Save The Planet

The Earth as we know it, over the entire history of our species, is but an extremely short snapshot in time. Human culture is even younger; the oldest of writing, the most ancient of oral traditions, all of what we are, it all amounts to – a blink. A marvelously stable run of years, with a stable climate and a stable supply of the necessities of life: Land, Air, Water, Energy, other life forms, it's all here, in abundance, in this system we call “The Planet”. This system, this blink in time.

What does it mean, “Save the Planet”? What is “Sustainability?” Does sustainability mean: help The Planet continue to exist in a condition similar to the condition it has been in for the last 10,000 years? Is the goal to make the blink last as long as possible? 100 years? One would hope that's doable. Preserve and conserve for 1000 years? That might even be possible. What about another 10,000 years? Things start to look less certain. Extend that to 1 billion years, and Earth becomes a dry ball orbiting a sun grown much hotter than the one it orbits today.

Save the Planet? The Earth is an evolving system that has always evolved and will continue to evolve. It has gone through at least a half dozen mass extinctions over the last half-billion years. There are more to follow. The glaciers have grown and retreated dozens of times over the last two million years. They will return. The Planet is not stable. The Planet is on a wild ride.

Does the destructive nature of the accelerating Human presence mean that Humans are currently the cause of the next, currently occurring mass extinction? Possibly. But what can can be done, really? Reduce the footprint of each individual, there are going to be many more individuals in a very short amount of time. Further, even if some miraculous way is found to end environmental destruction everywhere . . . there will still be more ice ages, and more mass extinctions to follow. This much is out of our hands, the wild ride continues. In which case, if the miracle environmental cure is found, what really have we saved? Our conscience, maybe, but we're certainly not saving the Planet - we're just passing the buck.

The hard fact is, the Planet is not sustainable. With or without Human intervention, with or without Human indifference, with or without Human intention, the Planet is not sustainable. Like Death and Taxes, there is nothing we can do about it. The blink will end.

Some thoughts on the scales of time and space

Who paid for World War II?

Plastics are entering the geological record. In a few hundred million years, some future geologists will probably be able to read the fossil remains of the odd cd or two, incorporated into the rock.

Most petroleum reserves started 300 - 400 million years ago, when our ancestors were just gaining the ability to lay their eggs on land instead of in the water. The oldest reserves, however, date back to a time when our ancestors, tiny little ocean creatures, were diverging from the ancestors of the insects.

It is probably the case that some of the petroleum and natural gas we burn today consists, in part, of the direct remains of our ancestors.

Cheap oil, and the internet: these are the decades of maximum wealth.

The earth is in between ice ages. The next one will be in a few tens of thousands of years. In the midst of the last one, we won the great Cro Magnon/Neanderthal smackdown.

The sun will steadily increase in brightness over the next few billion years. A billion years from now, the oceans will have evaporated away and the whole planet will become a desert, completely sterilized of life. Life has existed on earth for 3.5 billion years, and it has no more than 1 billion more years to go.