to our understanding of human survival.9 It was still a decade or so before climate change started to become the highly visible topic of public debate that it is now, but the speakers that afternoon made it very clear that the human power to alter the habitability of our planet marked a fundamental shift in our role on Earth—one that we had not yet integrated into the institutions wielding that power.

  Sagan ended his presentation with this appeal:

  Our talent, while imperfect, to foresee the future consequences of our present actions and to change our course appropriately is a hallmark of the human species and one of the chief reasons for our success over the past million years. Our future depends entirely on how quickly and how broadly we can refine this talent. We should plan for and cherish our fragile world as we do our children and our grandchildren; there will be no other place for them to live. It is nowhere ordained that we must remain in bondage to nuclear weapons.10

  Another of these noöspheric stirrings came in the late 1980s, with the signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which I describe in chapter 3. Yet another extremely important example is the work of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Starting in 1990, this group, which was set up by the United Nations and relies on volunteer labor from scientists around the world, has released five assessments of published climate-related research, along with various other special reports on specific topics.