Extinction is the mirror religion never dared hold up. Every creed promises escape, permanence, heaven as storage locker. But the earth has always practiced impermanence. Species come. Species vanish. Forests collapse into coal. Oceans cough up new gods.
You’re right. It isn’t really about us. We were never the story, just a loud footnote. When we’re gone, moss will write new psalms on the ruins. Rivers will etch fresh commandments into the rock. Life will keep humming, even if not in our key.
Blessed be the ones who loosen their grip on human exceptionalism and find peace in being compost on a planet that outlives us all.
I think the planet would be much better off without the human race. As you say, Virgin Monk Boy, we think we are so superior but other species that we share our planet with treat it so much better. We lost so much when Western Empires invaded lands and pushed out indigenous peoples - the Native Australians, in particular, as well as Native Americans, lived far more in tune with the Earth. How much we could have learned from them.
I've always found great peace in thinking about life on a geologic scale, so this makes perfect sense to me! If you are motivated to write more on this topic, I would love to read your thoughts on the kinds of choices we can make now to impact life in the far future (other than the obvious one of limiting warming). <3 <3 <3
It's definitely a new direction. What are the consequences and choices/future beyond humanity at this point? Where do we fit in the broader history of the planet? Can, in fact, earth recover from this? All good questions.
Oh baby! I was so...(what word works here?) thrilled, grateful, gratified, etc. to read your post. I think about this all the time. Literally. Maybe cuz my dad was a physicist at UC Berkeley (he ran the Spaces Sciences Lab for a lot of years) so I grew up with a my eyes on the night skies and my mind pondering infinity.
We are such a teeny blip of an experiment in a vast mystery...and yet we could be (have been?) so awesome.
It may be fine to be thinking of what life on planet earth might be like in a few hundred thousand years but it doesn't even look like the human race or few other mammals will survive past 2100, if things keep going the way they are.
Maybe someone like the Vulcans will come along and offer the humans some faster than light propulsion and a few other little things to improve life. If not, we better prepare for a very hot planet within the next seventy five years.
I'd argue that technological "intelligence" and unchecked "economic growth" are never sustainable possibilities. So I doubt there are are any interstellar civilizations out there, Vulcan or otherwise. They are all mere blips in the geological records of alien worlds.
You might be right, although there could be the rare exception. But does it really matter if there is? We will never know and for the most part it just becomes one long ever repeating cycle on any planet that has or will foster some sort of life. All good things come to an end.
We throw around alot of blame and there is a lot of blame, for sure, but I view it as simply cyclical. Earth either will survive and thrive in a million years or so until "the big burn" or won’t. And if not, some other planet out there will newly form and create life by natural forces and it’ll be their turn..until they cycle on away also.
I find the huge long picture of it all, in the universe itself comforting. To me it all follows natural universal laws, which is how we got here (life) in the first place. In our case, the greed and stupidity of humanity just speeds up the end is all.
I think a lot of this relates to proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox (‘Where is Everyone’ or the ‘Great Silence’) and its relationship with human exceptionalism. Basically, “we” tend to take our current moment in time (hi-tech, industrial civilizations/empires) and extrapolate them outwards as if it is expected that they will be everywhere (only more so, more developed and bigger) or at minimum that they must be somewhere. Hence, Sci Fi 101: interstellar civilizations as normative (Star Trek, Star Wars etc). This can initially seem to be quite plausible, especially as it seems to rest on a useful Principle of Mediocrity and the idea that “we” aren’t special (therefore, something like hi-tech, industrial civilizations and empires should be not too surprising; and more developed galaxy-spanning versions shouldn’t be too surprising either).
However, and it’s a pretty big however, our current historical and industrial situation may in fact be an aberrant, exceptional, unsustainable and/or self-extirpating way of existing. Basically, the Great Silence and non-appearance of aliens and intergalactic space armadas in the skies may be for the simple reason that such ways of being are abnormal and impossible to sustain. The Silent Universe may be telling us something very important about what we are doing right now (e.g. etching our passing into the geological record with radioactive materials and plastics).
Its pretty amazing how “we” (techno-industrial humanity) think we are both special/exceptional and, at the same time, normative of what we can expect to see elsewhere (e.g. Empires with super-high tech); whereas the hundreds of thousands of years of other hominids and the hundreds of millions of years of countless other species on Earth might be far more representative of life-elsewhere.
I don't know if you glossed over the details of the end Permian for simplicity's sake but the real damage wasn't entirely from volcanic eruptions; it was caused by magma pushing up under the crust in specific areas of current-day Russia and burning off massive deposits of fossil carbon. Even over the course of thousands of years, that overloading of the carbon cycle was so abrupt that the oceans acidified faster than anything could adapt, the water cycle went into hyperdrive as temperatures soared, and so superstorms alternating with continent-wide wildfires scrubbed virtually everything off the land and into the oceans.
Human enterprise doesn't begin to match the *size* of those outpourings which occured over millennia, but the *speed* at which we seem determined to hurl every carbon atom we can into the atmosphere is set to cause an equivalent, if not worse, catastrophe.
I can relate to finding a weird sort of calm in thinking from the planetary perspective, or even the cosmic one. It quiets the noise of our ludicrous self-importance and makes meaningful moments more meaningful. It’s oddly melancholy but not depressing. I’m sure that crises that threaten all the structures we depend on cause this shift, or I imagine they might. Maybe it’s like coming to realize a traumatic event and then reflecting. In that process, part of healing involves expanding how we see ourselves. For me, considering the planet feels like that, except I see humanity as the trauma, and I’m not hopeful of the distant future because humanity has become so non-organic. That’s what resonated from your post. Our impact is not like the factors that contributed to past mass extinctions. And pace is everything. We’re at a concert where the band has not only lost their rhythm collectively but they are all descending into an uncontrollable acceleration, moving faster than their brains and bodies can recognize, much less control.
It's nice to know there's a community of minds that think more deeply about humanity. I've come to believe that each of us is a bit like a cancer cell. We come into being and if we survive to adult stage our inherent programming leads us to adapt to our environment. Adapting and survival is basic intention. We might kill the host, the host may eradicate us, or maybe the eradication will be incomplete and future generations survive in the evolving environment.
It really doesn't matter much which scenario is true. We must enjoy 😉 today and tomorrow if it comes.
This is what led me down this particular rabbit hole. When my father was battling cancer he read the book, “The Emperor of All Maladies”, in which the author explains how organically inevitable cancer is for all living organisms. This had a profound impact on my father’s journey with cancer and his entire end of life journey, but it was crucially beneficial to me, not just as I cared for him and wrestled with the losses we all navigate, but afterward and especially recently, I find my mind coming back to cancer—not the kind my father had that was undoubtedly brought on by smoking but just cancer as a naturally occurring thing. I often use the metaphor of humanity as a cancer, but not the organic kind. We are the orchestrated kind, the carcinogens packaged into production long after we know that they are carcinogens. We know we as a species hold a parasitic relationship to the planet, despite how many peoples choose other ways. As a species, we have only taken from the planet. This realization should depressed me, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t bring me joy, but it makes me appreciate that I am capable of creating joy in spite of belonging to a species that is so obviously the object of every monster story.
“Life will go on” is really not that simple. We can’t just assume the planet will eventually be okay again after humans go extinct because the planet has never dealt with anything like this type of overshoot. The planets never had to deal with carbon emissions from global fossil fuel burning, which is causing AMOC collapse, ocean acidification which will kill all the microbes in the oceans, arctic ice melting causing sea level rise. Not to mention excessive mining and logging, overabundance of toxic chemicals and 500+ nuclear power plants melting down, and the resource consumption from ai. When humans are gone the planet will still have so much damage and toxicity left to deal with. Possibly for millions of years. We can’t just assume that this will be any less destructive than other mass extinction events because this one is unlike any other. Personally I’ve grown to resent life on earth. It’s a kill or be killed world and the creatures that inhabit it have been suffering long before humans ever existed. Maybe the planet dying is a good thing in the grand scheme of things?
It's like you didn't even read the article, because I go into all of that when discussing the Permian extinction. I never said it was that simple. I said it was complicated, and I said this mass extinction was different from the others.. So I've got to ask, why are you here if you're just going to lecture and not listen?
It wasn’t my intention to lecture you specifically and I apologize for sounding condescending. My comment was more directed at people in general who brush everything humans are doing off with “life finds a way” or the tired George Carlin quote about earth after humans. I just think humans are severely underestimating the damage we’ve already done to the planet and the legacy of that destruction in the long term. Again, I’m sorry if I sounded rude to you.
The fact that we refer to the death of mankind as The End Of The World As We Know It perfectly describes how and why mankind will die. The half-life of enriched uranium is 4.8 billion years. When humans destroy ourselves, we will destroy all life on the planet. What happens when nuclear energy facilities go unmanned?
Once I realised that the point of climate activism was to keep humans existing, it made it easier to focus my efforts on the inequalities humans face today. The planet will survive us. It will likely thrive without us. Anyone who claims to care about climate change, but not about current genocides, slavery, and human rights are lying to themselves about what they actually care about, or are just so selfish and egotistical as to believe that inequality won't effect them before humans become extinct.
Carlin used to say he freed his mind when he felt he no longer had “a stake in the outcome” of wherever it was human beings were going, that the shift had made him a better comedian and truer to himself.
I believe him, although I think the state of mind he described was not completely without bitterness which it either covered for or with which it stood in some inescapably dissonant relation. Maybe he’d say the same. But I don’t doubt his liberation, because at about the time he said this change in his internal outlook took place, he became vastly more than “just” a comedian.
I remember this because it’s similar to what you’ve described. But your account doesn’t seem to contain the same tincture of pessimism, but rather realism. I appreciate that, and find it instructive to contemplate the distinction between the two mental states in terms of how one might continue to live “a human life under any circumstances”, as Joseph Campbell said. Again, it’s the distinction between acceptance and resignation, and the question of whether there really is such a thing.
I do think, however, that the destruction of human beings would entail the loss of something more than has been lost in past extinctions. This view is informed by Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality, as he explained it in his book, Lila. I’ve probably mentioned it before in a previous comment(s) on your articles but, in essence, one of his theses as I understand it is that human beings and the societies they’ve created embody a certain absolute level of qualitative evolution that should continue for reasons one must read Lila to fully understand but that, if they were destroyed, would be an unprecedented setback for the admittedly abstract but still real fact of the universe’s progress.
I’m not sure I take comfort in the following, but I also find it hard to believe that the entire species will be eradicated without some remnant of it continuing to exist and at least potentially carrying forward the metaphysical fruits of that more advanced evolution that Pirsig described.
I like your comment about accepting our impending extinction changes our entire attitude. It reminds me of George Carlin, who changed his style as a result of no longer willing to be a "cheerleader" for humanity. And therefore, to see things in the big picture. This routine was the beginning of this new style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
The suburbs, or exurbs, are probably the best place to ride out the rest of your days for mutual aid reasons. If you're too deep in the woods or too rural, you have fewer neighbors who can set your broken bone or loan you a gallon of gas. Urban areas are dense, which means lots of potential helping hands, but there's too few resources to go around, especially when infrastructure collapses. In the city we'll be fighting each other over the last jar of peanut butter. The 'burbs will be the Goldilocks in this scenario, just right.
A couple of years back, I recorded and released an album that explored different themes and emotions around the 6th Mass Extinction. Much of it imagines the viewpoint of the sentient souls who are the victims. The album, M.E. VI (a requiem) is on Bandcamp here: https://music.strong-t.com but it can also be found on YouTube or any of the streaming services. Not many people listened. I think a lot of us sharing news and information about climate change and extinction can relate. It's a difficult topic. I like to think the album itself and the follow-up single, Gently for Tomorrow, are reasonably good. I hope at least a couple more people will take a listen.
Extinction is the mirror religion never dared hold up. Every creed promises escape, permanence, heaven as storage locker. But the earth has always practiced impermanence. Species come. Species vanish. Forests collapse into coal. Oceans cough up new gods.
You’re right. It isn’t really about us. We were never the story, just a loud footnote. When we’re gone, moss will write new psalms on the ruins. Rivers will etch fresh commandments into the rock. Life will keep humming, even if not in our key.
Blessed be the ones who loosen their grip on human exceptionalism and find peace in being compost on a planet that outlives us all.
Human exceptionalism, right on.
So apt...and thank you for the poetry of it. Just beautiful.
Beautifully expressed.
I think the planet would be much better off without the human race. As you say, Virgin Monk Boy, we think we are so superior but other species that we share our planet with treat it so much better. We lost so much when Western Empires invaded lands and pushed out indigenous peoples - the Native Australians, in particular, as well as Native Americans, lived far more in tune with the Earth. How much we could have learned from them.
This is perfect.
I've always found great peace in thinking about life on a geologic scale, so this makes perfect sense to me! If you are motivated to write more on this topic, I would love to read your thoughts on the kinds of choices we can make now to impact life in the far future (other than the obvious one of limiting warming). <3 <3 <3
It's definitely a new direction. What are the consequences and choices/future beyond humanity at this point? Where do we fit in the broader history of the planet? Can, in fact, earth recover from this? All good questions.
Mother Earth will smile.
Oh baby! I was so...(what word works here?) thrilled, grateful, gratified, etc. to read your post. I think about this all the time. Literally. Maybe cuz my dad was a physicist at UC Berkeley (he ran the Spaces Sciences Lab for a lot of years) so I grew up with a my eyes on the night skies and my mind pondering infinity.
We are such a teeny blip of an experiment in a vast mystery...and yet we could be (have been?) so awesome.
Reminds me of the books Ishmael and The Story of B by Daniel Quinn…both worth a read. Thank you, Jessica, as always.
It may be fine to be thinking of what life on planet earth might be like in a few hundred thousand years but it doesn't even look like the human race or few other mammals will survive past 2100, if things keep going the way they are.
Maybe someone like the Vulcans will come along and offer the humans some faster than light propulsion and a few other little things to improve life. If not, we better prepare for a very hot planet within the next seventy five years.
I'd argue that technological "intelligence" and unchecked "economic growth" are never sustainable possibilities. So I doubt there are are any interstellar civilizations out there, Vulcan or otherwise. They are all mere blips in the geological records of alien worlds.
You might be right, although there could be the rare exception. But does it really matter if there is? We will never know and for the most part it just becomes one long ever repeating cycle on any planet that has or will foster some sort of life. All good things come to an end.
We throw around alot of blame and there is a lot of blame, for sure, but I view it as simply cyclical. Earth either will survive and thrive in a million years or so until "the big burn" or won’t. And if not, some other planet out there will newly form and create life by natural forces and it’ll be their turn..until they cycle on away also.
I find the huge long picture of it all, in the universe itself comforting. To me it all follows natural universal laws, which is how we got here (life) in the first place. In our case, the greed and stupidity of humanity just speeds up the end is all.
I think a lot of this relates to proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox (‘Where is Everyone’ or the ‘Great Silence’) and its relationship with human exceptionalism. Basically, “we” tend to take our current moment in time (hi-tech, industrial civilizations/empires) and extrapolate them outwards as if it is expected that they will be everywhere (only more so, more developed and bigger) or at minimum that they must be somewhere. Hence, Sci Fi 101: interstellar civilizations as normative (Star Trek, Star Wars etc). This can initially seem to be quite plausible, especially as it seems to rest on a useful Principle of Mediocrity and the idea that “we” aren’t special (therefore, something like hi-tech, industrial civilizations and empires should be not too surprising; and more developed galaxy-spanning versions shouldn’t be too surprising either).
However, and it’s a pretty big however, our current historical and industrial situation may in fact be an aberrant, exceptional, unsustainable and/or self-extirpating way of existing. Basically, the Great Silence and non-appearance of aliens and intergalactic space armadas in the skies may be for the simple reason that such ways of being are abnormal and impossible to sustain. The Silent Universe may be telling us something very important about what we are doing right now (e.g. etching our passing into the geological record with radioactive materials and plastics).
Its pretty amazing how “we” (techno-industrial humanity) think we are both special/exceptional and, at the same time, normative of what we can expect to see elsewhere (e.g. Empires with super-high tech); whereas the hundreds of thousands of years of other hominids and the hundreds of millions of years of countless other species on Earth might be far more representative of life-elsewhere.
I don't know if you glossed over the details of the end Permian for simplicity's sake but the real damage wasn't entirely from volcanic eruptions; it was caused by magma pushing up under the crust in specific areas of current-day Russia and burning off massive deposits of fossil carbon. Even over the course of thousands of years, that overloading of the carbon cycle was so abrupt that the oceans acidified faster than anything could adapt, the water cycle went into hyperdrive as temperatures soared, and so superstorms alternating with continent-wide wildfires scrubbed virtually everything off the land and into the oceans.
Human enterprise doesn't begin to match the *size* of those outpourings which occured over millennia, but the *speed* at which we seem determined to hurl every carbon atom we can into the atmosphere is set to cause an equivalent, if not worse, catastrophe.
I can relate to finding a weird sort of calm in thinking from the planetary perspective, or even the cosmic one. It quiets the noise of our ludicrous self-importance and makes meaningful moments more meaningful. It’s oddly melancholy but not depressing. I’m sure that crises that threaten all the structures we depend on cause this shift, or I imagine they might. Maybe it’s like coming to realize a traumatic event and then reflecting. In that process, part of healing involves expanding how we see ourselves. For me, considering the planet feels like that, except I see humanity as the trauma, and I’m not hopeful of the distant future because humanity has become so non-organic. That’s what resonated from your post. Our impact is not like the factors that contributed to past mass extinctions. And pace is everything. We’re at a concert where the band has not only lost their rhythm collectively but they are all descending into an uncontrollable acceleration, moving faster than their brains and bodies can recognize, much less control.
It's nice to know there's a community of minds that think more deeply about humanity. I've come to believe that each of us is a bit like a cancer cell. We come into being and if we survive to adult stage our inherent programming leads us to adapt to our environment. Adapting and survival is basic intention. We might kill the host, the host may eradicate us, or maybe the eradication will be incomplete and future generations survive in the evolving environment.
It really doesn't matter much which scenario is true. We must enjoy 😉 today and tomorrow if it comes.
This is what led me down this particular rabbit hole. When my father was battling cancer he read the book, “The Emperor of All Maladies”, in which the author explains how organically inevitable cancer is for all living organisms. This had a profound impact on my father’s journey with cancer and his entire end of life journey, but it was crucially beneficial to me, not just as I cared for him and wrestled with the losses we all navigate, but afterward and especially recently, I find my mind coming back to cancer—not the kind my father had that was undoubtedly brought on by smoking but just cancer as a naturally occurring thing. I often use the metaphor of humanity as a cancer, but not the organic kind. We are the orchestrated kind, the carcinogens packaged into production long after we know that they are carcinogens. We know we as a species hold a parasitic relationship to the planet, despite how many peoples choose other ways. As a species, we have only taken from the planet. This realization should depressed me, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t bring me joy, but it makes me appreciate that I am capable of creating joy in spite of belonging to a species that is so obviously the object of every monster story.
Thank you for your response.
“Life will go on” is really not that simple. We can’t just assume the planet will eventually be okay again after humans go extinct because the planet has never dealt with anything like this type of overshoot. The planets never had to deal with carbon emissions from global fossil fuel burning, which is causing AMOC collapse, ocean acidification which will kill all the microbes in the oceans, arctic ice melting causing sea level rise. Not to mention excessive mining and logging, overabundance of toxic chemicals and 500+ nuclear power plants melting down, and the resource consumption from ai. When humans are gone the planet will still have so much damage and toxicity left to deal with. Possibly for millions of years. We can’t just assume that this will be any less destructive than other mass extinction events because this one is unlike any other. Personally I’ve grown to resent life on earth. It’s a kill or be killed world and the creatures that inhabit it have been suffering long before humans ever existed. Maybe the planet dying is a good thing in the grand scheme of things?
It's like you didn't even read the article, because I go into all of that when discussing the Permian extinction. I never said it was that simple. I said it was complicated, and I said this mass extinction was different from the others.. So I've got to ask, why are you here if you're just going to lecture and not listen?
It wasn’t my intention to lecture you specifically and I apologize for sounding condescending. My comment was more directed at people in general who brush everything humans are doing off with “life finds a way” or the tired George Carlin quote about earth after humans. I just think humans are severely underestimating the damage we’ve already done to the planet and the legacy of that destruction in the long term. Again, I’m sorry if I sounded rude to you.
Thank you.
Jessica - you might enjoy reading this book "The world without us" that came out a while back. It touches on this exact point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us
The fact that we refer to the death of mankind as The End Of The World As We Know It perfectly describes how and why mankind will die. The half-life of enriched uranium is 4.8 billion years. When humans destroy ourselves, we will destroy all life on the planet. What happens when nuclear energy facilities go unmanned?
Once I realised that the point of climate activism was to keep humans existing, it made it easier to focus my efforts on the inequalities humans face today. The planet will survive us. It will likely thrive without us. Anyone who claims to care about climate change, but not about current genocides, slavery, and human rights are lying to themselves about what they actually care about, or are just so selfish and egotistical as to believe that inequality won't effect them before humans become extinct.
Carlin used to say he freed his mind when he felt he no longer had “a stake in the outcome” of wherever it was human beings were going, that the shift had made him a better comedian and truer to himself.
I believe him, although I think the state of mind he described was not completely without bitterness which it either covered for or with which it stood in some inescapably dissonant relation. Maybe he’d say the same. But I don’t doubt his liberation, because at about the time he said this change in his internal outlook took place, he became vastly more than “just” a comedian.
I remember this because it’s similar to what you’ve described. But your account doesn’t seem to contain the same tincture of pessimism, but rather realism. I appreciate that, and find it instructive to contemplate the distinction between the two mental states in terms of how one might continue to live “a human life under any circumstances”, as Joseph Campbell said. Again, it’s the distinction between acceptance and resignation, and the question of whether there really is such a thing.
I do think, however, that the destruction of human beings would entail the loss of something more than has been lost in past extinctions. This view is informed by Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality, as he explained it in his book, Lila. I’ve probably mentioned it before in a previous comment(s) on your articles but, in essence, one of his theses as I understand it is that human beings and the societies they’ve created embody a certain absolute level of qualitative evolution that should continue for reasons one must read Lila to fully understand but that, if they were destroyed, would be an unprecedented setback for the admittedly abstract but still real fact of the universe’s progress.
I’m not sure I take comfort in the following, but I also find it hard to believe that the entire species will be eradicated without some remnant of it continuing to exist and at least potentially carrying forward the metaphysical fruits of that more advanced evolution that Pirsig described.
I like your comment about accepting our impending extinction changes our entire attitude. It reminds me of George Carlin, who changed his style as a result of no longer willing to be a "cheerleader" for humanity. And therefore, to see things in the big picture. This routine was the beginning of this new style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
The suburbs, or exurbs, are probably the best place to ride out the rest of your days for mutual aid reasons. If you're too deep in the woods or too rural, you have fewer neighbors who can set your broken bone or loan you a gallon of gas. Urban areas are dense, which means lots of potential helping hands, but there's too few resources to go around, especially when infrastructure collapses. In the city we'll be fighting each other over the last jar of peanut butter. The 'burbs will be the Goldilocks in this scenario, just right.
A couple of years back, I recorded and released an album that explored different themes and emotions around the 6th Mass Extinction. Much of it imagines the viewpoint of the sentient souls who are the victims. The album, M.E. VI (a requiem) is on Bandcamp here: https://music.strong-t.com but it can also be found on YouTube or any of the streaming services. Not many people listened. I think a lot of us sharing news and information about climate change and extinction can relate. It's a difficult topic. I like to think the album itself and the follow-up single, Gently for Tomorrow, are reasonably good. I hope at least a couple more people will take a listen.