Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

369 Pages·2013·3.79 MB·English

by  Annalee Newitz

Copyright © 2013 by Annalee Newitz
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53592-2
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-385-53591-5
Portions of Chapters 3, 6, and 16 are adapted from pieces originally
published on io9.com.
Book design by Michael Collica
Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Jacket illustration by neilwebb.net
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newitz, Annalee, 1969–
Scatter, adapt, and remember : how humans will survive a mass
extinction / Annalee Newitz.
pages cm
1. Survival. 2. Extinction (Biology) I. Title.
GF86.N485 2013
576.8′4—dc23 2012042409
ISBN 978-0-385-53591-5
v3.1
To Charlie for the words
To Chris for the sounds
To Jesse for the stars
Utopian speculations … must come back into fashion. They are
a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems
that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of
humanity is a utopian hope.
—Norman O. Brown, from Life Against Death
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Are We All Going to Die?
PART I
A HISTORY OF MASS EXTINCTIONS
1 The Apocalypse That Brought Us to Life
2 Two Ways to Go Extinct
3 The Great Dying
4 What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs
5 Is a Mass Extinction Going On Right Now?
PART II WE ALMOST DIDN’T MAKE IT
6 The African Bottleneck
7 Meeting the Neanderthals
8 Great Plagues
9 The Hungry Generations
PART III
LESSONS FROM SURVIVORS
10 Scatter: Footprints of the Diaspora
11 Adapt: Meet the Toughest Microbes in the World
12 Remember: Swim South
13 Pragmatic Optimism, or Stories of Survival
PART IV
HOW TO BUILD A DEATH-PROOF CITY
14 The Mutating Metropolis
15 Disaster Science
16 Using Math to Stop a Pandemic
17 Cities That Hide
18 Every Surface a Farm
PART V
THE MILLION-YEAR VIEW
19 Terraforming Earth
20 Not in Our Planetary Backyard
21 Take a Ride on the Space Elevator
22 Your Body Is Optional
23 On Titan’s Beach
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Large Map Images
INTRODUCTION: Are We All Going to Die?
HUMANITY IS AT
a crossroads. We have ample evidence that Earth is
headed for disaster, and for the first time in history we have the ability
to prevent that disaster from wiping us out. Whether the disaster is
caused by humans or by nature, it is inevitable. But our doom is not.
How can I say that with so much certainty? Because the world has been
almost completely destroyed at least half a dozen times already in
Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, and every single time there have been
survivors. Earth has been shattered by asteroid impacts, choked by
extreme greenhouse gases, locked up in ice, bombarded with cosmic
radiation, and ripped open by megavolcanoes so enormous they are
almost unimaginable. Each of these disasters caused mass extinctions,
during which more than 75 percent of the species on Earth died out. And
yet every single time, living creatures carried on, adapting to survive
under the harshest of conditions.
My hope for the future of humanity is therefore not simply a warm
feeling I have about how awesome we are. It is based on hard evidence
gleaned from the history of survival on Earth. This book is about how
life has survived mass extinctions so far. But it is also about the future,
and what we need to do to make sure humans don’t perish in the next
one.
During the last million years of our evolution as a species, humans
narrowly avoided extinction more than once. We lived through harsh
conditions while another human group, the Neanderthals, did not. This
isn’t just because we are lucky. It’s because as a species, we are
extremely cunning when it comes to survival. If we want to survive for
another million years, we should look to our history to find strategies
that already worked. The title of this book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember,
is a distillation of these strategies. But it’s also a call to implement them
in the future, by actively taking on the project of human survival as a
social and scientific challenge.
In the near term, we need to improve one of humanity’s greatest
inventions, the city, to make urban life healthier and more
environmentally sustainable. Essentially, we need to adapt the
metropolis to Earth’s current ecosystems so that we can maintain our
food supplies and a habitable climate. But even if you’re not worried
about climate change, Earth is still a dangerous place. At any time, we
could be hit by an asteroid or a gamma-ray burst from space. That’s why
we need a long-term plan to get humanity off Earth. We need cities
beyond the Blue Marble, oases on other worlds where we can scatter to
survive even cosmic disasters.
But none of this will be possible if we don’t remember human history,
from our earliest ancestors’ discovery of fire to our grandparents’
development of space programs. Fundamentally, we are a species of
builders and explorers. We’ve survived this long by taking control of our
destiny. If we want to survive the next mass extinction, we can’t forget
how we got here. Now let’s forge ahead into the future that we’ll build
for ourselves, our planet, and the humans who will exist a million years
from now.