I read the newspapers over the last few days, and the bad news has put me into a black mood. Humanity is overrunning the globe, outstripping its ability to sustain us, decimating species from the Sumatran Rhinoceros to the Blue Frittilary Butterfly, carving the tops off mountains in Appalachia, poisoning the Amazon delta with oil spills, and incidentally keeping everyone under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. However hard we strive for the Good, we are at heart an evil, selfish people. Sooner or later, we will reduce the biosphere to a state where it cannot sustain animal life more complex than a cockroach, or plant life more complex than club moss, and we will have caused the next of the great die-offs in geologic history.
I told you that I was in a black mood. But when I despair about us as a species and our desperate need to dominate nature and destroy our own home, I take great comfort in a rather perverse thought.
Nature doesn’t care about us.
The whole history of life on this planet has occupied less than a thousandth of its history, the history of animals less than a ten-thousandth, and the history of humans less than one hundred-thousandth. For all our self conceit, we are a barely noticeable footnote in nature’s grand history. As such, there is very little that we can do for evil or good that will even be noticeable in the multi-billion lifetime of this planet.
Let’s say that we do our worst - we release all the nuclear arsenal that we have built up, we set ablaze all the forests of the world, we blast dust high into the stratosphere and bring on the next Ice Age, and we blanket the world with cobalt isotopes that will be active for the next two thousand years. Let’s say that somehow we manage to kill all multi-cellular life in the oceans and on the land, and render both uninhabitable for a ten thousand years. What will happen?
Very quickly, in geologic terms, the horrible pollution will abate. The chemical poisons will decompose, the radioactive dust will be buried in sedimentary rock, the atmospheric dust will settle out of the stratosphere, and the glaciers will retreat, leaving no trace that humanity ever existed. Then all the microbes that inhabit the soil, and the bedrock, and the deep ocean trenches, and the deep fissures in the earth’s bones will start to migrate back to the surface world, where energy will be plentiful. As they do, they will start to form multi-cellular forms again, because that is advantageous out here on the surface. And over hundreds of millions of years, they will recapitulate our own rise to complex life forms and maybe to intelligence. In a blink of a geologic eye, the biosphere will become rich and vibrant once again.
We have no idea what this reconstituted biosphere would look like. Pseudo-octopi could emerge as the dominant intelligence in the ocean, and insect analogs of the ants and termites might develop hive intelligence on the land. But whatever happens, we can be sure that the biosphere will be as rich and vibrant as the one that we are destroying.
So here is my comforting thought:
Only when we think of our actions from our narrow, self-centered view do they seem apocalyptic; but in reality Nature doesn’t care. In the grand sweep of galactic evolution, it doesn’t matter what humanity does to our planet. Do our worst, the planet will recover quickly and completely and Life will continue with barely a stumble.
I already admitted that it is a perverse outlook, but as I depair of my own species, I find it very comforting that our ability to do harm is ultimately limited to a pathetically small scope.
