Save the Humans

[justinsb]

The environmental movement has made, almost from it’s beginnings, a huge mistake. They have repeatedly shown cute animals or beautiful scenery as the reason people should support environmental causes. This has earned them some members, it is natural to some to want to protect these animals and beautiful locations. But, what we are really talking about if you add it all up is something that should be much more motivating than saving dolphins, owls, or national parks. What we are talking about is saving the humans.

We are not capable of saving the planet. The planet is, and will be, fine and life will go on. Even if we pollute the Earth to the point where we can no longer live here, even if it takes the Earth 100,000 years to recover, the Earth will be fine. 100,000 years is, after all, only a long weekend in the history of the Earth and there are species that will survive even extreme temperatures, acid rain etc. If we all died today, 1 million years from now the planet would be lush with life and a new species would dominate.

So, if it wants to be effective, if it wants to appeal even to the selfish, and disinterested the environmental movement needs to stop talking about saving the planet, the dolphins, spotted owls and rain forests and start putting children and families on it’s endangered species adds. Stop telling people what is happening in the Amazon and tell them about the toxic chemicals being dumped in their own drinking water.

I don’t think I need to provide examples to illustrate that: People even if they are very busy, even if they are uninformed, even if they don’t care about cuddly animals will go to great lengths and great expense to save their own lives.

[ixion]

1. ah, but are the humans worth saving?

I used to think so, when I was young and idealistic, but now I think we're more curse than blessing to the planet. ;-)

[justinsb]

2. That question will answer itself

We can be of benefeit to the planet but unless we become so quickly, we will be extinct.

[ixion]

3. 10,000 years later...and still collectively just one step out of the cave,

and still VERY frightened by shadows on the walls at this point.

Collectively speaking, humans have the mentality of an emotionally-disturbed third grader.

And that's after 10,000 years of 'progress', mind you.

We've a long way to go to reach collective Nirvana.

[justinsb]

7. Evolution happens slowly

I was reading "A Brief History of Progress" sorry blanking on the authors name right now, but it is an excellent, and brief, description of the situation. For all of our 'progress' humans haven't changed on an evolutionary level in over 50,000 years. If you took a newborn from ancient Egypt and raised him in New York, he would be a fully functional New Yorker as an adult, as likely as anyone to go to MIT and work for NASA. The book also traces how environmental degredation has resulted in the collapse of civilzations from Egypt, to Summeria, to ancient Greece and Rome.

[phantom power]

8. It'll happen faster, after I get my "Garage Gene Engineer" kit!

[CrispyQ]

4. Ditto

Besides, if humans are so stupid they can't figure out that 'save the planet' really means 'save the environment that supports human life', then maybe we aren't worth saving.

How can anyone think that spoiling our own nest is a good thing? That's the argument I use when I get the 'humans aren't causing global warming' crap.

[phantom power]

5. you'd probably find this interesting, if you haven't seen it already.

The whole thing is well worth the read, but here's a teaser.

And so it came to pass. An ideology born from efforts to see man in nature, and nature in man, came to pit nature against man. Conservatives were more than happy to participate in this effort. An ideology focused on the inter-relationship of all things came to be an ideology of things, for conservationists and all Americans.

If environmentalism contains a sunny side and a dark side, a side of interdependence and a side of "things" that separated nature from man, there's little doubt that it's the things that the American people have been taught to associate with the words, "the environment": seal pups, redwoods, clean air, Yosemite, clean water, and toxic waste.

Some of the things they have been taught not to think of when they think of the environment are AIDS in Africa, the tax code, highways, homeless people, asthma, good jobs and the war in Iraq. Each of those things -- "environmental" or not -- are stripped by American environmentalism and its sister ideology, liberalism, of their native habitat, their context, and their web of connections. They are single "issues," each requiring its own movement and experts.

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/werbach-reprint/

[justinsb]

6. Thanks!

[NNadir]

9. I am not so certain that "earth will survive."

A runaway greenhouse effect could make this planet rather Venus-like.

Is this probable? Maybe not, in absolute terms. Is it possible? Clearly this is so.

Venus is the most earthlike planet. Some people believe that at one time its temperatures were relatively moderate. Its modern temperatures are not the result of its closer proximity to the sun so much as it is a function of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly CO2.

The sun is much hotter now than it was when Venus went over to the hot side. The mechanism of this temperature increase was probably due to boiling its water off into space, when a significant portion of the velocity distribution of water exceeded the planetary escape velocity. (A similar effect accounts for the fact that earth doesn't have any Helium in its atmosphere.) It doesn't take all that much of an increase in temperature for that to happen here. Probably before that time is reached humanity will have become extinct, but it is not clear that the surviving forms of life will necessarily survive that catastrophe. It is very possible for the earth to be entirely sterilized.

[justinsb]

10. Personally I think that

man would be extinct long before things got to the level of Venus, and once the people are gone, the planet will recover quickly. It has also been shown that life can exist even in very extreme conditions. Through exploration science continues to find life in areas of the earth (such as the extreme depths of the ocean and near underwater lava flows) where it was previously assumed that nothing could live.

[skids]

11. I suppose that depends...

...on whether the atmosphere "boils off" or not. At least we have a decent mass.

[suneel112]

20. no...the atmosphere won't boil off

The Magnetic Field protecting the earth's atmosphere is expected to last for billions of years, even after the sun becomes a red giant and incinerates the earth. Everything will return to normal. The sea will flood, just as it was flooded during the days of the dinosaur, to 300 feet above the current level. The runaway environmental disaster, as well as the excess CO2, will cause massive algal blooms the likes of which have never been seen before.
Most likely humans will be shaken off, and only those more evolved (i.e. those who are long term thinkers and problem solvers) will survive: A small progressive community that was well hidden during World War 3.
Meanwhile, the algae will absorb lots of CO2, forests will grow over the old farmland, and millions of years later, there will be plenty of oil and coal from the forests and dead algae, only for history to repeat itself again.
Cyclical history is sooo fun! </Sarcasm>

[phantom power]

12. "We owe God a death... and let it go which way it will,

he that dies this year is quit for the next."
--Shakespear, "Henvry IV"

Oddly enough, I ran across that quote while reading Venus, by Ben Bova. It got me to thinking, earth's biosphere is going to be incinerated right down to the core, after the sun starts fusing helium and carbon and engulfs the inner planets.

Not that I'd like to see us bring about the same fate through our own folly, but it is going to happen. Some say it's likely to start even sooner. The sun will continue to grow hotter, long before it becomes a red giant. The water will start to bake off in another billion years or so.

I think of this as a good reason for colonizing space. Under no circumstances do we get to live here on earth forever.

[NNadir]

13. I'm less worried about the next billion years than I am about the next 100

I expect that this is the first time in history that the earth has risked planetary extinction (even if that risk is small) because of the presence of a single species.

One sees, in some of Hatrack's posts, the mechanism for a positive feedback loop in global climate change.

I don't think we have all that much time to act.

[phantom power]

14. At least since the blue-green algae invented photosynthesis...

and killed off the methane-breathing biosphere.

I agree, the coming century will be a turning point. We'll either stand or fall.

[NNadir]

17. Yeah, those little oxygen releasing buggers did almost ruin the planet.

I don't think though that they were as much of a threat as we are.

I do believe that some thermophilic species may survive a few hundred million years after we cook the planet, but I also believe that even they won't survive the cooking off of the atmospheric water.

I recall reading somewhere at sometime, interestingly, that another mechanism for boiling off the water on Venus was homolytic cleavage of the water there, leading to a large amount of hydrogen. Hydrogen then escaped by the mechanism I described earlier. This mechanism was supported apparently by UV radiation which can effect this homolytic cleavage. The emergence of ozone in earth's atmosphere suppressed the same mechanism from operating, so the oxygen production by those nasty blue green algae may have resulting in life being possible at all over the long term.

It happens that hydrogen already is light enough to escape from earth. It can be shown that at 300K, roughly room temperature, about 600 molecules in every mole of hydrogen exceeds the escape velocity of earth, about 11000 m/s. This may not sound like much, but over a period of time, it is significant. There has been plenty of time for all of the hydrogen (and helium) on earth to have boiled off into space. This is particularly cogent when one recognizes that molecular speeds (and temperatures) can be very much higher in the ionosphere than they are in the trophosphere.

I can do the calculation for the temperature required to boil off the earth's water at roughly the same rate as hydrogen boils off at 300 K but I don't have time right now. I have little doubt however, that a runaway greenhouse event resulting from, say the outgassing of methane from methane hydrate in the sea due to changes in seawater temperatures, can easily produce such temperatures.

[phantom power]

18. I'm fascinated by the question of "how fragile is the biosphere?"

I came of age during the reign of Carl Sagan and his Cosmos series (which I recently got on DVD, and was pleased to discover isn't dated at all, excepting for hair/clothing styles).

Sagan was pretty much in the "fragile-biosphere" camp. The implication being that we're all rather lucky to be here, and we fuck with the climate at our great peril.

Later, in the 90s, I kind of gravitated toward the "robust-biosphere" camp, in response to people like Stuart Kauffman, who's work suggests that the rise of complexity, including life, may be all but inevitable across a wide range of substrates and conditions.

But I've noticed that there's been a resurgence of theories and/or findings that argue towards the "fragile biosphere" conclusion. Snowball-earth, or the interplay between solar influx, ozone, etc. The possibility of runaway scenarios seems more likely to me now than it did a few years ago.

I wonder where the truth of it all lies. In terms of perspective, we're so impoverished. All we've got are nine planets, and our knowledge of the other 8 is paltry. Our knowledge of earth itself leaves a lot to be desired.

Meanwhile, we're conducting reckless experiments with the only planet we know how to live on so far.

What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet earth?

We have heard the rationales offered by the superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations; but who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for earth?

From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure and the most important task it faces is preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet.

(...)

Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring!

--Carl Sagan, "Who Speaks for Earth?
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan_cosmos_who_speaks_for_earth.html

[NNadir]

19. I admire Kauffman's work very much, and I think he's on to something, but

I think the evidence is pretty solid that a minimal condition for the existence of life is liquid water. The extraterrestrial planet that we know best is of course Mars, and while the question of whether there was once life there is still open, the preponderance of evidence is that there is not any there now. Neither does there seem to be much liquid water, if any at all.

The existence of extremophiles such as those found at deep sea vents or in hot pools does nothing to disprove the assertion that liquid water is not required. Although a lot of great work has been published in recent times about self-organizing systems, I am not familiar with any work that suggests that these types of events happen in the absence of a liquid solvent, of which water, with its polarity and hydrogen bonding capacity is the best. I can imagine circumstances under which liquid ammonia might fill a similar role, but symmetry considerations suggest that absenting either water or ammonia, any other solvent system could be so versatile.

Kauffman, if I recall, and it's been some time since I've read him, refers to life as a "thermodynamic eddy." I like this very much. If we extend that analogy somewhat we can see that "eddies" don't really exist under all conditions. There are no eddies in ice. There may be some in steam, but they are transitory at best and do not last long.

There is evidence for complex organic molecules distributed throughout the universe, and my own bias is for a kind of panspermia. But just as seeds need an appropriate place to germinate, I believe that for these molecules to develop, through some mechanism, a metabolism, certain minimal conditions must prevail, including a pressure and temperature suitable for multiphasic water (or less likely, ammonia). Earth clearly has those conditions, and has been particularly blessed with remarkable stability. But I think it would be a mistake to believe that the earth cannot be driven away from the conditions under which life can exist.

As for Kauffman's hypothesis, it will be interesting to see if liquid water is discovered elsewhere in the solar system, say in the core of Europa, what exactly the molecules there are doing with one another. But the existence of life engaging in metabolism is a very different deal than life with consciousness. I would suspect that this is far more rare in the universe than people generally seem to believe.

[phantom power]

21. theoretically, it's any environment that can support autocatalytic cycles.

However, in the chemical world, that is hard to imagine happening without a liquid medium. Water, ammonia, methane, etc. And outside the chemical world, things become very very speculative, the stuff of science fiction.

It appears that there are conditions which support bacterial life, that will not support macroscopic life.

Given macroscopic life, the rise of social organisms (wolves, primates, cetaceans, etc) seems to occur pretty reliably. And social organisms have (in my estimation) a reasonable probability of developing self-awareness. It's not a huge leap from modeling others to modeling yourself. The cetaceans, and higher primates, seem to have some level of self-awareness, if not the level of humans. But even that is not the same as a technological species. However advanced they are, dolphins don't have much prospect for developing technology. It's hard to imagine technology without a stable, solid surface to work with. And you need hands. Or some other way to manipulate things.

One thing that interests me about the pattern of mass-extinctions on earth is that each time, life appears to have come back faster and with more diversity. I think that isn't entirely a coincidence, but it also doesn't in any way preclude various scenarios that would wipe the slate back to the bacteria, or sterilize the planet altogether. Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns!

I can "convince" myself that life should be common, and even that self-awareness may not be all that rare. I have a harder time estimating the likelihood of a technological species, although the niche of "social organism living in trees, with arms/fingers" seems like a niche which is likely to develop on any planet that supports macroscopic plants and animals, and any species filling a niche like that has a shot at developing both self-awareness and technology.

But really, it's all handwaving without evidence. I'm left with Fermi's paradox. If life is so common, where is it? If intelligent species are out there, where are they?

I wanna believe. But as a scientist, I'm stymied by a lack of data.

[bigmonkey]

15. I'm old enough to think that this has a political cause, historically.

Here's what I think happened.

Corporate forces have always opposed any comprehensive criticism of the organization of human society. Those becoming interested in the subject in the 70s found that a comprehensive criticism met so much opposition that as a first step they instead focused on issues and elements of those issues that were not explicitly critical of business interests. I think the idea was that if enough people could be convinced, then there would be a concomitant change in the culture, and the deeper criticisms could be addressed at that point as a second step. It turns out, it seems, that instead the corporatists found even those "peripheral" issues to be too threatening, and opposed them vigorously.

On the other hand, maybe we have just reached the second step.

[justinsb]

16. I don't think there's enough time left to address it in spotted owls

and organic farming anymore. The impact of environmental degredation is becoming substantial and is not just theory, or if we're not careful X will happen in the future anymore. It is estimated that, in my city (Toronto) alone heat and smog combine to kill 500+ annually.