Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk
about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last
three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of
thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our
predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other.
While I was in the middle of these reflections, a correspondent reminded me of
a
post from last year by peak oil blogger Ugo Bardi, which set out to
place the crises of our time in the context of the next ten billion years.
It’s an ambitious project, and by no means badly carried out.
The only criticism that comes to mind is that it only makes sense if you happen
to be a true believer in the civil religion of progress, the faith whose rise
and impending fall has been a central theme here in recent months. As a sermon
delivered to the faithful of that religion, it’s hard to beat; it’s even got
the classic structure of evangelical rhetoric—the awful fate that will soon
fall upon those who won’t change their wicked ways, the glorious salvation
awaiting those who get right with Progress, and all the rest of it.
Of course the implied comparison with Christianity can only
be taken so far. Christians are generally expected to humble themselves before
their God, while believers in progress like to imagine that humanity will
become God or, as in this case, be able to pat God fondly on the head and say,
“That’s my kid.” More broadly, those of my readers who were paying attention
last week will notice that the horrible fate that awaits the sinful is simply
that nature will be allowed to go her own way, while the salvation awaiting the
righteous is more or less the ability to browbeat nature into doing what they
think she ought to do—or rather, what Bardi’s hypothesized New Intelligence,
whose interests are assumed to be compatible with those of humanity, thinks she
ought to do.
There’s plenty that could be said about the biophobia—the
stark shivering dread of life’s normal and healthy ripening toward death—that
pervades this kind of thinking, but that’s a subject for another post. Here I’d
like to take another path. Once the
notions of perpetual progress and imminent apocalypse are seen as industrial
society’s traditional folk mythologies, rather than meaningful resources for
making predictions about the future, and known details about ecology,
evolution, and astrophysics are used in their place to fill out the story, the
next ten billion years looks very different from either of Bardi’s scenarios.
Here’s my version or, if you will, my vision.
Ten years from now:
Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at
8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple
expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy
output, and the annual cost of weather-related disasters continues to rise.
Politicians and the media insist loudly that better times are just around the
corner, as times get steadily worse. Among those who recognize that something’s
wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial
intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems,
and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Another, equally popular, insists that total
human extinction is scarcely a decade away, and therefore we don’t have to
change the way we live. Most people who worry about the future accept one or the other claim, while the
last chance for meaningful systemic change slips silently away.
A hundred years from now:
It has been a difficult century. After more than a dozen
major wars, three bad pandemics, widespread famines, and steep worldwide
declines in public health and civil order, human population is down to 3
billion and falling. Sea level is up ten meters and rising fast as the
Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps disintegrate; fossil fuel production
ground to a halt decades earlier as the last economically producible reserves
were exhausted, and most proposed alternatives turned out to be unaffordable in
the absence of the sort of cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy only
fossil fuels can provide. Cornucopians still insist that fusion power,
artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now,
and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most
people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group.
A thousand years from now:
The Earth is without ice caps and glaciers for the first
time in twenty million years or so, and sea level has gone up more than a
hundred meters worldwide; much of the world has a tropical climate, as it did
50 million years earlier. Human population is 100 million, up from half that
figure at the bottom of the bitter dark age now passing into memory. Only a few
scholars have any idea what the words “fusion power,” “artificial
intelligence,” and “interstellar migration” once meant, and though there are
still people insisting that the end of the world will arrive any day now, their
arguments now generally rely more overtly on theology than before. New
civilizations are rising in various corners of the world, combining legacy technologies
with their own unique cultural forms. The one thing they all have in common is
that the technological society of a millennium before is their idea of evil
incarnate.
Ten thousand years from now:
The rise in global temperature has shut down the
thermohaline circulation and launched an oceanic anoxic event, the planet’s
normal negative feedback process when carbon dioxide levels get out of hand.
Today’s industrial civilization is a dim memory from the mostly forgotten past,
as far removed from this time as the Neolithic Revolution is from ours;
believers in most traditional religions declare piously that the climate
changes of the last ten millennia are the results of human misbehavior, while
rationalists insist that this is all superstition and the climate changes have
perfectly natural causes. As the anoxic oceans draw carbon out of the biosphere
and entomb it in sediments on the sea floor, the climate begins a gradual
cooling—a process which helps push humanity’s sixth global civilization into its
terminal decline.
A hundred thousand years from now:
Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the
oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that
govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts,
triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global
civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in
motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic
cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion
power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea
that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than
the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving
those dreams than we did.
A million years from now:
The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of
the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and
sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time,
who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have
become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have
used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of
fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization
is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great
floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end
after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise
in its place.
Ten million years from now:
The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has
finally ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy
jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too
much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and
fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique sciences,
technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of thinking about the
cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a century before blowing itself
to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before
finally winding down.
All that is over now. There are still relict populations of
human beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years
will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push the
last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the tropical forests
of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of raccoons who crossed the
Bering land bridge during the last great ice age are proliferating rapidly,
expanding into empty ecological niches once filled by the larger primates. In
another thirty million years or so, their descendants will come down from the
trees.
One hundred million years from now:
Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft
settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch
is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but
not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent
species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they
look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle
Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin
to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.
Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons
after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than
eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the
long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though
their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look
embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited
psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they
worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around
to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play
much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots
play in ours.
As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes
gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set
high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was
petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth
to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an
oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus
it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin
kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the
moon.
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins,
though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of
some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based
equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very
long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the
stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a
spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had
suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might
have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as
wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made
it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some
providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings
on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of
visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little
was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its
mark on the Moon.
Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark
warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in
convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and
other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and
ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason
the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial
intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most
enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed
before their day finally ended.
One billion years from now:
The Earth is old and mostly desert, and a significant
fraction of its total crust is made up of the remains of bygone civilizations.
The increasing heat of the Sun as it proceeds through its own life cycle, and
the ongoing loss of volatile molecules from the upper atmosphere into space,
have reduced the seas to scattered, salty basins amid great sandy wastes. Only
near the north and south poles does vegetation flourish, and with it the
corbicules, Earth’s eleventh and last intelligent species. Their ancestors in
our time are an invasive species of freshwater clam. (Don’t laugh; a billion
years ago your ancestors were still trying to work out the details of
multicellularity.)
The corbicules have the same highly practical limb structure
as the rest of their subphylum: six stumpy podicles for walking, two muscular
dorsal tentacles for gross manipulations and two slender buccal tentacles by
the mouth for fine manipulations. They spend most of their time in sprawling
underground city-complexes, venturing to the surface to harvest vegetation to
feed the subterranean metafungal gardens that provide them with nourishment. By
some combination of luck and a broad general tendency toward cephalization
common to many evolutionary lineages, Earth’s last intelligent species is also
its most intellectually gifted; hatchlings barely out of creche are given fun
little logic problems such as Fermat’s last theorem for their amusement, and a
large majority of adult corbicules are involved in one or another field of
intellectual endeavor. Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to
collective stupidities, they have gone very far indeed.
Some eight thousand years back, a circle of radical young
corbicule thinkers proposed the project of working out all the physical laws of
the cosmos, starting from first principles. So unprecedented a suggestion
sparked countless debates, publications, ceremonial dances, and professional
duels in which elderly scholars killed themselves in order to cast unbearable
opprobrium on their rivals. Still, it was far too delectable an intellectual
challenge to be left unanswered, and the work has proceeded ever since. In the
course of their researches, without placing any great importance on the fact,
the best minds among the corbicules have proved conclusively that nuclear
fusion, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration were never
practical options in the first place.
Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to
collective stupidities, the corbicules have long since understood and accepted
their eventual fate. In another six
million years, as the Sun expands and the Earth’s surface temperature rises,
the last surface vegetation will perish and the corbicules will go extinct; in
another ninety million years, the last multicellular life forms will die out;
in another two hundred million years, the last seas will boil, and Earth’s
biosphere, nearing the end of its long, long life, will nestle down into the
deepest crevices of its ancient, rocky world and drift into a final sleep.
Ten billion years from now:
Earth is gone. It had a splendid funeral; its body plunged
into stellar fire as the Sun reached its red giant stage and expanded out to
the orbit of Mars, and its ashes were flung outwards into interstellar space
with the first great helium flash that marked the beginning of the Sun’s
descent toward its destiny. Two billion years later, the gas- and dust-rich
shockwave from that flash plowed into a mass of interstellar dust dozens of
light-years away from the Sun’s pale corpse, and kickstarted one of the great
transformative processes of the cosmos.
Billions more years have passed since that collision. A
yellow-orange K-2 star burns cheerily in the midst of six planets and two
asteroid belts. The second planet has a surface temperature between the
freezing and boiling points of water, and a sufficiently rich assortment of
elements to set another of the great transformative processes of the cosmos
into motion. Now, in one spot on the surface of this world, rising up past
bulbous purplish things that don’t look anything like trees but fill the same
broad ecological function, there is a crag of black rock. On top of that crag,
a creature sits looking at the stars, fanning its lunules with its sagittal
crest and waving its pedipalps meditatively back and forth. It is one of the
first members of its world’s first intelligent species, and it is—for the first
time ever on that world—considering the stars and wondering if other beings
might live out there among them.
