Chapter 7: The Anthropocene
The seventh and final chapter from the documentary I’m creating is now live. (Also see chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)
Transcript
“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.”
― David Deutsch
“I do not hesitate to proclaim this the Anthropocene era: The creation of man is the introduction of a new form of being into nature, a force previously absent from the world … This new element, more than any that previously existed anywhere, not only relates the non-living world to the living as had already happened, but, in a new and mysterious way, unifies physical principles with intellectual and moral ones. It is a force which, in its power and universality, is not inferior to any of the other great forces of nature.”
— Antonio Stoppani (In Volume II of his monumental three-volume geology textbook Corso di Geologia).
It seems that, as soon as our ancestors could afford to, they added a spiritual dimension to their existence. Human burial practices are at least 100,000 years old, and religious ceremonies date back at least 50,000 years. Though interpretations vary, it is thought that the famous archeological site called Gobekli Tepe is the oldest ritual site ever discovered. This Turkish site is thought to have been constructed around 10,000 BC—not by city-dwellers, or even by settled agriculturalists—but by nomadic hunter-gatherers. This implies that such people satisfied their spiritual needs before settling down and building the great early civilizations of Mesopotamia. The Biblical Matthew, with his famous line “Upon this Rock, I will build my Church,” may have got things backwards.
Cave paintings that reveal a reverence for animals and the Greek constellations named after divinities suggest that our forebears lacked the explicit distinctions between the sky above our heads, the fauna that roam the Earth and ourselves that we take for granted today—it has taken centuries of scientific investigation to make the fundamental differences between these realms obvious. The terrestrial, celestial and human were intertwined in the magical stories our prescientific ancestors told themselves.
In humanity’s earliest theories of the world, then, people played a fundamental role.
But, with the dawn of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, such anthropocentrism grew less plausible—first, in 1543, Copernicus overthrew the geocentric model of our Solar System, and then, in 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica. Newton offered a bold new worldview, in which the motions of objects from pebbles to planets could be both explained and predicted—tell me the current position and velocity of an object, along with the forces acting on it, and I’ll give you its position and velocity at any later point in time. Copernicus—and later Galileo—demonstrated that the Earth was not at the center of the Solar System. Newton robbed our ancestors of their innocence by proposing the first universal theory, which explained phenomena across all of time and space in purely physical terms—magical and religious thinking were banished from his predictable, clockwork universe. Humans, it seemed, played no special role in this new understanding of reality.
Then along came Darwin and our ancestors took another step towards adulthood. In Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, all the apparent design in the biosphere has emerged through a long, long chain of slight modifications passed down from generation to generation. Those changes, which we now understand as due to mutations in the genetic code, were more likely to be passed on if they increased an organism’s fecundity—its ability to produce offspring—who, in turn, survived and reproduced. (The modern incarnation of Darwinian theory considers genes, not organisms, as the fundamental replicators.) The organism’s environment was a selector, a ruthless arbiter that determined which organisms were more likely to reproduce, and which were more likely to be tossed into the dustbin of extinction. String together enough of these cycles of random changes and non-random selection, and the result is all the elegant design and order in the biosphere.
There was no getting around it—this process explained the evolution of humans, too. Apparently, the story behind the emergence of algae and cattle also explained our entry onto the world stage. There was no room for the exceptional status of our species, which many had hoped biology would preserve.
So, after only a few centuries of modern science, the role of people was diminished on all fronts. We are not at the physical center of our Solar System, nor of our galaxy. We are not mentioned in any of our profoundest physical theories, which present a world that conforms to exact laws of motion and can be predicted with certainty. And even our best theory of life implies that we came about by the same naturalistic process that brought about every other apeish creature. Anthropocentrism, it seemed, was a thing of the past, a relic of a less mature people.
It’s taken a few centuries, but we’ve come back to the ancients’ view of the relationship between people and the cosmos. While we’ve rightly abandoned the majority of their beliefs, they were right about this much—to understand nature at its deepest, we have to acknowledge the special role people play. As we’ve explained, it is people, and only people, who are the ultimate transformers of this vast and wondrous cosmos.
You probably remember from high school that the effects of gravity diminish with the square of the distance. The same is true for the intensity of light. In general, physical effects rapidly diminish with distance. even from a hundredth of a light-year away, the sun would appear as a cold, bright dot in the sky, barely affecting anything. At a thousand light-years, even a supernova would have little impact. When viewed from a neighboring galaxy, the most violent quasar jets would be little more than an abstract painting in the sky. There is only one phenomenon whose effects do not necessarily diminish with distance: knowledge. A piece of knowledge could aim itself at a target, travel without diminishing for a thousand light-years, and then completely transform the destination.
It is taken for granted that our Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel in five or so billion years, expand to become a red giant star and swallow the Earth in a deadly tsunami of heat. Many people take that moment as the moment that the human project will end. But our descendants may not want the Sun to eat the EarthEarth so. Such a feat is out of reach with our current technology, but no law of nature precludes us from succeeding in this task..
In fact, we know what would be required—we’d have to (somehow) suck matter out of the Sun. Not only is this possible in principle, but humanity has literally billions of years to plan and do so extremely gradually.
If humanity chooses and succeeds in modifying the Sun this way, then the typical account of stellar evolution as written in physics textbooks will simply not apply to our star. Those accounts explain the lifecycle of stars in terms of nuclear and electromagnetic forces, gravity, hydrostatic pressure, and radiation pressure—but they fail to consider the effects of yet another fundamental force—knowledge.
So, while the size of the Sun in billions of years does not depend on the gravitational effects of Mars, or the atmospheric events of Neptune, or the collision of asteroids in our solar system’s empty pockets. It does, as the textbooks say, depend on its own gravity, radiation pressure, and nucleosynthesis. But it also depends on intelligent life on Earth—the choices people make, the outcomes of their elections, their economic activity, the development of their moral values, and how they rear their children.
What’s true for our Sun is true for the universe as a whole: the fate of the cosmos depends on the future history of knowledge.
We’ve said that very few physical transformations take place in the absence of life, and that the overwhelming majority of transformations that could happen require the presence of people and their knowledge. But even the universe’s rather unvaried raw materials have the potential to explode into an infinite basket of wonders once we create knowledge about what we can do with them—and not a moment before that. For instance, coal is the result of millions of years of the earth’s slow but steady hand pressurizing dead plants, rock, and soil. And it can last in its black, stoic state for just as much time, as it doesn’t decompose. For most of humanity’s history, they must have regarded coal as an impotent rock, roughly as valuable to their lives as any other round bit of stone. Archeological evidence suggests that around 3500 BC, people in China were mining coal to use it as a source of energy. Armed with new knowledge of how to harness coal’s attributes, what had been an impotent feature of their environment had suddenly become a means to improve their lot in life, to transform their world from a worse one to a better one. In Ancient Greece, the heat from burned coal helped people in metallurgy. The Aztecs used coal as lights for their ornaments. In all cases, the value of coal was not some intrinsic attribute of the ancient material but rather depended on the knowledge that people had about which transformations coal could be used to cause.
The logic of the situation generalizes to the entirety of the cosmos. Cosmic rays and cows, dust and dark matter, tornados and tundras, planets and particles, black holes and white dwarves are all raw material to be transformed by the knowledge that people create into works of art, technologies that boggle the mind, a prosperous civilization that spans the cosmos itself.
Already, if one wants to explain regularities found on Earth, one cannot avoid mentioning the effects that people and their knowledge have had. But we are just beginning. Alien cartographers of the universe may one day observe the Milky Way and notice that entire solar systems have been altered by forces very unlike gravity. They may see that planets have been moved around as if by God’s invisible hand, that energy from stars is being siphoned this way and that, that oddly shaped objects are rotating around black holes that are made of utterly alien materials.
They will map out what they see, but their maps are hopeless against the tide of human creativity. For a future generation of these alien cartographers may find that the space between the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, contains far more interesting systems than just cosmic dust, all with the clear mark of an Intelligent Designer. And they may find that even Andromeda looks entirely differently than the previous generation of cartographers had detailed, and that there exist patterns that somehow correlate between the two galaxies, even though none of the forces in physics could have possibly explained how one of the galaxies could have possibly affected the other to such a degree. These cartographers may explain the correlation in much the same way that we explain correlations between two Western societies, say, the United States and Great Britain—that there exist literally galaxy-wide cultures in both the Milky Way and Andromeda, and that they are exchanging and adopting each other’s ideas.
The alien cartographers may give up hope on mapping out the universe, resolving themselves to the fact that those pink-skinned Apes that originated on the planets of some backwater planet will continue to conquer the cosmos, atom by atom and galaxy by galaxy, forever converting its raw materials into products of its own imagination in a fundamentally unpredictable and unending process. Or they may choose to join us in the most important project there could ever be.
It may have taken those cartographers a long time to admit what they were seeing, but the spark had taken place long before humans had played with galaxies as easily as a toddler plays with her toys. As you well know by now, humanity finally kicked into high-gear during the Enlightenment, when we realized that progress was both possible and achievable, when ideas that fostered creativity and criticism began to replace those that suppressed them, when we sought to explain the world around us with rigorous theories, both scientific and otherwise. If we so choose, we can continue to make the world, the solar system, the galaxy, and the rest an infinitely better and more beautiful place. Human knowledge—our values, scientific theories, political ideals, and culture—can come to be the predominant cause of every physical structure in the cosmos. To the alien cartographers, explaining any given phenomenon they come across will entail explaining the choices that people make. Welcome to the Anthropocene.