Surviving Humanity

(Image: The Earth seen from Apollo 17).

What is an organism? Some sort of organized community of entities giving rise to what scientists call “emergent” behavior, behavior which is complex and unexpected given the relative simplicity of its parts.

A human being is an organism: a community of cells, a huge set of simpler organisms. The community “agrees” to work together for the greater common benefit. Indeed, when a revolt takes place it’d better be put down fast, or all chaos will ensue and the organism will die.

The miracle of the human being community owes a great deal to the moment of conception. The fertilized egg is a single entity with a single, wonderful program for the creation of many copies of itself in tight choreography. The program is passed along with almost no mistake, over and over again. Of course, many things can go wrong with this story. Revolts do take place, led by powerful cells in what is known as cancer. Organisms age, get disorganized and die. Both cancer and aging can be thought of as organizational diseases. We can expect to find them, in some form or another, in other examples of organisms.

The Earth itself has been described as a macro-organism. This is the Gaia Hypothesis. It means that our planet is a living entity capable of homeostasis—the control of parameters critical to the organism’s survival such as temperature and atmospheric composition. According to this view, the biosphere is part of Gaia’s machinery to sustain itself: ecosystems maintain homeostasis for the benefit of all. Of course, just as with the example of the human organism, we can think of two threats to Gaia. One is cancer, the other aging. What would represent cancer for Gaia? As before, the revolt of some sub-organisms foregoing the common good. And this is what humanity is doing. We are reproducing and exhausting the planet’s resources, polluting the biosphere, and killing off most of our organic companions. Mind you, we are also quite capable of killing each other for those resources, as sad recent events demonstrate. And we now have real firepower.

Will we manage to avoid killing Gaia? As Stephen Hawking recently asked, How can the human race survive the next 100 years? According to all symptoms, our climate is really changing. Due to human activity, the oceans are sick with fertilizers and oil. Can science and technology help? Part of the problem is that we, lowly sub-organisms, don’t have a direct view to the organic planetary troubles. Sensors, including remote sensing from satellites can help. Today we can measure the planet surface and atmospheric temperature with precision, as well as the rising of sea level. We can see the oceans move, currents giving rise to subtle surface undulations of tens of centimeters over long scales. Oceanic circulation is akin to the pulse of the planet, at least with regard to climate change. Thanks to Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, we can see oil tankers cleaning their tanks in the open ocean. We will soon be able to actually identify and prosecute them.

So science and technology can help us—at least in becoming aware. But it is hard to be overly optimistic. The main problem may be our operating system: our culture, our values, our nature. As Hawking concluded, our best bet may be to leave our planet at some stage. After all, the universe is rather large.