بخش 4

IV

The Anthropic Principle

What if we’re wrong? Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.

No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do. Climate science has arrived at this terrifying conclusion not casually, and not with glee, but by systematically ruling out every alternative explanation for observed warming—even though that observed warming is more or less precisely what would be expected given only the rudimentary understanding of the greenhouse effect advanced by John Tyndall and Eunice Foote in the 1850s, when America was reaching its first industrial peak. What we are left with is a set of predictions that can appear falsifiable—about global temperatures, sea-level rise, and even hurricane frequency and wildfire volume. But, all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?

Those are the only questions that matter. There are, it is true, feedback loops we don’t understand and dynamic warming processes scientists haven’t yet pinpointed. Yet to the extent we live today under clouds of uncertainty about climate change, those clouds are projections not of collective ignorance about the natural world but blindness about the human one, and can be dispersed by human action. This is what it means to live beyond the “end of nature”—that it is human action that will determine the climate of the future, not systems beyond our control. And it’s why, despite the unmistakable clarity of the predictive science, all of the tentative sketches of climate scenarios that appear in this book are so oppressively caveated with possiblys and perhapses and conceivablys. The emergent portrait of suffering is, I hope, horrifying. It is also, entirely, elective. If we allow global warming to proceed, and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it will be because we have chosen that punishment—collectively walking down a path of suicide. If we avert it, it will be because we have chosen to walk a different path, and endure.

These are the disconcerting, contradictory lessons of global warming, which counsels both human humility and human grandiosity, each drawn from the same perception of peril. The climate system that gave rise to the human species, and to everything we know of as civilization, is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity. But that instability is also a measure of the human power that engineered it, almost by accident, and which now must stop the damage, in only as much time. If humans are responsible for the problem, they must be capable of undoing it. We have an idiomatic name for those who hold the fate of the world in their hands, as we do: gods. But for the moment, at least, most of us seem more inclined to run from that responsibility than embrace it—or even admit we see it, though it sits in front of us as plainly as a steering wheel.

Instead, we assign the task to future generations, to dreams of magical technologies, to remote politicians doing a kind of battle with profiteering delay. This is why this book is also studded so oppressively with “we,” however imperious it may seem. The fact that climate change is all-enveloping means it targets all of us, and that we must all share in the responsibility so we do not all share in the suffering—at least not all share in so suffocatingly much of it.

We do not know the precise shape such suffering would take, cannot predict with certainty exactly how many acres of forest will burn each year of the next century, releasing into the air centuries of stored carbon; or how many hurricanes will flatten each Caribbean island; or where megadroughts are likely to produce mass famines first; or which will be the first great pandemic to be produced by global warming. But we know enough to see, even now, that the new world we are stepping into will be so alien from our own, it might as well be another planet entirely.

—

In 1950, walking to lunch at Los Alamos, the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, one of the architects of the atom bomb, found himself caught up in a conversation about UFOs with Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York—so caught up that he drifted off in thought, jumping back in long after everyone else had moved on to ask, “Where is everybody?” The story has now passed into scientific legend, the interjection known as Fermi’s paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it?

The answer may be as simple as climate. Nowhere else in the known universe is a single planet as suited as this one to produce life of the kind we know, as Fermi’s only children. Global warming makes the proposition seem even more precarious. For the entire historical window in which human life evolved, almost all of the planet has been, climatologically speaking, quite comfortable for us; that is how we managed to get here. But it wasn’t always the case even on Earth, where it is no longer comfortable, and only getting less so. No human has ever lived on a planet as hot as this one; it will get hotter. In talking about that near future, several climate scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as a Fermi solution. The natural lifespan of a civilization may only be several thousand years long, and the lifespan of an industrial civilization conceivably only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and then burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another.

The Fermi paradox has also been called “the Great Silence”—we bellow out into the universe and hear no echo, and no reply. The iconoclastic economist Robin Hanson calls it “the great filter.” Being filtered, the theory goes, are whole civilizations, enclosed by global warming like bugs in a net. “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” as the charismatic paleontologist Peter Ward—among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas—told me. “The filtering we’ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.

The search for alien life has always been powered by the desire for human importance in a vast, forgetful cosmos: we want to be seen so that we know we exist. What’s unusual is that, unlike religion or nationalism or conspiracy theory, the alien fantasy doesn’t place humans at the center of a grand story. In fact, it displaces us—in that way it is a sort of Copernican dream. When Copernicus announces the earth revolves around the sun, he briefly feels himself in the spotlight of the universe, but by making the discovery he consigns all of humanity to the relative periphery. This is what my father-in-law, describing what happens to men with the birth of children and then grandchildren, calls “the outer ring theory,” and it more or less encapsulates the meaning of any imagined alien encounter: suddenly humans are major players in a drama of almost inconceivable scale, the lasting lesson of which, unfortunately, is that we’re total nobodies—or, at best, a lot less unique and important than we thought we were. When the astronauts aboard Apollo 8 first caught a glimpse of Earth from the tin can carrying them through space—first saw the half-shadowed planet past the surface of the moon—they looked at one another and jokingly asked, about the world that had launched them into orbit, “Is it inhabited?” In recent years, their telescopes gazing farther, astronomers have discovered legions of planets like our own, many more than were expected a generation ago. This has led to a flurry of activity revising the terms of expectation established by Frank Drake in what is now known as the Drake equation—which builds a prediction about the possibility of extraterrestrial life off assumptions about things like the fraction of planets conceivably able to support life that actually do support life, the fraction of those planets that develop intelligent life, and the fraction of those planets that would emit detectable signs of that intelligence into space.

And there have been many theories, beyond the Great Filter, about why we haven’t heard from anybody. There is the “zoo hypothesis,” which suggests that aliens are just watching over us and letting us be for now, presumably until we reach their level of sophistication; and something like its inverse—that we haven’t heard from aliens because they’re the ones sleeping, in a civilization-scale system of extended-sleep pods like the ones we know from science fiction spaceships, waiting while the universe evolves a shape more suitable to their needs. As far back as 1960, the polymath physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that we may be unable to find alien life in our telescopes because advanced civilizations may have literally closed themselves off from the rest of space—encasing whole solar systems in megastructures designed to capture the energy of a central star, a system so efficient that from elsewhere in the universe it would not appear to glow. Climate change suggests another kind of sphere, manufactured not out of technological mastery but first through ignorance, then indolence, then indifference—a civilization enclosing itself in a gaseous suicide, a running car in a sealed garage.

The astrophysicist Adam Frank calls this kind of thinking “the astrobiology of the Anthropocene” in his Light of the Stars, which considers climate change, the future of the planet, and our stewardship of it from the perspective of the universe—“thinking like a planet,” he calls it. “We are not alone. We are not the first,” Frank writes in the book’s opening pages. “This—meaning everything you see around you in our project of civilization—has quite likely happened thousands, millions, or even trillions of times before.” What sounds like a parable from Nietzsche is really just an explication of the meaning of “infinity,” and how small and insignificant the concept makes humans and everything we do in the space of such a universe. In an unconventional recent paper with climatologist Gavin Schmidt, Frank went even further, suggesting that there may even have been advanced industrial civilizations of some form in the deep history of this planet, so deep in the past their remnants would have long been reduced to dust below our feet, making them permanently invisible to us. The paper was meant as a thought experiment, pointing out how little we can really know from archaeology and geology, not a serious claim about the history of the planet.

It was also meant to be uplifting. Frank wanted to offer what he believes is the empowering perspective that our “project of civilization” is profoundly fragile, and that we must take extraordinary measures to protect it. Both are true, but nevertheless it can be a bit hard to see things his way. If there have really been trillions of other civilizations like this one, somewhere out there in the universe and including possibly a few scattered in the dust of the earth, then—whatever lessons of stewardship we can draw from them—it does not bode well for ours that we don’t yet see the trace of a single one that’s survived.

That is a lot of despair to hang on “trillions”—in fact a lot to hang on some very speculative math. Which goes even more so for the work of anyone trying to “solve” the Drake equation, as many have. That project, which looks to me less like sorting out the nature of the universe on a chalkboard than like playing games with numbers, working from close-to-arbitrary postulates so confidently that when you see the universe departing from your predictions you choose to believe it is hiding from you some very important information—namely, about all the civilizations that may have died and disappeared—rather than that your suppositions may have been made in error. The fact of dramatic near-term climate change should inspire both humility and grandiosity, but this Drakean approach seems to me somehow to get the lesson both right and backward: supposing that the terms of your thought experiment should govern the meaning of the universe, yet unable to imagine that humans might make for themselves an exceptional fate within it.

Fatalism has a strong pull in a time of ecological crisis, but even so it is a curious quirk of the Anthropocene that the transformation of the planet by anthropogenic climate change has produced such fervor for Fermi’s paradox and so little for its philosophical counterpoint, the anthropic principle. That principle takes the human anomaly not as a puzzle to explain away but as the centerpiece of a grandly narcissistic view of the cosmos. It’s the closest thing string-theory physics can bring us to empowering self-centeredness: that however unlikely it may seem that intelligent civilization arose in an infinity of lifeless gas, and however lonely we appear to be in the universe, in fact something like the world we live on and the one we’ve built are a sort of logical inevitability, given that we are asking these questions at all—because only a universe compatible with our sort of conscious life would produce anything capable of contemplating it like this.

This is a Möbius strip of a parable, a sort of gimmicky tautology rather than a truth claim based strictly in observed data. And yet, I think, it is much more helpful than Fermi or Drake in thinking about climate change and the existential challenge of solving it in just the few decades ahead. There is one civilization we know of, and it is still around, and kicking—for now, at least. Why should we be suspicious of our exceptionality, or choose to understand it only by assuming an imminent demise? Why not choose to feel empowered by it?

—

A sense of cosmic specialness is no guarantee of good stewardship. But it does helpfully focus attention on what we are doing to this special planet. You don’t need to invoke some imagined law of the universe—that all civilizations are kamikaze ones—to explain the wreckage. You need look only at the choices we have made, collectively; and, collectively, we are at present choosing to wreck it.

Will we stop? “Thinking like a planet” is so alien to the perspectives of modern life—so far from thinking like a neoliberal subject in a ruthless competitive system—that the phrase sounds at first lifted from kindergarten. But reasoning from first principles is reasonable when it comes to climate; in fact, it is necessary, as we only have a first shot to engineer a solution. This goes beyond thinking like a planet, because the planet will survive, however terribly we poison it; it is thinking like a people, one people, whose fate is shared by all.

The path we are on as a planet should terrify anyone living on it, but, thinking like one people, all the relevant inputs are within our control, and there is no mysticism required to interpret or command the fate of the earth. Only an acceptance of responsibility. When Robert Oppenheimer, the actual head of Los Alamos, later reflected on the meaning of the bomb, he famously said he was reminded, in the flash of the first successful nuclear test, of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But the interview was years later, when Oppenheimer had become the pacifist conscience of America’s nuclear age—for which, naturally, he had his security clearance revoked. According to his brother, Frank, who was also there when Oppenheimer watched the detonation of the device nicknamed “the gadget,” he said only, “It worked.” —

The threat from climate change is more total than from the bomb. It is also more pervasive. In a 2018 paper, forty-two scientists from around the world warned that, in a business-as-usual scenario, no ecosystem on Earth was safe, with transformation “ubiquitous and dramatic,” exceeding in just one or two centuries the amount of change that unfolded in the most dramatic periods of transformation in the earth’s history over tens of thousands of years. Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost that may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for what warming will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by 50 percent. If this strikes you as tragic, which it should, consider that we have all the tools we need, today, to stop it all: a carbon tax and the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy; a new approach to agricultural practices and a shift away from beef and dairy in the global diet; and public investment in green energy and carbon capture.

That the solutions are obvious, and available, does not mean the problem is anything but overwhelming. It is not a subject that can sustain only one narrative, one perspective, one metaphor, one mood. This will become only more so in the coming decades, as the signature of global warming appears on more and more disasters, political horrors, and humanitarian crises. There will be those, as there are now, who rage against fossil capitalists and their political enablers; and others, as there are now, who lament human shortsightedness and decry the consumer excesses of contemporary life. There will be those, as there are now, who fight as unrelenting activists, with approaches as diverse as federal lawsuits and aggressive legislation and small-scale protests of new pipelines; nonviolent resistance; and civil-rights crusades. And there will be those, as there are now, who see the cascading suffering and fall back into an inconsolable despair. There will be those, as there are now, who insist that there is only one way to respond to the unfolding ecological catastrophe—one productive way, one responsible way.

Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines. The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. At least I hope it does. But that is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.