Incredible article, but the following four pieces regarding the importance of pursuing sustainability especially caught my attention: [Based on all the evidence now available to us, it appears that in all 4.5 billion years of planetary history, the planet produced nothing else like us, nothing else with the potential to escape the grim end of life on Earth. Some of us could go to space. Some of us could, in principle, even escape the solar system entirely, bound for parts unknown—maybe for habitable planets orbiting other nearby stars. Who knows what we’d find out there? Maybe we’d find someone else to talk to. We only have these options by virtue of things like our large brains and our opposable thumbs, our capacities for language and tool-making and foresight that we have with great difficulty used to build a global technological culture. We really owe our progress and our current state not only to our biology, but also to our planetary resources—to the fossil fuels we burn, the ores we mine, the rich diversity of other species we exploit, and so on. We’re presently using most of those resources in very unsustainable ways. We’ve already plucked all the low-hanging fruit, and much of what we are burning and mining and exploiting now is only available to use through our already sophisticated technology. So if we somehow drive ourselves extinct, if all our great edifices collapse, I think it would be very difficult if not impossible for anything else to rise up and rebuild to where we are now, even given a half-billion or a billion years. People can and will disagree with me about that, but my position errs on the side of caution, on the side that says humanity’s present moment in the Sun is too valuable to treat as something disposable. And we can’t count on help coming from anywhere else, from beneficent all-powerful aliens swooping out of the sky to save us, or on messages of salvation beamed from hyper-advanced civilizations on the other side of the galaxy. Keep in mind that life on Earth isn’t going to be getting easier throughout all that future time—it will be getting harder, as the planet becomes less and less conducive for complex life. So we may have—we may be—the only chance available for life on Earth to somehow escape a final, ultimate planetary and stellar death. If we don’t do that, then the book’s title would become a prophecy: After fading into oblivion, the sum total of life’s history on Earth will only be billions of years of solitude.] ^^ I hate to get political, but conservatives so often mistake the trees for the forest. Their obsession with the now -- instant profits, instant growth, instant gain -- prevents them from thinking on a long-term scale. I appreciate their desire for more jobs, more economic growth and more success, but I urge them to remember that it will all eventually amount to nothing if we keep kicking the can of planetary responsibility down the seemingly never-ending road of Earth time.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:45:44 +0000
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