On a cosmic scale, who cares? Humanity will almost certainly go extinct no matter what we do.
On human scales… well, I expect that in a couple of decades there will be pogroms against the elderly (i.e. my generation) because of how we didn’t try to prevent the catastrophe we knew was coming. I think boomers will just slip the net, getting to enjoy all of the best fruits of fossil-fuel-driven economic expansion, while dying off too early to pay the piper for it.
Interestingly there are like three periods of life really on Earth, from a time/development point of view.
Single Cellular Life ~ a billion years
Photosynthetic life ~ another billion years
Multi-cellular Life ~ a billion years after that
All the “life” people think of on earth has only happened in the last 600M years or so. Flowering plants weren’t around until 160M years ago.
In other words, the filter to just get multi-cellular, complex life was at least 3 billion years of cooking. The 65 million year difference between Dinosaurs and Mammals is a drop in the bucket by comparison. It seems like once there is a complex enough self reproducing thing, that complexity tends to be preserved, ie, you see something like “runaway complexity and differentiation” once multi-cellular life exists in complex forms.
I used to read quite a lot of about gene theory but I’ve come to the conclusion that actually there is a preference for complexity in evolution. Sure, complexity leaves niches behind that simple, non-complex life can fill, but the very nature of evolution implies increasing efficiency, and increasing efficiency invariably means increased complexity.
Yeah, we pretty much can. Aside from actual constructing nutritional materials through chemical processing, we can create controlled habitats where we can do things like grow crops and stuff.
Hell, we are currently improving the ability to grow crops in space. If we can grow plants in the space station, we can sure as hell do it anywhere on Earth.
Again, these aren’t things that would keep our current society alive, but the species will certainly continue to exist. We are almost infinitely adaptable at this point.
Eh, i think it’s important that the species continues.
I’m not sure that evolution actually favours complexity. I think it wants things to be as simple as possible and still fill their niche. On the other hand, you can’t have complex stuff without having simpler stuff first, so the frontiers of complexity tend to expand outwards.
There’s a good case to be made that the principle bottleneck proceeding to multicellularity was the development of eukaryotes. Eukaryotic cells are vastly bigger and more complex than prokaryotic ones. It’s like the difference between a paper airplane and a jetliner.
I don’t think anyone questions that evolution tends toward greater specialization. It’s like a ratchet. The more specific an adaptation becomes, the more difficult it is to co-opt it for other purposes later. “Complexity” is a vague term. There’s an amoeba that has a genome 200x larger than our own. How do you measure complexity?
I don’t think that “intelligence” as we conceive it–abstract reasoning, facility for complex communication, advanced number sense–is necessarily all that adaptive. Just using the info we’ve got, there aren’t that many creatures on Earth who possess these characteristics. No plants or fungi possess them. And even among animals, only a few species of megafauna in the last couple of million years have had them. Life persisted for a long time without them and did just fine. I don’t think intelligence is inevitable for evolutionary systems. And then, even if you have intelligence, a technological civilization seems like a long shot. Fully modern humans did their thing for 200,000 years without it.
I’d disagree, if you consider “intelligence” more broadly as “receiving information from the environment and acting on it.”
The more information a self reproducing molecule can receive, process, and act on, all things being equal, will result in an increase in fitness.
Actual Intelligence as is normally understood in just the end point of a long line of organisms become ever better processors of environmental information. IMO!
It’s a lot like pornography - you know it when you see it! But, actually that amoeba’s genetic complexity is completely valid complexity, since that, in my estimation, is the “reservoir” out of which later, macro-scale complexity arose. Just like you don’t jump from self reproducing organic molecules straight to trilobytes. There had to be billions of years of increasing complexity in single cellular organisms just to get to the next big leap. In fact that is almost certainly far more impressive an increase in “complexity” than, say the difference between Triassic animals to modern animals. Maybe there’s some kind of measure of genetic entropy.
I actually stumbled across something very useful for navigating the issues we’re discussing here.
The professor that Watt references as predicting societal collapse within 10 years is Jem Bendell. He clarifies that 10 years is not a hard and fast prediction but rather a consciously chosen time scale that conveys the idea of inevitable societal collapse in the near future. Could be more than 10 years or less but it’s a short enough time scale that we need to think of it as something Immanent rather than the traditional ways of framing this conversation which (a pet peeve of mine) use the year 2100 (or more recently I’ve been seeing 2040), dates so far in the future than they are essentially denials of what’s happening right now and what will happen in the coming years.
Anyway, he has a paper and accompanying blog on the subject of deep adaptation — The idea that if we accept the inevitability of near term societal collapse, we have to start discussing things that people have been afraid to discuss, throwing out our existing paradigms and conceptions of how the world of humankind is organized and start thinking about how we will deal with an entirely new context.
The blog includes some really good resources on starting to think about how to process this knowledge once you accept what’s happening. I’ve only started reading the paper and accompanying posts but I’m finding it very helpful. This post in particular frames a range of responses and feels like a really good starting point:
Oddly enough, my initial impression is that Bendell might be a bit of an optimistic in that he seems to believe in the possibility of positive outcomes on a local level. Maybe not though, I’ve only started scratching the surface.
Yes, though I would contend that there are reasons based on physical laws that things unfolded the way they did and as those laws are universal, I would expect to see the same pattern unfolding repeatedly. The initial research into exo planets seems to be revealing categories of solar systems depending on how things fell out during there formation and that makes perfect sense.
After that it’s just probability. If most stars have solar systems and some categories of solar systems are capable of sustaining life, the sheer numbers suggest that given all of these systems are bound by the same physical laws suggests that life is a thing that happens and evolution is a part of that process as well
It looks like recovery started about 4-6 million years after the Permian Exctinction and was “complete” within 30 million years.
Well, that’s all right then. Sure, we’ll all lose a little weight, and I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed, but help is coming.
Given (pre-)historical extinction rates for mammals, only about 5% of extant species remain after 5 million years. (The other 95% have gone extinct, supplanted by other species.) After 15 million years, there will be virtually zero extant species of mammals remaining. That’s without considering the effects of humanity (already an epoch-defining extinction event) or some other catastrophe.
We’ll sure, I agree that life tends to find a way. During the Permian Extiinction only 96% of all marine life died. The link between our oceans and the atmosphere is profound though so you don’t need the ocean to be 100% dead for the atmospheric makeup to become highly unpleasant. Hypoxia? Fatal levels of CO2 or methane? I don’t know.
As a civilization? Sure. As individuals? Not so much. Strip away civilization, economies and the conditions necessary for the development, production, operation and maintenance of technology and the survivors are left in a primitive state. Primitive people have shown an incredible ability to survive in extreme climates but, again, the restriction is that that climate has to be compatible with human physiology. Go ask the people of Raqqa or Hodeida to get cracking on developing habitats capable of sustaining human life in the face of a fatal climate. I’m curious to see what they come up with.
All of that having been said, sure, it’s possible the human race doesn’t go extinct. We’re tenacious and no one can say for sure. I’m just saying that it could be a long shot. It’s not a case of surviving one specific threat. It’s death by a million cuts.
The only environmental disaster that causes me existential dread is a precipitous drop in the oxygen level.
There are lots of marginal ways to survive an ecological collapse. But not if we suffocate.
Not to sideline the conversation, but would you mind explaining why you think that? I’m being serious: I can see people wanting a world for their children, but from a purely objective viewpoint–barring religious reasons–I don’t see any strong arguments for the perpetuation of the human species. It has been a pretty unmitigated disaster for the planet and every other living thing on it.
You sound like a Pak Protector without any family members.
It’s all about the species.
I don’t think Timex is saying he doesn’t care about individuals. He’s just pushing back against the idea that climate change would wipe out the species altogether.
I tend to agree and think of it as more of a Black Plague-level event, which is to say, survivable by a civilization but really really sucks to anyone going through it. Which is more than enough to make it the highest priority in the world right now.
But I could be wrong. It could also be much, much worse than the Black Plague (say, modern-civilization-ending) and still leave hundreds of millions of humans alive in primitive circumstances. Or it could actually be an extinction level event as some here are arguing. I simply don’t know enough about how our ecosystem works, and how vulnerable to climate change its essential pillars are, to venture an opinion with much confidence.
I don’t know what a Pak Protector is.
But I’m serious: I feel no allegiance to the human race as a species. I don’t see any compelling non-religious reason why anyone should care if it disappears from the face of the planet. I understand that genetically we are wired to propagate, but we are intelligent enough to overcome that if we choose.
Having a kid suddenly makes one very, very interested in the future of the species for the next ~100 years at least.
It’s not rational, but humans aren’t Vulcans.
Yeah, I mentioned that upthread. But wanting to protect and provide for your own progeny is different than caring about the survival of the species as a species.