…or how “homo martis” may evolve to care for Earth in a way “homo sapiens” never have
Recently
a friend chided me for being an Elon Musk fanboy. “I’m so tired of all
these Muskophiles,” she said when I brushed off the dig. “What is it
you’re all so excited about anyway?”
“Tesla for starters,” I responded. “There’s a company whose explicit reason for existence is to disrupt our fossil fuel addiction. While most everyone else is whining about global warming, Elon has found a way within capitalism to combat it.”
“But what really gets me amped,” I added, “is Mars.”
“Pffft,” she sounded with a roll of the eyes. “Mars? I am so tired of hearing about Mars! What an escapist’s dream — blasting off to some other planet when it’s this one that’s in trouble!”
The 6th Mass-Extinction
She had a point. The Earth is dying. It’s shedding life at a remarkable rate. Ocean acidification is occurring at breakneck speed with devastating consequences to marine life, in seas already on the brink of being fished to death. Studies in Germany have shown that the insect population (Earth’s thankless workforce of plant pollination) has plummeted a staggering 75%
since measurement started 30 years ago. And of course we all know the
rest – the earth is rapidly heating up, the ice caps are melting — our
global ecosystem is deeply out of whack.
Worse still, this isn’t just some freak moment in history, but the latest in a long saga of humans decimating nature. You can literally chart a course of extinction around the globe by tracking the migration of early humans. Wherever we show up, megafauna (like wooly mammoths and sabretooth tigers) disappear.
Where humans go, the death of life follows. We’re not just a keystone species, we are hands-down the single most destructive force to impact this planet since a large asteroid took out the dinosaurs (and 75% of life on Earth) 65 million years ago. Put succinctly, humans are the 6th mass extinction.
Yeesh. The idea that our planet is dying? Terrifying. The idea that we’re the reason why? Horrific. What the hell does one do with that? Surprise, we’re the bad guys? That’s not the kind of story most people are eager to believe.
And for those of us who do believe it? For those of us who can accept the idea that the earth is dying and we humans are responsible? What next?
Well, depression, for starters. If you haven’t already felt that sickening “oh god”
feeling in the pit of your stomach, chances are you’ll find little of
value in the rest of this post. Nothing I’m about to say will sound the
least bit reassuring unless you’re already painfully aware of the depth
of shit we’re in.
If
there is hope here, it’s in the idea that we might find some way to
change this pattern. To stop destroying the planet that gives us life
and start stewarding it instead. But how would such a change occur? How
would 8 billion humans transform from self-interested actors who are
unintentionally devouring the planet into considerate, capable
caretakers of a global ecosystem? That’s not the kind of change that’s
going to just happen on its own.
Original Sin
If
there’s a way forward, it must begin with understanding the present.
What is it about humans that results in our current situation? We don’t want to destroy the planet, so why does it happen?
Many have argued that the fundamental problem is technology, man’s
attempts to better himself through the creation of ever-more-powerful
tools that (unfortunately) have ever-more-complicated side effects. Some
point to industrialization as the moment our relationship with the Earth began to turn. Others say agriculture
is to blame: that when we went from being hunter-gatherers to food
cultivators, the resultant cultural revolution took us out of a ‘garden
of Eden’ and into (broken) civilization. In each case the basic idea is
the same: humans inadvertently harm both their world and themselves when they attempt to reshape nature for their own purposes.
This
narrative is — quite literally — as old as they come. In ancient
Hebrew, the forbidden tree that ends Man’s tenure in Paradise is called עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע, or the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Humans, the Bible opens by telling us, once faced a fundamental choice: dare to divide the world into good (literally “that which is valuable to us”) and evil (that which is not), or accept life as it was. And humans, the story goes, chose poorly.
But
this most ancient of moral dilemmas presents us with an impossible
situation, for there is no world where humans exist in harmless
camaraderie with nature. If this is indeed the fundamental problem, then
there is nothing for us to do but give up, for there is no version of
reality where man can not eat
from such tree and still survive. Our very existence derives explicitly
from our unique ability to coordinate our creative capacities to reshape
nature – it’s only by separating good from evil that humans are here at all.
The “wise” animals
Homo sapiens, literally
“wise men”, share roughly 98% of DNA with chimpanzees (for comparison
sake, we share 99% with one another and 50% with a banana). Once, a long
time ago, we were little more than monkeys ourselves, forced onto the savannah when climate change destroyed the forests we’d long called home.
Evolution is born out of necessity: those primates who left the forests for the savannah and didn’t
repurpose nature to suit their needs didn’t survive. Our ingenuity is
an essential part of our existence — the predators in our early days
demanded it.
If this creative reshaping of nature is fundamental to homo sapiens,
then we can’t pick some moment in our past and say “there’s where we
made a wrong turn”. Not when we learned to shape sticks into spears, or
to speak to one another using symbolic language. Not with our
domestication of fire, or animals, or plants. Not with the agricultural
cultures that rose up in the Fertile Crescent, nor the invention of
industrialization, nor the Information Age. These are all incremental
consquences of our fundamental nature — without them there simply would
be no humans at all.
If
there’s never been a version of “human” that didn’t possess this
fundamental ability to transform nature, can we look to any other
aspects of ourselves as the source of our planetary woes? I’ve come to
believe the fundamental issue — man’s original sin — runs
even deeper: it’s our past as chimps, grazers of bountiful forests,
that leads to the current mass-extinction. What brings us now to the
brink of our own destruction is the simple fact that we’re born from a
world of plenty.
Homo sapiens is the result of an evolutionary system that rewarded collective innovation. By this ability, this virtue
in the literal sense, we have taken over the world, outsmarting the
fiercest of predators and overcoming most obstacles of nature. But for
most of our history, that evolutionary system hasn’t demanded we learn
how to thrive without abundance. Our environment has not required us to
think ecologically or develop the capacity to keep an ecosystem in
balance. Those just aren’t skills most humans have had to develop in order to survive.
And that’s where Mars comes in.
Elon
Musk says he wants to go to Mars because of all the ways that humanity
on Earth can be destroyed. Whether by global thermonuclear war,
planetary climate change, or some rogue asteroid, there are just too
many scenarios where we all end up dead. Mars, he argues, presents an opportunity to safeguard the humans species by backing up our DNA on a second planetary hard drive.
While
this argument seems reasonable, it’s not what gets me so excited. If
our primary purpose for going to Mars is to preserve the human species, I
think I’d have to agree with my friend that our efforts would be better
directed towards fighting the most likely existential threats back at
home. Why pour so much energy into fuel-guzzling rockets when our real
issues are rockets and fuel-guzzling in the first place?
To me, what makes colonizing Mars appealing is not the chance to back up human beings, but the opportunity to give birth to an entirely new species, much like what our move from the forests to the savannah kickstarted nearly 2 million years ago.
Homo martis
Darwin’s
theory of natural selection is perhaps best represented by his
finches — those sweet little birds from the Galapagos that he
popularized through his writing. Presumably all descendants of a common
ancestor, as each evolved from generation to generation in their
individual micro-ecologies, the finchs became distinct. Small, environmentally-serving variances compounded over time to produce something new and different on each island.
The
diversity of human forms tells a similar story. Presumably we all come
from a common set of ancestors, but over time races developed various
physical differences in response to different environmental demands
around the world. Like Darwin’s finches, our environment shapes who we
become.
Homo sapiens is
the evolutionary product of a fertile gem of a planet. Biologically
speaking, our relationship to Earth is that of an entitled child to an
exceedingly gracious parent. But on Mars, an entitled child can’t
survive. For humans to exist on Mars, they’ll have to carve gardens out
of stone. Everything, from the air they breathe, to the food they
consume, will have to be cultivated, grown, shaped, made. For where
Earth is Eden, Mars is a wasteland.
Musk
talks about backing up humans, but I suspect he recognizes that once
enough time has passed the two planetary species won’t be copies of one
another. As with the finches, given enough time we can expect a pretty
different kind of human to evolve on the Red Planet compared to those on
Earth. The distance between the two ‘islands’ is vast, and the
environments could not be more dissimilar. If Martians survived and
managed to terraform their red planet into blue and green, how would they change along the way? What kind of creature — and culture — would emerge from such a place?
Bringing it home
Just as finches and humans evolve, so too does human culture.
And
new lands mean the opportunity for new cultures — the chance to try out
new ideas and new ways of working together. It’s no coincidence that
liberal democracy was first proven in the Americas, for instance: here
was a land without a powerful ruling class to stand in the way of
experimentation.
But
new ideas don’t just grow where they’re planted. After liberal
democracy was demonstrated in North America, the resultant culture
spread like a disease. It wiped out monarchies and dictatorships across
the globe, invading host countries and transforming them from the inside
out. Of course, the transformation has been far from consistent — each
land re-shapes Western culture in a way that’s more suited to its own
environment — but overall the impact has been tremendous:
Of
course, this says nothing of the barbarian ways in which the world has
been colonized – much of Western civilization has spread not by choice
but by force – nor that the dominant cutlure is a very good one (we can
see from current events that it obviously isn’t) but that the culture
born in North America eventually infected the rest of the world.
Ideas
spread. Technologies spread. Ways of organizing ourselves and our labor
spread. And the most efficient and effective ones tend to win out (you
know the old saying: democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the other ones).
If
you’ve made it this far, it goes without saying that you’re among the
people who dont want to see us turn our planet into any more of a
wasteland than we already have. But what if the trend of destruction continues? What if homo sapiens continue to consume and destroy the Earth until there is almost nothing left?
Even then, it’s doubtful we’d be able to produce anywhere near the level of desolation that homo martis
would be born into. What kind of impact might that kind of
stewardship-oriented species have on the Earth? How will the lessons we
learn on Mars, and the way that planet further shapes this
once-forest-dwelling ape, change how we care for life over here?
Of
course, we might not make it. Mars is — in every imaginable sense — an
incredible longshot. And at the rate we’re destroying Earth our own
civilization might collapse before we manage to even get started. But
it’s also a place where humans might internalize what the majority of us
have never learned here: how to care for the world we’re a part of. And
it seems pretty clear we’re going to have to master that one way or
another if mankind is going to survive at all.
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