250 million years. It sounds like a long time, but big picture? It's not necessarily a breeze, but it's still not as much time as a human being would think. A story broke in Nature about a group of scientists who used a super computer to extrapolate what the planet would look like in the future, and it's the picture you see above. Some of it is recognizable but not much.
People don't tend to think about continental drift, but if they do, they think about it in terms of past tense. The continents are still drifting, though. So slowly you can't notice it. Kind of like how we don't notice the earth rotating, but it does.
How accurate is something like this? Hard to say. Who can truly predict the future? We do, however, have evidence of what has happened so far. Barring any surprises, this is how the world will change over the next 250 million years. By then the world will be unlivable for human beings and nearly all life that exists here now. Volcanic activity increases. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous. The heat will be so unbearable that we wouldn't be able to sweat it out of us. It will be, quite literally, hell on earth.
And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
So that's it. In 250 million years humanity will be no more. Unless we get a surprise--and when it comes to surprises for us, how many are all that good?--then we're fucked. Well, we were fucked one way or the other. Eventually the sun will expand and consume the solar system past where the earth is now, but that wasn't really expected to happen for 7.5 billion years. We had considerably more time for that one.
Well. About that. No more humanity in 250 million years? That's the BEST CASE SCENARIO. The kicker is, the computer simulation assumed that we would stop burning so much goddam carbon the very minute it started its calculations. What's the likelihood of that happening? Despite the steady increase in natural disasters, everyone is mumbling under their breaths, "How did that happen?" This couldn't be the whirlwind James Hansen warned us about reaping in 1988 when he testified before Congress about global warming. No way. That's commie talk.
Hansen warned us. And the very thing he warned us about is happening before our very eyes. We should be screaming like Chicken Little, but we'd rather be ostriches and stick our heads in the sand.
I get it. I really do. This isn't a today problem, not really. We've weathered some bad, uh, weather before, and we'll continue to do it. Our kids will probably be fine. Probably our grandkids, too.
But their kids? Ah, fuck 'em, right? You will never know them. They're practically strangers to you even though they have a good percentage of your DNA. But you got yours. As a US president once said, "Fuck the doomed."
It's all well and good for me. I won't have descendants to worry about. I should double, maybe even triple, down on destroying the planet. Get what's mine and let your descendants suffer. But I *do* care.
The nihilists among you are probably shrugging your shoulders. It's going to happen anyway, right? Why fight it? By that reasoning, you should kill yourself. I'm not suggesting you do that. In fact, I'm telling you *not* to do that. But if you're going to die someday, why fight it, right?
What's the most valuable thing you have? Something that no amount of riches will ever buy you? Time. For something that may or may not exist, it's pretty fucking valuable. What you do with your time is of the utmost importance. Why would you fast track the end? The only thing you should be doing with your life, paramount above all else, is seeking ways to ensure you have more time here.
So yeah, we should probably do more to stop the human race from ending. Too many people view it as a whiny save-the-planet kind of thing and not an imperative save-us kind of thing. As George Carlin once said, "The planet isn't going anywhere. We are!" And yes, I recognize that the bit I took that from is about how we shouldn't give a shit because our end is inevitable, but I'm going to cherry pick it for two reasons. One, it's pithy. And two, he's right, it's people who are fucked, not the earth (not yet), and if we look at it from that perspective, maybe we'd be motivated to do something about it.
So let's buy some time. In all actuality, if this computer simulation comes to pass, we'll probably be dead long before the 250M mark, but let's try to squeeze as much time out of this place as we can.
Or, as Monty Python once told us, you can look on the bright side of life, and Ian Malcolm is right. Life, uh, finds a way. It's just not going to be *our* life.
You're still here? OK, there's some good news. Human beings have something that not many other creatures on this planet have: adaptable survival skills. It's possible that humanity will find a way to survive on earth even if this extrapolated future comes to pass. We would have to be very clever, and I imagine we'd have to live at the edges of Pangea Ultima or in caves or some such. Perhaps Dune by Frank Herbert will be a survival guide in the future.
Or! We have another option. 250M years is a long time from our point of view. Perhaps by then we'll have figured out how to survive off-planet. Probably not within our solar system, so we'll have to figure out interstellar travel by then. Hopefully we'll figure it out, because if we're relying on Elon Musk, we're all going to get a big surprise when he gets in his space shuttle and locks us all out and lives on some inhabitable planet lightyears away from earth. He claims SpaceX is to pave the way for humanity to live among the stars, but I have a sneaking suspicion he's just like the rest of his rich white boy ilk. He's in it for himself.
Unless he selects you as one of his slaves. Because you know that if we infect the rest of the universe, we're bringing slavery back. But that's a story for another day.
OK, one more thing. Ostriches actually *don't* bury their heads in the sand. I just needed a silly metaphor to match Chicken Little. I apologize to ostriches everywhere.
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| "Fuck the doomed." |
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