Where do we go from here?

There is nothing like reflecting on the entire span of our planet's history to get some perspective on where we, as a species and civilization, are today. The study of this immense period of time, and not merely the relatively brief history of mankind, is amongst the most insightful and beneficial parts of any person's education. Too many of us are only interested or preoccupied with the recent history of humanity, for example from the beginning of the industrial revolution and the birth of modern nation states. Undeniably, the geopolitics of today have been predominantly shaped by the events of the previous centuries, especially since the first World War. Analyzing this period is perhaps useful for making short term general predictions of the positioning of each country viz-a-vi one another in the next few years, but to look further ahead at where we as a global society is headed we need to dig a little deeper. I will come back to the 20th century again, if only to highlight the extremely rapid changes wrought by our species on Earth in a relatively short span of time. To really understand where we've come from, it is useful to look back much further, beyond the age of civilizations, past the paleolithic even, when we lived as hunter-gatherers for perhaps a hundred thousand years before agriculture was invented. I am speaking of geological epochs, the time scale at which the evolution of life takes place i.e. millions of years.

Source: http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/the-greatest-animal-war

The Earth has a history of some 4.5 billion years, but life really only took off with the Cambrian explosion some 550 million years ago when large bodied multicellular organisms rapidly colonized first the oceans, then the land. This means for almost 90% of its existence our planet was a barren, lifeless rock (if we exclude simple single celled life). Despite the conditions being suitable for life to arise, like the planet being in a sweet spot in terms of distance from the sun, for water to remain in liquid form, for instance, for almost four billion years there was nothing substantial beyond archaic bacteria-like life forms. To keep the story short, the onset of complex life led to the spread of ever larger and more complex biota, culminating in the era of dinosaurs, before they were unceremoniously wiped out by an asteroid strike from space. One wonders if that had not happened what would be the state of life on Earth today, and if intelligent, sentient beings like ourselves would still have eventually evolved. Perhaps if that evolutionary trajectory had not been disrupted it could have brought forward sentient life by millions of years, instead of resetting the clock back to zero but allowing mammalian life to fill the vacuum and inherit the Earth. But I digress!

In any case, it took another 63 million years give or take, for our planet to produce walking apes that would eventually lead to hominids and us, "only" around a million years ago. We were rather insignificant as a species for the majority of that time, just another large bodied mammal trying to make a living from the land, in competition with the suite of various mega-fauna of the time like cave lions, dire wolves and mammoths to name just three. With the discovery of fire and refinement of tool use humans dispersed out of Africa and gradually spread out worldwide to every continent. Still, our numbers remained small and impact on the environment was localized and negligible, if we conveniently overlook the extinction of mega-fauna that have been attributed to our competitive edge.

Things began to pick up with the dawn of farming around ten thousand years ago, which allowed our population to rise rapidly as settlements expanded and technological progress gathered pace. However, for thousands of years of civilization, we could only rely on the energy from ourselves, other creatures, the sun, wind, and living plants to do our bidding. It was only with the unlocking of energy from fossil fuels, accumulated underground since the beginning of life on Earth (i.e. hundreds of millions of years worth) that we really took off, quite literally. One has only to look at charts of world population, GDP and energy use to see the exponential growth of our species, particularly in the last century and more so post-WW2. In 1900 there were about 1.6 billion people, we are at seven billion today, all in a mere hundred years. Economic and industrial output growth are even more rapid, driven by associated massive inputs of material and energy resources. Which brings me to the point of this essay - that it is simply impossible for our current path of expansion to last much longer.

Exponential growth of any sort has the effect of compressing time, as the underlying subject increases in a geometric progression. Each doubling of number requires a shorter period as the base expands. Looking back at the history of life on Earth and the sheer stretch of deep time that has passed, one can be fooled into thinking there is ample time still for something to happen, perhaps the discovery of a new energy source, or the ability to colonize other planets that will once again push those annoying physical resource limits away from their current constraints on carrying capacity. But the enemy of exponential growth is against us in this fight. We just do not have another thousand or even a few hundred years to figure a way out of the limits of a finite Earth. I venture that in all likelihood we don't even have another hundred years. Before this century ends, i.e. within our children's lifetime, things would have to come to a head. This is no mere hysteria on my part without substantiation or deliberate, rational analysis. In all but a few of the multiple scenarios generated by a sophisticated model from the authors of 'Limits to Growth'*, some sort of collapse is forecast before the end of the 21st century. To summarize their analysis, even if we were to take collective action quickly and invent practical technologies without further delay, we will inevitably come up against limits of one sort or another to further economic expansion. There has to be a sea change in mindset away from the goal of perpetual material growth if we are to avoid the inevitable downward 'adjustment' in ecological carrying capacity. Yet the majority of us blindly go about our individual lives without any seeming concern or awareness of the cliff looming ahead of humanity. We continue to strive for the next career advancement, upgrade our houses, our cars, put our kids into prestigious institutions so that they may become even more materially well-off, ad infinitum. It is truly mass insanity, truth be told, as we step on the accelerator even whilst headed for the precipice.

From a lifeless rock and empty world, to one filled to brimming with humans, but all the impact on the planet has come about within the last hundred years, a blink of an eye as they say, in the enormous span of geological time. How long will the Anthropocene (Age of Man) last? At the rate we are going it could be just another blink of an eye. Just take a look at those population and world economy charts, the way the lines on the graphs rocket almost to the vertical, and tell me if you think otherwise.

And we have lift-off!

 *Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004)