By Alex Shenderov
World belongs to humanity.”– Dalai Lama
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”– Yogi Berra
We are at a crossroads. Prove me wrong.
The two sentences above are among the most worn-out ones in the English language. Everyone and his brother use these to produce a very predictable short-lived adrenaline rush. The rush lasts about 100 milliseconds before you scroll to the next, equally hysterical squeal. We no longer read much besides the headlines, – most of the time very justifiably so. Filtering pearls of information out of a Niagara of garbage takes more time and effort than we can afford, – so many folks protect their sanity by refusing to let anything through. It’s getting really hard to get a message across. It’s getting hard to find words that haven’t been cheapened to the point of losing much of their original meaning.
Human storytelling is a reflection of our collective psyche. It’s a mirror we see ourselves in. And the picture isn’t pretty.
It has become fashionable to treat humanity with cynicism and contempt. Our bad news media routinely portray us as lemmings inexorably driven by some brain-eating virus to jump off a cliff. Our celebrities call us cancer, plague, locusts.“To insult someone we call him ‘bestial’. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‘human’ might be the greater insult,” wrote Isaac Asimov, among other things — former President of the American Humanist Association and a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The misanthropic message is so overwhelmingly prevalent that it does trickle through. Only 6% of Americans believe the world is getting better [1]. Most adults in wealthy countries believe that human civilization is unlikely to last another century [2]. And children get the message, too. When asked to draw how they see the world fifty years from now, most kids in a test group aged six to twelve drew apocalyptic pictures [3].
Expectations—both high and low—are among the most reliable self-fulfilling prophecies known to humanity. After all, if you believe that you live among 8 billion locusts gobbling up the last remaining resources of the finite planet, the only rational course of action is to gobble up what you can, while you still can. Misanthropy is, quite literally, self-defeating.
Meantime, the most numerous, prosperous, healthy, peaceful and educated humankind ever inhabits this planet now. Sure, we started out as a few thousand unappetizing apes on the fallback lunch menu of big carnivores. But from these unremarkable beginnings, in only a million years or so, we have progressed to become nearly eight billion masters of our domain. The descendants of the merciless carnivores rummage through our dumpsters. We have conquered the highest mountains and the deepest trenches and both of Earth’s inhospitable poles. We have covered the planet with the World Wide Web, filled with an immense amount of knowledge. We somehow got from the caves to the Moon, and some of us have felt inexplicably compelled to create the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal and the Mona Lisa and the theory of relativity, and we dreamed of Mars and Jupiter and stars and galaxies. So, where do we go from here?
Wherever we choose to, that’s where. I am convinced that within a few decades from today, humanity, collectively, will have made its most important decision – deliberately or otherwise. We’ll have decided if we, as a species, are going forth to the stars, or back to the caves. Why? Glad you asked.
See, the story of human progress is, among other things, the story of replacing one main source of energy with another, better, more efficient one [4]. That’s how we fueled our acceleration. And accelerating civilization is the only one we have any experience running. The most impressive acceleration in the history of our species has been fueled by the Sun energy in a very special, convenient and concentrated form: fossil fuels. Sun in a can.
We now use an estimated ten times more per-capita energy than the first agricultural societies did 12,000 years ago. We have indoor plumbing and flu shots and schools and the Internet and movies and vacations and retirement.
But we, as a species, aren’t using just ten times more power than we were using 12,000 years ago when we first tried building temples and observatories. We’re actually using about 16,000 times more. There’s 1,600 times more of ustoday than 12,000 years ago. And most of that increase happened rather recently. Just 220 years ago, there were a billion of us. Today, there are almost eight billion humans. That’s what we have done with most of that Sun-in-a-can: we converted long-dead plants and animals into live people.
More people are alive today than have ever been alive at the same time ever in the planet’s history. More people are available to contribute to Wikipedia today than could contribute to the Alexandria library of Ptolemy. More people can trade opinions on Quora than ever argued at Athenian gyms during the times of Plato and Aristotle. More people listen to TED talks than Socrates ever lectured.
Meantime, Sun-in-a-can is running out. It took oil and gas and coal hundreds of millions of years to form in the Earth’s crust, and now we are burning through them in just hundreds of years. Simple accounting suggests that we better find something else quick, or we are in trouble. We have about 50 years’ worth of oil and gas left, and 130 years’ worth of coal [5]. The previous 50 years of trying to replace those with renewable energy left us with 80% of overall energy we use still being supplied by fossil fuels – and in transportation, it’s 92%. In air transportation, it’s 100%.
Charles Jones, an economics professor at Stanford, has recently published population dynamic modeling results, which I think paint a relevant broad-strokes picture of the options we have [6]. What he found was that there are three steady states for a human society, only two of them stable. One stable steady state is an accelerating civilization climbing the Kardashev scale to the stars. The other is an empty planet left after the civilization has faded away.
The third, intermediate steady state between the forth-to-the-stars and back-to-the-caves scenarios, is inherently unstable. It’s a crossroads, a tipping point. Any external perturbation gets amplified by the system’s inherent positive feedback loops and sends the civilization to one of the two stable states: settling the Universe or going extinct.
Significantly, the controlling variable in Jones’s model was knowledge per person: a high knowledge civilization stays that way by growing its island of knowledge, – climbing the Kardashev scale, – while pastoralist society can hardly find the “excesses” of World Wide Web, Hubble telescope, GPS and Large Hadron Collider worthy of the resources spent. Once the retreat starts, it will become progressively easier to justify shutting down the opulent temples of global civilization – first Saturn Vs and Tevatron and Arecibo radiotelescope, then the nuclear power stations and air transportation, then megafactories and industrial farms, then seaports and large mining operations. Soon there won’t be any justification for the expense of maintaining United Nations and universities and museums and national governments, and these will be gone, too.
And there is no reason to believe that this self-destruction has a natural lower limit.There have been civilizations in human history that abandoned the development path to completely vanish in the mist of time, leaving us no living memory of what happened to them. Our historians may never know for certain what was the purpose of Nazca lines or moai of Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island statues) or GobekliTepe complex, or how Saqsaywaman stone walls were built. The human tribes that created them couldn’t afford to keep the knowledge alive. They departed the accelerated path, and the departure cost them dearly. We call them the “dearly departed.” For a global tribe that never managed to plant backup copies of itself elsewhere, that would be curtains.
And right now, our global civilization will have to do one of two hard things, ready or not: quit the accelerating path or stay on it. I believe that most of the humans responsible for choosing between the two are alive today, as I write these words. I don’t think the people living today have the luxury of not making a choice, because—as usual in our time-constrained world—not making a choice is very much a choice. Often the worst one. Those who refuse to choose one of two alternatives frequently end up paying for both without benefitting from either.
We don’t know how to do either of these things: keep accelerating or quit. We have never tried. We, as a global civilization, have never quit accelerating. We have never attempted a deliberate global slowdown. We have no tools to give us reliable and detailed predictions of how the complicated intertwined systems we are trying to control—society, the economy, the biosphere, Gaia—would respond to us leaning on the brakes. And the broad-strokes predictions for that scenario that we do have – the Charles Jones’s empty planet model – don’t look very promising.There is no evidence that degrowth, intentional or otherwise, has a natural bottom. That way, apparently, lies defeat.
Nor do we know how to keep our global civilization accelerating beyond the dash fueled by Sun-in-a-can. We have never tried doing that, either. The tools to give us detailed predictions of how society, the economy, the biosphere, and Gaia would respond to us leaning on the accelerator are as unavailable as the tools for predicting the outcome of the leaning-on-the-brakes scenario. They’re kind of the same tools.
We’re the only global civilization we know facing this dilemma. There’s no prior experience to draw on. There’s no oracle to tell us how it’s going to turn out.
The one thing we can be sure of is that the massive resource investments needed to have even a shot at building a spacefaring civilization won’t happen accidentally. Especially our species’ most valuable resource, human talent. The time when being lucky was an adequate substitute for being good and ambitious is over. We have run out of freebies. We shall have to make the decision to invest in ourselves while we still can, or the decision will be out of our hands.
How do we make choices? Irrationally, as usual, that’s how. To make completely rational choices, you need to know things you can’t (yet) know – and then if you knew those things, these “choices” wouldn’t be choices anymore. Rational choice is an oxymoron. Sure, you can choose, say, a college by evaluating a lot of objective information about it – but your choices of evaluation criteria, and especially their relative importance, are irrational, and so is your choice of the moment to quit vacillating and make a decision already. In this intertwined world, you can easily rationalize sticking to one worldview or the other – after you’ve irrationally made the choice, that is. Others have the same information available yet make completely different decisions – and, after the fact, justify theirs every bit as convincingly (to themselves, at least) as you justified yours. There is plenty of data available that can be picked and interpreted every which way. Where you draw the line, and what you do with the data that happens to fall inside it, tells more about you than about anything, or anyone, else.
Why should we want to settle the Universe, like we have settled the Earth? Why should we behave as if we owned this planet, and had the right and responsibility to run it? Don’t these goals contradict each other? Is it fair to Gaia to ask it to support our dash to the stars?
These are all reasonable questions, and they need to be answered. Trouble is, we don’t have the luxury of answering them completely rationally: that would require knowing all outcomes of all possible choices, andthe last I checked, there was no time machine in my basement to tell us those outcomes. A rational choice, when you look closely, invariably turns out to be either not completely rational or not much of a choice. So, owning our future is, IMHO, going to take (among other things) a leap of faith.
Faith in us humans, that is. A.k.a. humanism.
When I face questions that ask for a leap of faith, I usually end up doing a very simple exercise. It helps me; maybe it’ll help you too. All you have to do is to go out on a clear night and look up. I don’t know what you’ll see if you try it, – but what I see when I do that is, literally, a Universe of challenges and experiences and resources and opportunities.
The opportunity cost of refusing to even try to go up there is incalculable. You don’t know what you are missing, so you can’t put a price on it. It cannot be known in advance, not without a time machine. We can choose to take a leap of faith, or not. We can choose to believe the unknown opportunities to be better than the known ones; and then – if we are lucky, and so is our entire lineage – folks settling Milky Way Galaxy in a distant future may be our descendants. Or we can make the easily justifiable, common sense, rational choice of the bird in hand over two in the bush; and then – if we are lucky, and so is our entire lineage – folks settling Milky Way Galaxy in a distant future may be visiting our descendants in some cosmic zoo.
Having done that irrational exercise, what did I learn? What personal, read biased, opinions about the questions above,– settling the Universe, owning this planet, relationship with Gaia, – formed in my mind?
I suggest that asking Gaia to support our dash to the stars is more than fair – it’s Gaia’s only shot at immortality. I suggest that a space-faring civilization is an evolutionary adaptation. Space is a shooting gallery, and every life-bearing planet will one day be sterilized one way or another. The only way Gaia can immortalize itself is to evolve a civilization that can protect it from global catastrophes – and/or plant its copies elsewhere. If someone does it for the Earth, it sure won’t be bugs or slugs or polar bears – it’ll be us. That is, if we choose to, and if we are lucky enough and persistent enough to succeed.
Once we, quite irrationally, choose to believe in ourselves and set the irrationally high goals – we’ll certainly need that other side of the inseparable human coin, rationality, to actually get us there. I suggest that our irrationality is not an alternative to being rational, but the way we humans – lacking a time machine or an oracle – choose what to be rational about. And so far, this synergyhas worked for us – on an increasing scale. It remains to be seen how far it can take us.
The question of us winning this round and moving to the next one, which will be perhaps a lot more challenging than this one was, is – to me – the question of what “us” stands for. Who is the “us” we’re supposed to bet on? How far back can our germlines diverge for you to still mean me, too, when you say “us”? At the dawn of the species, it was our tribe versus the rest of the world, then our country, our empire. Is our planet next in line for what “us” means? Our solar system, our galaxy? Our universe? How big is the biggest community you’re a patriot of? How big is the biggest thing you feel ready to own? Is it six degrees of separation, or six degrees of convergence? Are you ready for the seventh? Do you want to be?
What does it take to move to the next round of natural selection for future ownership of, for starters, the Milky Way Galaxy? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m going to offer mine anyways. The evolving self-organization of humanity is, to me, a story of learning to get more and more diverse folks involved in pursuit of more and more intertwined goals. Learning to call other, very different, humans “us” rather than “them.” Confluence, convergence, cross-pollination. Unity in diversity. Encountering concepts too bulky and fuzzy and nuanced to fit in any one human mind and making them work for us anyways. Constructing a stereoscopic view of this world (a.k.a. evolving human culture) by stitching together a mosaic from my little tile, and yours, and billions of others’.
I reckon this mosaic is our species’ identity. Contributing to this mosaic is what it means to be “us.” I think that reconciling the freedom of diverse individual minds with their collaborative convergence into collective consciousness—making sense of it all, together—is the secret weapons of our story-telling species. Our claim to fame. Our strong suit. Getting better at it is what our upward mobility means.
Upward mobility for humans, in every respect, is inseparable from upward mobility for humanity. Should we give up on ourselves and become what space visionary Robert Zubrin calls, sadly, Homo Mundanis, – then the (very predictable) rollback likely won’t be limited just to demographics, economy, technology, art, and science. Human moral standards are closely linked to growth and progress, too [7]. Violence among diverse humans goes down, tolerance and mutual understanding and respect go up when different people pursue common goals. When you’re busy pushing a civilization uphill, you have no time for sexism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, Sinophobia, or any other arrogant xenophobic nonsense. When you’re busy, you can’t afford smugly dismissing your competition, either. When our goals are ambitious enough, sometimes we fail (that’s how you know if you challenge yourself enough: if you succeed every time, your bar is set too low). But someone else may succeed – and it might be a good idea to learn from them so you can do better the next time around.
Aiming this high helps to see our little problems, petty squabbles and dreamed-up grievances in a proper perspective. No less importantly, it helps resolve the real ones, too.
For example, remember running out of the Sun-in-a-can? Well, it’s no longer insurmountable once we have faith in humanity. Sun is still shining just fine, but we are currently using a paltry 0.02% of what Earth gets from our home star. What’s worse, it took us over 50 years of campaigning and investment to get 1.4% of our worldwide energy use from solar. There is no reason to think that cynics will do much better than that in the next 50 years.What prevents us from using solar energy better than we already do is its intermittency: we need to store it someplace for the night, and storage costs an arm and a leg – both in money and in environmental damage. That’s the grim picture of misanthropic worldview:
But once we choose to move upward, intermittency of solar ceases to be an unsolvable problem. At any given time, it’s daytime on half the planet. It turns out that if, instead of local storage, we build global grid (as China and India have already proposed), solving intermittency problem is a technically and financially very doable thing, in a few decades – as long as we can trust each other to sell energy the way we are already selling pretty much everything else: globally. By the “simple expedient” (just kidding) of learning to trust each other, we can get 67% savings: building a global grid instead of local storage is that much cheaper. Yes, keeping this civilization going even after these impressive savings will still cost as much as 2,000 Manhattan Projects or 300 Apollo programs. But we surely do have the resources to do it this way.
The three existential threats recently outlined at the World Economic Forum Davos [8] were nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. As I mentioned before, people building space-faring civilizations might be too busy with that to whack each other on the head with nuclear bombs. People busy building space-faring civilizations might also take good care of their home planet, as a reassurance that planting its (diverse and evolving) copies elsewhere is a good idea.
What about the existential threat of technological unemployment, a.k.a. devolving into terminally bored useless people? After all, we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, right? That is, finite planet of finite carrying capacity for finite number of people with finite needs—needs increasingly met by robots rather than people. With this mindset, the notion of human uselessness is hard to avoid, especially when every young person around you is having trouble finding a decent job. Farm labor went from 95% of the population to 2% in under two centuries, and factory and office work are following suit, – so we naturally start asking the very reasonable question: What the heck do we need ourselves for? The failure to find an inspiring answer is a serious problem of our affluent times.
But once we choose to move upward, this problem goes away too. The traditional view is thatwe can afford to either take care of this planet or expand our species beyond Earth. This zero-sum-game delusion makes no sense when we have hard time finding use for ourselves. The instant we shake its spell, the demand for human labor shoots up. The 58.5 man-hours humans spent exploring the Moon required 5.2 billion man-hours of work down here on Earth. Sure, some of that Earth-bound labor could now be performed by robots; but that would mean more humans, not fewer, can focus on exploring new worlds. And that’s where we outshine robots every day and twice on Sunday: we are the ones that make irrational decisions in an alien environment. In the adaptation department, we the slightly irrational humans outperform the pre-programmed robots the way Internet outperforms carrier pigeons. The one trained human geologist that visited the Moon, accomplished more in a few hourswalking around there than preprogrammed robots without, ahem, adult supervision, managed to do in decades.
If we won’t bet on ourselves, no one will. Sure, supporting your species’ oddballs, a.k.a. visionaries and idealists, is a risk: you’re spending resources without any guaranteed return on your investment. You can fail if you do that. But you can’t succeed if you don’t. Somebody else somewhere else is trying while weain’t, and if weain’t trying then whoever succeeds it won’t be us.
So, there is another existential threat to our civilization, which I regard as more serious than nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption – combined. That threat is misanthropy and cynicism and risk-aversion that may prevent us from choosing the stars – and then the other three will make sure that we get back to the caves. Faith in ourselves, Humanism 2.0, appears to be a natural selection criterion for a fledgling civilization like ours. It’s a simple, uncluttered faith, and its first commandment is that we can, should, and shall aim for the stars.
But why Humanism 2.0 is the last faith of humanity? And how faith in nearly 8 billion humans can possibly be monotheistic?
Glad you asked. That will be discussed in the second part of the series. And also, in much more detail, in my book “Homo Exploratoris”. This article is, for the most part, an excerpt from that manuscript.
References
| [1] | [Online]. Available: https://reason.com/2016/07/07/american-pessimism-only-6-percent-think/. |
| [2] | [Online]. Available: https://reason.com/2015/08/14/the-end-is-nigh/. |
| [3] | [Online]. Available: https://www.dw.com/en/this-apocalyptic-is-how-kids-are-imagining-our-climate-future/a-40847610. |
| [4] | V. Smil, Energy and civilization: a history, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017. |
| [5] | [Online]. Available: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/#:~:text=There%20are%201.65%20trillion%20barrels,levels%20and%20excluding%20unproven%20reserves).. |
| [6] | “empty planet,” [Online]. Available: https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/emptyplanet.pdf. |
| [7] | F. BM., The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, New York, 2005. |
| [8] | “Davos 2020 Harari,” [Online]. Available: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/yuval-hararis-warning-davos-speech-future-predications/. |