Guest post: Wait ’til you see Nature’s idea of draconian measures

Dec 10th, 2022 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by YNnB (yes, again) on Elon Musk does not have imposter syndrome.

Then there’s working on shit to make it livable… solving that problem would also be useful making Terra more habitable even as it undergoes massive ecological shifts.

Maybe I’m just a “glass half empty” kinda guy, but I’m not so sure that it would work this way. Those “massive ecological shifts” are our fault. We already know that much of what we’re doing to the Earth shouldn’t be done, yet we do it anyway. A Mars colony will be a distant, isolated luxury bubble where everyone knows they have to be careful lest they do something stupid that kills everyone. We’re already living in a planet-sized bubble subject to the same rules, it’s just taken a few millenia for our numbers and mistakes to catch up with us. It’s taken more of them, but their effects will turn out to be equally lethal. There’s nothing a Mars colony will teach us that we don’t already know. We already know we shouldn’t dump toxic wastes into the air, water and soil we rely on to breathe, drink, and grow food. The world has become smaller, and it’s all interconnected. We’ve learned too late that “over there” is “right here,” and that you can’y throw anything “away.” We already know that the Earth’s ability to absorb these wastes is limited. We are running into the limits of the bubble in which we already live, and upon which we are utterly, inescapably dependent. If we can’t make things work here, colonies elsewhere (which will themselves remain dependent upon Earth) are pointless, as we will be taking our mistakes with us.

It took just under twenty years for the lessons of the Apollo One fire to be forgotten. The Challenger disaster did not prevent the pressures and complacency that resulted in the destruction of Columbia seventeen years after that. (And that’s just the American space experience; the Russian track record has its fair share of incompetance and heedless, expedient risk-taking.) Any Mars colony will have its own version of shoddy construction, O-rings and foam-shedding. We as a species have already blown through any number of the equivalents of faulty wiring, O-rings and tile damage. We are seeing the very real possibility of a planetary scale loss of mission, loss of vehicle, loss of crew, yet we push on with what NASA’s repeated inquiries called “go fever.”

The best thing we could be doing is reducing our ecological footprint, reducing the pressure that humans are putting on the rest of the living and non-living environment. Even without anthropogenic climate change, human overshoot is an ongoing crisis. Our sheer numbers limit our ability to do this; having eight billion humans places a certain minimum level on the level of activity which must take place to keep all of them alive and healthy, but we’re not even doing a very good job of that, thanks in part to extreme, grotesque inequalities of wealth distribution (Hello Mr. Musk. Fancy meeting you here!). Decreasing the human population is key to the drawdown of human demands upon the planet. It will happen, one way or another. If you think human dictatorships are bad, wait ’til you see Nature’s idea of draconian measures. We can try to manage our numbers ourselves, or they will be managed for us. If we do not step back, we will be stepped on.

The continued pursuit of a suicidally unsustainable way of life will result in disaster for ourselves and many other living creatures. That we allow ourselves to be led along such a path by those who can make a quick buck off of it while the ride lasts seems to be a lethal flaw in our make-up. That all of us have heard of and have been forced to pay any attention at all to the likes of Elon Musk (or Donald Trump!) and anything he thinks or does is a symptom of this. That his wealth gives him such power and influence is a sign of our weakness and immaturity as a society and a species. This mind-set cannot be fixed by throwing engineering at it. Our technological development has outstripped our ability inclination to use it wisely.

In the next few decades, we’ll likely be facing massive disruptions of weather patterns and climatic zones, with cascading follow-on effects on agriculture, and whatever surviving natural biomes that might yet be hanging on. Add rising sea levels and island/coastal inundation, and you have the foundation for the collapse and disappearance of nations (some of which are armed with nuclear weapons) and the mass movement (and death) of hundreds of millions of people. Even if we avoid actual armed conflict, the damage, destruction and displacement will make the two World Wars combined look like the proverbial Sunday school picnic. Unless its life support systems were wildly chaotic, and its inhabitants unpredictably violent, I’m not sure that there are many lessons we could learn from a Mars outpost that would be applicable to living on Earth That’s Almost Here.

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