The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth

“Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.” – Jurassic Park

Ah, the future.  I, for one, welcome our new canine overlords!

I know I’ve mentioned before that when I start out some of my posts that I have a preconceived idea that just turns out to be wrong.  Well, this is one of those posts.  Honestly, I love that.  It feels almost better than vindicating my original thought – there’s a moment of clarity when I understand the universe a bit better.  And there’s no better gift than that.  Except for money.  I like money.

I read an article this week (10/16/18) about how it will require 3,000,000 to 7,000,000 years to replace biodiversity to pre-human levels.  I’ll link to just one, but this was one of those “blood in the water” stories where every fresh journalism school graduate jumped on it and there were about a 4,372 articles that all dropped about the same time with minor variations in headline.  This one (LINK) is particularly breathless and clueless – but not more than the average article on this subject.  The article indicates we’ve lost 2.5 billion years of evolution in the last 130,000 years.  Why the last 130,000 years?  They want to blame it on humanity, so when you read the article you can get your guilt going early in the morning with that first cup of coffee.  It didn’t surprise me when I found out the author works (in addition to being a freelance journalist) at a far-left environmental advocacy group.  Huh.  So, in other words, dad pays for everything?

However, almost all of this “slaughter of biodiversity” has occurred way before I was born.  And way before you were born.  But we must be made to feel guilty!  Action must be taken!  I’m fairly certain we owe reparations to the species we made extinct.  Oh . . . wait.

I believe that if you were to look a bit deeper into this story that the 2.5 billion years of evolutionary diversity “lost” was counted about 458 times.  As in – if it took 10,000 years for one bird species to develop a red feather on the top of its head, and 10,000 years for another bird species to develop a blue feather on top of its head and both species went extinct then you’d be out 20,000 years even though we still had a bird with a yellow feather on top of its head.   It actually must to be that methodology – since life on Earth 2.5 billion years ago was nothing but single celled organisms and journalism students.  And my mother.

I’m not going to lose much sleep over this.  I’m glad the sabretooth tiger is extinct.  I wish it would take all the mosquitos with it.  I’m not sad that the wolf is extinct over most of the lower 48 states – I’d prefer that rather than reintroducing the wolf, they gave little bronze plaques to the ranchers that shot them and exterminated them in the first place and then, if they have to reintroduce wolves, reintroduce them to New York City at about 1,000 per block while doing a documentary about how wonderful nature is.

Ahh, the beauty of nature.

But this article did made me ask the question – how long can Earth support life?

The Sun is growing hotter – increasing output at about 1% every 110,000,000 years, which means that it will have increased output by 10% by the time The Simpsons® is cancelled.  The reason Sun gets hotter is because of human activity that as time goes along, the Sun starts to fuse not only hydrogen, but also helium.  This helium fusion produces more output energy than the hydrogen, and also makes the Sun talk with a really funny voice.  It’s also why the Sun floats in space.  Without the helium the Sun would fall straight to the galactic floor!

According to some estimates, that probably gives us 1.75 billion years of time until the Earth is no longer habitable, and longer if we leave the window open to let the heat out.  Also?  I’d get your air conditioning looked at so you’ll know that it will run then.  Stock up on extra filters.

The other good news?  There’s no evidence that the molten part of the Earth that keeps the magnetic field going will freeze anytime in the next few billion years, so, we’ve got that going for us, too.  The magnetic field is important because it protects us from radiation streaming at the Earth, and also makes it look like we’re home so that aliens from Zontar-B don’t try to break in and steal our stuff.

So, according to the generally accepted chronology and geologic evidence:

• cells showed up four billion years ago,
• bugs 400 million years ago,
• dinosaurs 300 million years ago,
• flowers 130 million years ago, and
• my mom 50 million years ago.

Given that, we have plenty of time in 1.75 billion years for two or three more intelligent species to show up again.  And if there was a span of 100 million years or so, they’d never know that we even existed.  As I pointed out in this post (The Silurian Hypothesis, or, I’ve Got Lizards in Low Places), no part of the Earth’s surface that’s exposed is older than about 4 million years.  And there would be plenty of time for new oil for our hypothetical civilization to form, since that only takes 70 to 200 million years to cook new oil.  New people to feel guilty about using oil?  That might take longer.

And that’s what surprised me.  There is plenty of time for new civilizations created by new species to form on Earth and attempt to go to the stars.  I had (for whatever reason) thought that only humanity had that shot.  Nope.  There’s plenty of time.  I’ve even seen intrepid science fiction writers pen stories about intelligent crows in the far distant future, or calamari squid developed into sentient spaceship pilots, or even a vastly evolved set of dogs that play a lot of poker.

This picture is  . . . foreshadowing.  More on this next Friday in what may well be my most original and creative post.  I may have to take Friday off because it might take that long to get the awesome written! 

But I like people.  I am a people.  And we are the only species to have developed art, music, poetry, Twinkies® and PEZ™.   People have passed the age of no return – we have one shot at building a galactic empire.  We’ve used the easy oil, we’ve mined the easy resources.  Now?  We’re on the treadmill.  We can’t stay at this level of technological progress.  We either advance, or we regress.  It’s like the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland:

“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

Our technological progress has to increase just to support the billions living on Earth today.  To support more people?  To give more benefits and luxuries (like health care)?  We have to get smarter, faster still.

So how long do we have as a civilization?

This is why civilization is awesome.  Girls and beer.* 

*This post is really a continuation of the Silurian post, and it had Oktoberfest girls, so . . .

I remember reading a description of a mathematical technique that, given a few assumptions, would allow you to extrapolate the lifetime of, say, the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, or humanity.  It was in a novel.  I remembered reading it in the year 2000 or 2001.  I was going to spend ludicrous amounts of time searching it out, trying to remember a novel I read 18 years ago.  I think I would have gotten there . . . but the original source material dropped into my lap tonight!

It’s Nature, May 27, 1993 on page 315.  In it, a guy named J. Richard Gott III put together a theory, well, I’ll let Wikipedia explain it:

Gott first thought of his “Copernicus method” of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand. Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he didn’t think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life. Based on its age in 1969 (8 years), Gott left the wall with 75% confidence that it wouldn’t be there in 1993 (1961 + (8/0.25)).

In fact, the wall was brought down in 1989, and 1993 was the year in which Gott applied his “Copernicus method” to the lifetime of the human race. His paper in Nature was the first to apply the Copernican principle to the survival of humanity; His original prediction gave 95% confidence that the human race would last for between 5100 and 7.8 million years.

You can find his paper here (LINK) on a German website in an obviously photocopied PDF with a hair or something on the third page.  Seems legit.  But it does have calculus, so that’s a plus.

So what does this tell me?  I will sleep better tonight.  Life will find a way.  Global warming?  It won’t stop the world.  Plastic straws?  Although they are currently the greatest threat to mankind, even more than nuclear weapons or the Kardashians, plastic straws won’t end the world.

Life will find a way.  Oh, wait.

Please tell me the Kardashians aren’t considered living things.

No!  The Kardashians lay eggs!