Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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Ideas that could save humanity
« on: 2008-12-29 02:02:27 » |
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[Blunderov] Going into the new year it perhaps behooves us separately and collectively to to consider how many more of them we may enjoy. Collectively, that number turns out to be about half a billion.
newscientist
Commentary: Ideas that could save humanity
17 December 2008 by A. C. Grayling
Magazine issue 2686. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
For similar stories, visit the Mindfields by A.C. Grayling
GOOD ideas and striking insights are not so common that they can be allowed to float away on the slipstream of time without making a difference. That difference might be to change the way we think about ourselves and the world. Sometimes it might even affect the way we act - which is obviously more important, and less forgivable to forget. By way of example let me offer two ideas, one of each type.
First there is the case put forward in 2003 by astrophysicist Donald Brownlee and palaeontologist Peter Ward in their absorbing book The Life and Death of Planet Earth, that biological existence here has only another 500 million years left - at an optimistic best. The processes which over the next 7 billion years will incrementally scorch the Earth, dry up the oceans, and finally engulf the planet within the immense advancing orb of the dying sun, will long before that have extinguished all living things.
Bringing together cosmology and biology, Brownlee and Ward worked out the sequence of events in which the planet's complex ecosystems will disappear in the reverse order of their appearance, until eventually the world again belongs to nothing but microbes - its first and longest-lived inhabitants. This will follow a return to the seas of more complex organisms, trying to escape the heat of the nearing sun. But their descendants will eventually find even the vaporising oceans too hostile, and will disappear in their turn.
Brownlee and Ward add that the project of humanity colonising other planets is an improbable one, for the distance to suitable stars orbited by worlds that are or could be made habitable is too great a barrier. The inevitability, in short, is that the end of the habitable world is in sight. Life will have its billion years, and then be gone, to be followed by the planet itself.
Life will have its billion years and then vanish, to be followed by the planet itself
There is not a lot to be done about this in practical terms, except to be relieved that life has half a billion years to go, and the planet 7.5 billion. But the difference that these facts should make to our thinking, say Brownlee and Ward, is to oblige us to appreciate the world more, and look after it while we have it.
This is not as platitudinous a recommendation as it may sound, as my second and even more pertinent example illustrates. In his striking wake-up call Our Final Century, also from 2003, the University of Cambridge astrophysicist Martin Rees - who is also the UK's Astronomer Royal - shows that if we are not careful the eventuality that Brownlee and Ward schedule for half a billion years hence could happen a lot sooner, albeit by different means. If we are not careful, Rees warns, it is all too likely to happen in this present century.
Rees itemises, in sober terms, the risks that humankind and the planet we inhabit now face from "error and terror" and natural disaster. The latter category encompasses collisions with asteroids and catastrophic earthquakes. The former includes devastating human-made viruses and other genetically modified organisms, super-intelligent computers, self-replicating nanotechnologies, nuclear war, climate change and more.
Both types of event are sometimes called "zero-infinity" scenarios: the chance they will happen is tiny; but if they do the scale of the disaster will be immense. The "zero" part of the equation might make them seem discountable, were it not for the fact that there is a new risk in the mix: a few screwball individuals, or even just one, can make the zero inflate to infinity by, say, creating and releasing a virus against which human life is powerless.
That chilling possibility is one worth remembering. I suggest building a Repository of Good Insights which should be brought out and aired at regular intervals, lest we forget. If any of them should be needed, whether for speculative or for practical reasons, it would save time not to have to reinvent them - and in the latter kind of case it might save our skins, too.
From issue 2686 of New Scientist magazine, page 48. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
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