Earth in Human Hands

by David Grinspoon

  In searching for the right metaphor to describe the strange situation of humanity in the twenty-first century, I find myself reminded of a “generation ship,” a popular recurring motif in classic science fiction. It is conceived as an engineering solution to the problem of how to enable people to travel to exoplanets. Our lives are so short and the stars so very far away. If we’re right about the laws of physics, the exoplanets are forever out of reach for a human being—but not for a society of humans. A generation ship is a large interstellar craft built for a journey that will take multiple human lifetimes to cross the fearsome distance to another planetary system. Those who arrive will be the descendants of those who originally set out from Earth.

  Like so many ideas in space science and fiction, this one can be traced to Tsiolkovsky, who in his 1928 essay “The Future of Earth and Mankind” described a space colony, which he called Noah’s Ark, that travels thousands of years to reach other stars.23 It’s been explored in some classic sci-fi novels such as Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, and Non-Stop, by Brian Aldiss. They envisioned self-repairing, self-steering “world ships” with populations large enough to ensure genetic diversity and social contentment, built with enough room, comfort, and distraction to make life decent for the generations that will live out their lives on the journey. On board are engineers, pilots, and stellar navigators to oversee the machines and keep everything on course and running smoothly.

  Yet in the story, something always goes wrong. There has been a mutiny, an accident or societal collapse, and the people have reverted to a pre-technological, superstitious state. The inhabitants have no idea they’re on an artificial ship. To them, it is the entire universe, and they know nothing of planets and stars. Then the plot thickens when our heroes find a control room, or a porthole, see the stars for the first time, and realize that their world is not at all what they thought—and they discover that things have gone badly, dangerously off course, and the lives of all on board are threatened. Their only option is to try to convince everyone else to accept their radical revision of reality. “Our world is completely different from what we all assumed. We’re on a ship. There’s a whole universe beyond. We’re all traveling somewhere together on a multigenerational journey. We have to learn how to drive this thing and figure out where we’re going, or else we’re doomed. We have to wake up, everybody!” Talk about an inconvenient truth.

  To me, this seems like our current situation. Now we can see the stars for what they are and our home for what it really is—and we see that, unbeknownst to us, and whether we like it or not, we’ve been tasked with operating a world that we don’t know how to run. Just as, once, with the Copernican Revolution, we had to completely reevaluate our place in the scheme of things, awakening now to our role as world shapers requires another painful shift in worldview. We’re essentially on a generation ship, and we have to figure out how it works.

  This is similar to Spaceship Earth, the term coined by pioneering economist Barbara Ward and popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who stated that we are all crew and there are no passengers. What I like about the generation ship metaphor is that it hinges on that dramatic moment of awakening to realize we have inherited a perilous situation, and that our lives and those of all our descendants depend on convincing our fellow travelers of the reality we have discovered. It also carries the hope that humans have the capacity to overcome the challenge. In the generation ship story, hope comes from discovering that humans were once great inventors and must have the capability to be so again. In our world, we must draw upon our imagination and ingenuity, the innate resourcefulness and resilience of our planet, and the knowledge that our species has a long history of responding to existential challenges through innovation and self-reinvention.

  We are hurtling through space on the only place we know we could live, and we’ve discovered that it is indeed, in part, a kind of construct. We are piecing together its history, coming to understand our situation, and realizing that we have inherited a role for which we are not trained. Our current world, inhabited by seven billion, soon to be ten billion people, was created, in part, by the actions of our predecessors and will require smart engineering to return to a safe course. Our immediate task is to switch to auxiliary power and turn off the carbon generators that are overheating the ship. Our longer-term challenge is to shore up our world ship for the generations who inherit it.

  Beyond its value as a font of science fiction and a metaphor for our Anthropocene dilemma, is a generation ship something we might actually build some day? I think so. We are a wandering species, and it’s hard to imagine we will never, ever set out for the stars. When we do, eventually, I believe this is how we’ll go. You can find many confident pronouncements by scientifically knowledgeable people declaring that interstellar travel is impossible. Yet the speed of light is no secure barrier against our moving out into the galaxy. Mature humankind would be perfectly capable of visiting exoplanets. No hidden physics is needed. All we need is a long-term view and a collective spirit. In short, the same attributes that will help us (or anyone) survive technological adolescence are identical to those that will, if we wish, bring us to the stars.

  To do this, we might have to in a sense become trans-human, and that is not necessarily something to fear. I’m not referring to the abandonment of the physical body in some techno-Rapture, when we become uploaded machine versions of ourselves. I just mean the extreme commitment to the collective, to the long-term success of the group, that would allow us to feel right about joining such a venture. We would have to feel okay about committing our unborn children and their children to a journey they did not choose to be a part of. This introduces challenging problems of ethics and societal design. A world ship journey would require us to envision harmony and continuity of purpose over many generations in an unfamiliar and contrived setting. The members of later generations could not be given the choice of whether to make the journey. Their entire lives are committed in advance to a project they did not choose.

  Perhaps, though, this is not all that different from past human journeys, when future generations were banished to challenging new circumstances by the decisions of their forbearers—for example, ancient humans originally migrating from our ancestral home in Africa, the first Americans crossing the Bering Strait, the first humans to reach Australia, Pilgrims shipping out on the Mayflower, or Mormons first moving to Utah. There are similar examples for every continent but Antarctica. None of these pioneers could give their great-great-grandkids a vote in their plans. We have long been making commitments that later generations have had to live with. Here on Earth, the decisions we are making today about how to power our civilization will inalterably circumscribe the lives of our descendants for many generations.

  If we go to the stars, we will go as collectives, as communities dedicating their lives to a voyage they will not complete. We will make these ship/worlds fun and interesting places to be, with forests and privacy and infinite diversions, with places to run and swim and be alone. They have to be places where you would actually want to live.

  A world ship is a project for another time, but there is something we can do in the coming generation or two that will be a baby step in this direction. We can indeed send something to the stars, something positive and hopeful for the future. With current trends in miniaturization and propulsion, it will soon be possible to launch tiny interstellar probes that could reach some nearby exoplanets on a timescale of centuries. The builders of these probes will not live to see the pictures and data radioed home from our nearest interstellar neighbors. We should do this as a gift to our near descendants.

  Going interstellar means going long. We cannot imagine ourselves as interstellar actors without also conceiving of ourselves as intergenerational actors. We cannot reach the stars without a sense of identity and goals that span generations. This is true for interstellar communication as well as for travel. Neither makes sense unless we see ourselves as collaborating with descen
dants. To travel, or even send messages, to the stars, we will have to start conversations, projects, and journeys for our progeny to finish. This cements the essential bonds between generations. We won’t be the first to attempt such projects. The builders of pyramids and cathedrals mostly never lived to see them completed. Sometimes they worked under duress or coercion, but sometimes they were moved by spiritual commitment to something beyond their individual lives. I think of science itself as such an effort, with individual researchers fashioning bricks in an edifice each of us can see only partly constructed, knowing that our students and theirs will continue to build.

  In the last century, we became aware of ourselves as short-lived creatures on a small planet in a long-lived galaxy of evolving stars and countless planets. In this new century, we must act upon that knowledge. What could be a better project for us to commit to scientifically and spiritually than creating a sustainable civilization that can thrive on this planet and begin to reach for the stars? Regardless of how we got here and whom we want to blame, we have to take stock of where we are and figure out how to proceed. We are obligated to understand our world ship and get it back in balance, back on a course where our descendants will be safe and free to pursue knowledge and goals that we can scarcely imagine. We need to have a vision of where we’re going in the future. With this in mind, let’s rename our ship. I would suggest we call it Terra Sapiens.

  A Brief History of the Future

  So, can we do it? Successfully navigate this proto-Anthropocene bottleneck? Survive our current global changes of the third kind and emerge into the stability and promise of a mature Anthropocene? Do we have what it takes? We don’t have a crystal ball to tell us what’s coming. We have climate models and other projections, all dependent on assumptions and limited understanding. We have growing knowledge of the history of Earth and other planets. And we have visions of humanity’s future from literature, pop culture, and science.

  As a lifelong student of science fiction and the history of science, I’ve enjoyed reading predictions of the future from different time periods. During my two years researching this book at the Library of Congress, I’ve read numerous expired forecasts about the human future. These give us perspective on our skill at prophecy. What we often find is a mixture of uncanny accuracy and wild error, of clear foresight and utter blindness. Reading the futuristic visions of past sages is an interesting combination of “Wow! How did they know that?” and “How could they have missed that?”

  It is our ingrained habit, probably one built into our subconscious cognitive apparatus, to imagine the future as a linear extrapolation of current trends. Yet history shows us that the world changes most in surprising leaps, and the future will be no different. What will the world look like in the twenty-second century? The one thing I’m sure of is that nobody’s predictions will be right. Stanislaw Lem, discussing the futility of technological prediction, wrote, “Nothing ages faster than the future.” Nobody anticipates the game changers, the social or technological breakthroughs that rapidly alter the rules and assumptions of a society. Science fiction from the 1950s is full of sleek, futuristic buildings, space planes, and rocket ships carrying people throughout the solar system, but nobody foresaw the transistor, the microchip, the communications satellite, or the Internet.

  British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of population genetics, in a 1923 essay entitled “Daedalus; or Science and the Future,” wrote,

  As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the exhaustion of our coal and oil fields is a matter of centuries only. As it has often been assumed that their exhaustion would lead to the collapse of industrial civilization, I may perhaps be pardoned if I give some of the reasons which lead me to doubt this proposition.

  He then goes on to predict that

  Ultimately we will have to tap those intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form as convenient as coal or petrol.

  and continues:

  Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in England may be solved somewhat as follows: the country will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains.

  He also describes how this countrywide network of windmills will be used to chemically break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, and these will be used to drive a hydrogen economy. Haldane concludes that “Among its more obvious advantages will be the fact that… no smoke or ash will be produced.”

  Haldane’s timescale was off, but he presciently foresaw the limitations of a fossil fuel–based economy, and even though he didn’t exactly see global warming coming, he proposed a solution for widely available clean energy that still seems viable. However, in the same essay, he offers predictions that today seem ridiculous (as when he suggests that science may soon achieve communication with the spirits of dead people) or grossly offensive (as when he opines that one of the great hopes for the human future is the improvement of the species through eugenics).

  Yes, Haldane and many of his learned prewar contemporaries seemed to think that eugenics was a great idea—that by purifying and improving the human gene pool we would rid ourselves of the undesirable traits of those they considered lesser people. In the long, dark shadow of the Third Reich, this scheme is repugnant and makes us deeply uncomfortable. This illustrates something else about the limits of prediction: morals and acceptable norms can change in highly nonlinear ways. We are capable of learning lessons that become embedded in our collective character.

  Can we invent our way out of our current dilemmas? And can we change our “modes of thinking” sufficiently to win the quickening race between education and catastrophe? Currently there is a wide dispersion of views about our future, held by informed and reasonable people. We hear abundant warnings of impending doom and decay. There is ample ammunition for those promoting this outlook. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reminds us, with their graphs and figures, that if we continue on a “business as usual” path of carbon emissions, our world will be forced into an unknown, hard-to-predict, and scary climate regime. The Worldwatch Institute, with their regular comprehensive reports on global challenges, warns us of the multiple and converging threats of food scarcity, conflict, and drought, all of which may be worsened by unpredictable climate change.

  Yet, juxtaposed against the hard and true math about climate change and limits to global carrying capacity, we hear a different set of truths: predictions based on the numerous positive long-term trends in global health, education, and eradication of poverty, and on the nonlinear, unpredictable potential of human creativity, which has historically come through for us when our species faced crisis. Can we, through adaptation and innovation, save ourselves from the strange fruits of our past cleverness? Many creative and credible thinkers claim that we can.

  Will we harness the resources of our technology and intellect, raise up the living standards of the developing world, rein in the unsustainable consumption of the developed world, feed the world’s people, stabilize climate, and develop a peaceful global civilization, evolving beyond war? Or are we headed for a world of scarcity, with an out-of-control climate causing crop failures, water shortages, and endless streams of refugees from newly infertile or flooded lands, fueling conflict, terror, and societal decay?

  The outcome of this unprecedented experiment in accidental planetary (mis)management is unknown. There is widespread understanding that this is a time of risk and uncertainty, that there are dangerous possibilities, and that we need to meet the future by both inventing new technological solutions and changing our assumptions and behaviors. Reasonable people disagree about how dire the danger of various scenarios is, and how radically we need to change our society to fashion it into one where we can ensure that future generations thrive. Perhaps depending on our individual psychological makeup, we tend
to embrace the good future or the bad. Today we live in a world with ample evidence for either conclusion, so it’s very easy to cherry-pick your examples to shore up your view. We are addicted to certainty, but the Anthropocene raises questions for which we don’t have answers.

  However, we can take heart from the abundance of genuine examples of the kind of thinking and actions that, spread widely, could steer us to safety. The best involve innovative science and technology combined with multinational cooperative efforts to attack problems that themselves transcend borders. Some come from the realm of global health, where many infectious diseases have been fully or nearly eradicated. Our world is on track to be completely free of polio by the year 2018. In the domain of conservation, there is good news as well as bad. An abundance of heartening success stories counters the widespread disaster narratives. Consider the beautiful and elusive Asian snow leopard, which is threatened with extinction due to poaching and habitat loss. Remarkably, a growing effort involving local communities and nongovernmental organizations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China is making new progress in protecting these magnificent creatures and bringing them back from the brink.24 The diverse peoples of this area all value these legendary animals and are driven to protect them. We think of this zone as rife with sectarian strife, which it is. Yet people in communities across these many borders are coming to understand that only by working together can they get what they all want. Even in this war-torn region, the collective recognition of a crisis is revealing shared interests and values, and science and technology are providing new means to rectify past mistakes. The combination of satellite-enhanced tracking, sophisticated ecological modeling, and on-the-ground coordination among communities that might, on the surface, not be primed to cooperate, is a hopeful microcosm. It shows how the potent mix of innovative technology and innate human capacity to come together against shared obstacles can, at least sometimes, carry the day.