OPINION/BROWN: Gazing down on a world like ours

      

If it’s possible, let’s try to forget politics for a few minutes. If I can overcome the temptation, I’m not going to name a single politician. Let’s instead imagine we’re extraterrestrials conducting a zoological study.

A class of hominids has dominated this planet and, cancerlike, they’re wrecking the place. Aside from themselves, the biomass of the planet is collapsing. Millions of tons of plastic are taking its place in the carbon cycle. Every minute on Earth, 57 acres of land turns to desert.

The hominids are clever. They’ve devised power plants that burn fossilized carbon to run their machines. Consequently, their planet is heating up.

These creatures have severely compromised three-fourths of their land and at least half their oceans. Thirty-eight percent of their landmass is at risk of becoming deserts. Their storms are getting more violent as the planet warms, as are their fires and the expanding areas exposed to them. Ocean levels are rising.

They seem to enjoy procreation. In the last 120 years, they’ve increased their numbers five-fold – and they’re living twice as long. That adds up to a tenfold burden on the planet in little more than a century. Their planetary biomass is sliding into crisis. Oh, if I forgot to mention, they’re having a pandemic.

Fortunately, they are capable of intelligible speech and have created social arrangements to reason things out together. Here, they’re caught between contradictory human impulses: the desire to be left alone, the desire to help out and the lust for power over others. What will they want most?

Here’s the view from space, the nonpartisan list of options:

One: At some point, the dominant hominids will have to decide whether the rest of the biomass has any right to exist independent of their own needs. If they decide “no,” then the biomass will eventually implode – and they will perish with it. Will there be a rueful moment at the end of things when humans realize their attachment to nature? Far better for them, this insight arrives early rather than late.

Two: Another contributor to mass extinctions, and also as a problem in its own right, is the rapid warming of the planet. Spiraling carbon dioxide and, to some extent, methane gas levels in the air account for that. The energy output of their sun is slightly dimming at the moment. Even so, they’re still getting hotter. As with life on Earth, the temperature rise is subject to a feedback loop. Again, early insight would be far better than late. And what would a late insight look like? The sudden leap of flames ... a wall of fire erupting from the next ridge, or rising seas creeping up their streets.

Three: It seems for as long as aliens have watched our planet, a quarter to a half of humanity have lived as helpless servants to a few. As arable land shrinks, as water tables are depleted, as the biomass shrinks, more and more people will be competing for diminished resources.

Like weather reporters, one can look at the map and see where things are. Then we can see where the trends are headed ... and where and when they will converge. It’s all about tipping points. Our all-seeing orbital observers are the planet’s cosmic weathermen.

Either the descriptions in our alien reports are accurate depictions or they are not. True, they may not have taken into account the full range of human courage and inventiveness. In the end, though, if these broad descriptions of our planetary condition are accurate, all the courage, inventiveness and love latent in the entire human race will perish if the rest of the biomass does.

Of course, none of this has to happen. The terrifying trends can be reversed and nature is astonishingly resilient. But then there are all the human potentials for avarice, cruelty and that insatiable lust for the subservience of others ... and the pleasing incredulity in discovering how easily manipulated one’s fellow creatures can be.

It seems one of the most powerful tribes is about to make some kind of decision. Which way they go depends on whether they are beginning to realize what’s happening in the world around them or whether they don’t want to know, or can’t face it. Are they ready to begin making deep changes in how they live – or not?

In their travels, our aliens have seen garden planets and lots of desert ones. Nature has made so many worlds uninhabitable, they have a special interest in the places where life takes hold. When it does, life evolves from having a chance to having a choice. We are one of these places.

Larry Brown 

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