Program 4: Earth living on borrowed time

This program is about the inevitability of the demise of the Earth as a whole and all that sail upon unless they become space faring species before that fate befalls the Earth.

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Transcript

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The first programs in this series concern the shortness of human life. The second program concerned reflections on the grave. The third program was about the ruthlessness of Darwinian evolution as a springboard for violence in the human species. And this program is about the earth and all that sail upon it living on borrowed time. The inconvenient truth for humans and all other species that inhabit the earth is that we're all living on borrowed time. Our survival depends on the continuing existence of the earth itself and an environment that can sustain our fragile life forms. The present environment of the earth is in a Goldilocks period that can sustain the present forms of life that have arisen and evolved in this Goldilocks period. But the Earth's environment periodically undergoes major changes, sometimes to conditions in which the present inhabitants would not survive. Known changes have been caused by tectonic, volcanic, and solar activities that radically change the ambient temperature and chemical constituents of the atmosphere of the Earth, and by external cosmic factors such as nearby supernovas, comets, asteroid impacts, and massive solar flares. The environment of the Earth could also be destroyed by human activities, including nuclear war, widespread climate change, drought fires, and pandemics. The Earth has already undergone five total or partial extinction events in its history that have each reset Earth's evolutionary cloth to varying degrees. Independent of potential extinction events, the fate of the Earth and all its inhabitants is already sealed by the life cycle of the Sun, which is certain to expand into a red giant whose boundaries will subsume the Earth. Long before this, the Earth's atmosphere will have been lost to space, and shortly after that the Earth itself will be destroyed by the gravitational tidal forces of the expanding Sun. But present humans and their descendants will not live to see these events because our lifespan is less than a flicker in the cosmic time scale. If humanity remains bound to the Earth and fails to evolve into a spacefaring species, the ultimate fate of the human species is the same as that of the Earth itself. The inevitability of this extinction of human existence is the subject matter of the much cited lament by Nobel laureate, mathematician, and philosopher Bertrand Russell 1872 to 1970. It reads That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origins, his growth, his hope and fears, his loves and his belief are but the outcome of the accidental collocation of atoms. No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can preserve a life beyond the grave. That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast depth of the solar system. And the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beyond beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation be safely built. The American poet Roy Merritt, 1946 to 2020, in his poem Predation in Woeful Times, wrote about the tumult and the chaos which is likely to characterize the approaching end times for humans. It has a repeating chorus which is located at the end of each stanza and refers to predation in woeful times. I don't think this really adds much to the poem and accordingly I will not repeat the chorus. It reads Life is getting ghastly now, for few it seems sublime. Everyone engrossed with thoughts of predation in woeful times. In times like this, trust for neighbours is a luxury you can't define, you can't depend on anyone. Who knows if someday soon, someday just down the line, we're all at each other's throats we will turn to cannibalism, the ugliest of human crimes, soon enough enslave each other? Might we lose our beating heart like some wretched thing in slime? Will we turn into grotesque peace? Will we revert to when this earth first fostered our tenuous kind? Will we divorce from Darwinism? Will we blow up this planet? Are we thus far inclined? Perhaps we deserve all this predation in woeful times. Might it be we deserve all this? The American poet Robert Frost, eighteen seventy four to nineteen sixty three, whose biography we traversed in an earlier program, wrote the satirical poem Fire and Ice, which reads as follows Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire. But if I have to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. The American poet and science fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith, 1893 to 1961, wrote the poem Death of a Universe, which reads as follows A future so stark when the universe fades, leaving behind no mark, and lost existential decades. No more planets with moons or a centre sun, no more life or climate. Everything is gone and done. We lost the cosmic beat, no more family, not even a single friend, and with that the last star lost its heat. This is the sad eternal end. Not all poets saw the end of the world coming in tumult and chaos. To the contrary, is the Polish poet Cislor Milos, 1911 to 2004, who in 1944 wrote a poem entitled A Song on the End of the World, in which he described the end coming suddenly and unexpectedly and without chaos and tumult. The poem was written in the Warsaw ghettos during its occupation in World War II, which probably seemed like the end of the world to those interned. The poem speaks of how everyday life is going on, and the people do not recognise that the end of the world is approaching. On the day the world ends, a bee circles a clover, a fishman mends a glimmering net, happy porpoises jump in the sea. By the rain sprout young sparrows are playing, and the snake is gold skinned as it should always be. On the day the world ends, women walk through the fields under their umbrellas, a drunkard grow sleepy at the edge of a lawn, vegetable peddlers shout in the street, and a yellow sailboat comes nearer the island. The voice of a violin lasts in the air and leads into a starry night. And those who expected lightning and thunder are disappointed, and those who expected signs and archangel trumpets do not believe it is happening now. As long as the sun and the moon are above, as long as the bumblebee visits the rose, as long as the rosy infants are born, no one believes it is happening now. Only a white haired old man who would be a prophet, yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy, repeats while he binds his tomatoes, there will be no other end of the world. There will be no other end of the world. I've made my own attempt at expressing the existential anxiety concerning the end of the world, and in the same poem I have addressed my own anxieties about the violence of man that was addressed in the previous program. The poem is called An Encounter with Posterity. In this poem, posterity is an anthropomorphized figure that is, takes a essentially human form to represent the history of the species as a whole. The poem reads One morning at dawn I was walking amongst the charred remains of the earth. By chance I came across a creature that had the form of a man. The creature was sitting and moaning no, no, no. I asked the creature, Who are you? What makes you moan so? The creature told me I am posterity, the future of humanity, and I am here to deliver a final verdict on man. I moan for what man has done and for what I have become, for past mistakes and chances wasted. Posterity rose to its feet, showing a body covered in scars upon older scars from wounds from its past. We walked and talked. The creature told me of humanity's history until it had nothing else it wanted to say. I asked posterity, what are the mistakes and moisted chances that you regret? The creature replied a history of unremitting violence during the whole of humanity's short stay on the planet. I asked what form this violence took. It replied The violence of men involved physical, psychological, and economic brutality. The creature continued, the brutality was sometimes unconscious or instinctive, sometimes deliberate, and nearly always thoughtless. It was directed at other humans, other species, the earth, and against reason itself. Posterity lamented the brutality of men knew neither principle nor limits. Mankind became the corrupter and defiler of all good things and all things noble on the earth. I asked posterity, where did this violence come from? The creature replied, Blame Darwin or God, and the violence that comes from the evolutionary struggle for survival. Blame the selfishness and greed forced on us by this process. Blame everyone and everything except ourselves. I asked posterity whether humans could have mastered these violent impulses. But the creature replied that this was always improbable, at least beyond exceptional individuals. Posterity told me that our violent and selfish impulses were programmed into our subconscious over which we had little or no control or even awareness. It observed that humans mostly did not know why they were angry and violent, and why the mantra to fight, fight, fight, and kill, kill, kill struck such a chord with so many men, or why men were prepared to cheat, steal and lie for things they wanted but did not need. The creature described how from the first primitive societies and thereafter violence became institutionalized in the adulation of the warrior class and its various proxies. They were sometimes masked as sports and entertainment. We walked on, and posterity described how humans formed tribes around all manner of common interests. Some tribes were formed around combinations of ethnicity, religion, nationality, culture, and wealth, or just about anything else that could divide people and subvert their unity. The creature described how these tribes were a vehicle for violence and how the tribes were in a ceaseless struggle for superiority. Bigger and stronger tribes devoured the smaller and the weaker. Posterity lamented the gullibility of men and how the minds of most were so easily manipulated to violence. Their puppet masters need only pull their puppet strings that activated their selfishness and greed, their psychological vulnerability or the naivety of their untrained and unthinking minds. The creature told me of the many failed efforts by people of good intent to constrain these violent activities. But these efforts mostly founded on the apathy of the masses whose attention was mostly confined to the demands of the mundanity of their daily life. Posterity told me how these puppet masters were men afflicted with an excess of narcissism that drove their desire to manipulate and subjugate. The creature noted that narcissists were powerless when acting alone, but they were always supported by a small class of sycophants who saw the self-interests promoted by these alliances. The sycophants, selfish, sick, and stupid, became the militia for their tribes and the narcissists who could control their misguided loyalties. These militia had no need of a moral compass. For them it was needless baggage. They had no qualms with collective punishment, concern for the innocent, even infants and children, nor respect for the law or for life itself. Posterity told me how the prosperity of the planet was not shared amongst its people, and even food and water became weapons of war. The more the poverty and disease spread over the earth, the more militia were available and the more wars that raged. When the dystopian enterprise of the puppet masters miscarried, then their militia pleaded ignorance of their true intent and that they were just obeying orders. Posterity noted that the cruelty and brutality of men bred a desire for revenge, which bred further revenge in a cycle that repeated for generations on end. The creature observed that knowledge of the progenitor act of violence was often lost in the midst of time, but its facts were irrelevant to the later men. Reason told these men that two wrongs do make a right, and therein resided the only justification required for revenge. Posterity pointed to the cemeteries and mass graves as witnesses to the ruthless efficiency of this cyclical violence. The creature told me of one small headstone of a nine-year-old girl in the former land of Gaza that read I went out to fetch water for the family, and I came back in pieces in a coffin, and now I lay in my early grave. The creature wept and through its tears uttered, What possible reason was there for this? And what selfish sick and stupid human minds contrived and executed this end? The creature described how it needed little further tension or mishap for weapons of war to rain down on the whole of the earth from the sky, land and sea. These happenings sent the puppet masters and their sycophants scurrying for refuge in their bunkers and caves that within a short time would become their unmarked graves. Posterity lamented how many times humanity had waged destructive wars and ended with the collective declaration Never Again and No More War. But on each occasion, with only a couple of generations, the memory of these declarations was no longer retained. The creature lamented how short was the time that the dam of testosterone could resist the continuous mounting pressure until it ruptured. After which the whole banal, violent processes played itself out again and again, leading to yet further declarations. Posterity accused humanity of wasting large amounts of its time, energy, and ingenuity on weapons needed for the pointless and genocidal wars. It described how in the minds of these right-thinking men, the pursuit of knowledge of the universe was just an unwarranted diversion of resources that were properly directed to the preparation for the next war. This distortion of priorities was so extreme that humans never managed to develop any habitat beyond the planet. The sane, sensible, and the scientists who protested about these perverted priorities were dismissed as being weak and traitors to the various tribal values. The time inevitably came when the earth was exhausted from human activities. The spectre of the end for man became evident for all to see. The birds no longer sang, the fish no longer swam, the water was foul, the air stumped, and the soils were depleted. Posterity told me how the people in their panic vilified and sought retribution against those who had voiced opposition to the perverted priorities. The selfish sick, stupid, and the apathetic all denied their part in responsibility for the pending fate. Eventually the remaining and non-replenishable resources of the earth were exhausted, including those stored in the bunkers and caves. The narcissists, the sycophants, the rest of humanity and the earth itself were all but dead, and there was nothing left over which to fight. In those days it was every man for themself and where might was right. I pleaded with posterity whether humanity might have another chance, but the creature scoffed. The creature said humanity had had many chances, but had failed to rise above its primitive brutishness. Humanity has failed to use the intelligence it has been given, and has failed to accept the challenge to aspire to a nobility of character. The violence, misplaced confidence, arrogance, and hubris of man had brought man to this ignoble fate. Posterity told me that the planet would first spend time to heal itself and would then permit a different species, the same chance and the same challenge that humanity had passed up. The creature finally announced to me in a tone of resignation. Our meeting today is not by chance. You are the last of the species until tomorrow, when you too will be no more. It falls upon you to possess and bear this final futile awareness with all of its pesos and guilt, and take this awareness with you to an eternal end. I felt angry and dirty about this history, the ignobility of our species and our ultimate fate, but understood its inevitability.