Earth without Humanity
"Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow... Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust..."
"All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here...
Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.
But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly."
Extract from Imagine Earth without people, Bob Holmes, New Scientist, 12th October 2006.
Graphic from The Times Online, via Treehugger and BoingBoing.
posted by Arthur Josephson @ 10:20 AM
1 Comments:
I don't know how many have read this existential blog article in the last 3 years but I think the lack of response reflects badly on our inherent egocentric view of existence as the smugly dominant species on the planet - the only one we confidently know of as being capable of supporting self-aware, sentient life like ourselves.
We might theorise on the possibility, if not inevitability, of our need to vacate the planet - particularly if all 6.6 billion want to live like Americans - consuming 3 earths worth per person, per lifetime. How will we manage just 90 years from now in 2100, when the groaning Earth will be expected to feed, clothe and shelter 21 billion, probably living in a bleak Megalopolis, like that depicted in Blade Runner? - Within the lifetimes of today’s babies. What then will be their ‘future’ plans, if any comfortable future is feasible?
The reality, at present, bearing in mind Scotty's famous dictum, "Ye canna change the laws of physics Cap'n", is that it would take us longer than the entire history of civilisation to reach even the nearest star by present or even theoretically possible technology, given our current population growth and consumption versus resources. Nonetheless, we continue on with such grandiose projects such as CERN in the hope that by finding the ‘God Particle’ we may help provide some magical energy-consumption solution to our exponentially burgeoning problems as a heavily conflicted, planet draining species.
War, disaster, food, water and energy shortage, disease and cosmic catastrophe all threaten us and any hope of a stable future for us, as a random cosmic experiment in sentient existence. Even with vast, powerful organisations such as the United Nations, NATO and the WHO, we are no nearer to world peace and stability – the essential foundation of intelligent survival.
Economic yo-yoing due to egomaniacal profiteering and exploitation on the backs of the majority, by the psychotic, amoral few, points to a species which tolerates, if not celebrates, wilful, self destructive insanity (the ‘financial suicide bomber’) at its core and has no effective means of policing its sustainable needs or educating itself towards a responsible life style. Man’s religions merely confuse the basic issues, rather than provide pragmatic answers – birth control is a central threat to many of them.
As we exist now, with our dominant cultures obsessed with power, influence, material wealth, disseminating entertainment and useless information (that which we can't interact with), the human race represents little more than an irritating virus on the surface of the planet (according to Agent Smith in The Matrix). One day Terra Firma will find a way of randomly cleansing itself as it has done in the past, with much mass species extinction over hundreds of millions of years.
With all our insurmountable, petty squabbles over religion, politics, land and racial, national, tribal and social pecking orders, we are so much like a screaming infant which only knows or feels its own needs and is mostly oblivious to the reality of its fragile existence. We only seem to be fully motivated by our own selfish dreams, desires, demands and perversity and are largely incapable of a zero emissions existence = extinction. Prove me wrong…
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