When Worlds Collide

Today, astronomers announced the discovery of 32 more extrasolar planets, bringing the known count to over 400. The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher program is just looking in our own galaxy. Anyone who's heard Carl Sagan knows there are hundreds of billions of suns in our own milky way, and hundreds of billions of other entire galaxies far far away. Surely, there is intelligent life out there. The alternative, that humans are it, seems unthinkable.

There are known examples of colliding galaxies. Imagine an intelligent, technologically advanced species within such a doomed space. Leaving the collision and seeking another galaxy is prohibited by the speed of light. What would be the intelligent response? Meditate on the principle of impermanence on a cosmic scale?

Bringing it back down to earth, many humans refuse to believe in evolution, so it is not surprising many also reject the scientific evidence that we may be doomed. Unlike the case of the colliding galaxies, our doom is tiny; one supposedly intelligent species on one little planet around one medium sun. Maybe not even the species; just civilization as we know it.

People argue that cycles are natural. The earth warms up, the earth cools down. Species come, species go, but life will find a way. Why should we try to meddle in forces that are beyond us?

Because we can. Because we already are, only in the wrong direction. We have met the enemy and it is us. It didn't have to be this way, and maybe, with proper actions, it doesn't have to continue.

Consider this. Carbon dioxide is to the earth's climate as a master hormone is to our body. A team at the University of Cambridge developed a new technique to assess carbon dioxide levels in the much more distant past. The discovery of 4.4 million year old Ardi supports the timeline that merges our species with an early branch of chimpanzee around 6 million years ago. Tie it all together: until now, our species has never experienced life on earth with anything near the current level of CO2. You'd have to go back at least 15 million years to see 387 parts per million, our current level, a level that has just happened since the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the level was 280 parts per million.

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

The earth will do fine. Life will find a way. Our species might even emerge from calamity, and evolve further. But haven't we evolved enough to be able to see the near future? It is a rise in CO2 and the growing effect this will have. We're probably responsible. Even if we are blameless, we know how to change it. We know how to plan and design and prepare. This is not some case of colliding galaxies. We don't have to just sit back and await the rapture. Our species may be impermanent, but let's not go extinct just when we are finally starting to understand reality. Consciousness is still a big mystery, but it is clearly a tragedy to lose it forever.

“When faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.“ - Heinlein

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