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Published on the Doomstead Diner on September 8, 2013
Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner
This week on his Blog The Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer took a look at the REAL long term outcomes of Collapse, on a 10 Billion Year long scale for Homo Sapiens, which basically takes us right to the end of the Working Lifespan of the Sun, the main source of Energy driving forward all life on Earth, not just Humanity.
This is not the first set of such speculations, in fact it is a direct response to a similarly titled article by Ugo Bardi on his Blog Cassandra’s Legacy last year. Ugo in fact did a bit more in his treatment of the issue, first he chronicled the LAST 10B years up to today, and then presented 2 possible long term scenarios, one more upbeat and hopeful, the other a bit more doomy and gloomy.
The question is, WHY are both these Collapse Bloggers concerning themselves with such long term outcomes anyhow? Generally speaking at best most people are only concerned with what will occur to them in what remains of their lifetimes, perhaps at most extending into the lifetime of their Children & Grandchildren. After that, what does it really MATTER how long Homo Sapiens survives here? EVENTUALLY we will die out under almost any scenario you care to dream up. So how different is it for YOU if Extinction comes in 100, 1000 or 1,000,000 Years? Unless you believe in Reincarnation and that said Reincarnation can only occur on THIS planet, in THIS corner of the Universe, it doesn’t matter at all when Homo Sapiens goes the way of the Dinosaur here.
The lengths of time being bandied about in both Ugo and JMGs posts are quite enormous, Geological Time Scales really. In fact we have nowhere near 10B years possible for continuation of Homo Sapiens on this Planet, the Sun goes Red Giant and consumes the Earth long before that, and even long before THAT as the Sun burns up its fuel supply of Hydrogen and starts burning more Helium, it will get hot enough to boil off all the oceans on the planet and make it quite unlivable for ALL carbon based life forms we know, INCLUDING my favorite Extremophiles, the Tardigrades.
The Main Sequence
The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of life. Every second, 600 million tons of hydrogen are converted into helium in the Sun’s core, generating 4 x 1027 Watts of energy. For the Sun, this process got going 4.6 billion years ago, and it has been generating energy this way every since. But there isn’t an unlimited amount of hydrogen in the core of the Sun. In fact, it’s only got another 7 billion years worth of fuel left.As the Sun creates more helium at its core, the Sun burns a little more hydrogen. This causes the output of the Sun to go up. You won’t notice it now, but in about a billion years, the output from the Sun will have increased by 10%.
A more luminous Sun is bad news for Earth.
In 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10% brighter than it is today. This extra energy will cause a moist greenhouse effect in the beginning, similar to the runaway warming on Venus. But then the Earth’s atmosphere will dry out as the water vapor is lost to space, never to return.
In 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40% brighter than it is today. It will be so hot that the oceans will boil and that water vapor will be lost to space as well. The ice caps will permanently melt, and snow will be ancient history; life will be unable to survive anywhere on the surface of the Earth. The Earth will resemble dry hot Venus.
So really, you are talking MAX about 1B years from today for life to exist on earth in any form at all, because once the water boils off, life of any sort we are familiar with cannot exist. Indeed, Tardigrades can remain Viable near Absolute Zero and throughly dehydrated and Pop Back to Life once back in an environment with liquid water around, but they don’t “live” while they are dehydrated in the near absolute zero temps of space. Liquid Water is ESSENTIAL for life as we know it, all the chemistry which life is organized around occurs in Aqueous Solution of one sort or another.
When you consider this fact of life (sic), its actually probably long before all the Water actually Boils Off the surface of the Earth that life disappears in 1-3B years, it really just has to get hot enough that most of the water is Vapor and whatever tough little Tardigrades remain can’t cool themselves enough and end up dehydrating. So maybe good Outside Possibility for some higher plant & animal life forms is another 500M years. When you look at how long it took Dinosaurs and other Vertebrates to develop originally, this timescale is on the order of 100sM of years.
As you can see, this whole Biz began back there in the Pre-Cambrian period around 600M years ago, culminating in anatomically modern Homo Sapiens only in the last 100K years or so, though Proto-Homos existed a good deal earlier than that going back maybe 2M years. So what do you think the odds are that say our good friends and co-inhabitants of the Earth right now, the Tardigrades who are capable of handling a good deal tougher environmental situation than we can will have enough TIME and good fortune to evolve toward Sentience before the planet becomes uninhabitable even for THEM? IMHO, the likelihood is quite small. JMG does overcome this barrier by starting with Raccoons and Crows as the progenitors of sentient species, but based on the current spin out it seems unlikely that any higher organisms have a real good chance of survival when multiple Nuke reactors go super-critical and/or there is a phytoplankton collapse due to ocean acidification.
John Michael Greer thinks at least SOME Homo Sapiens will last a good deal longer than Nature Bats Last’s Guy McPherson’s mid-21st Century prediction for Near Term Human Extinction, he’s projecting out numerous Civilizations of Homo Sapiens rising and falling here over the next bundle of Millenia before finally sputtering out a million or so years down the line.
A hundred thousand years from now:Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did.A million years from now:The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.
1000 years from now. In the year 3000 A.D. the ecosystems of the planet have completely recovered from the damage done by human activities during the second millennium. A sophisticated planetary control system manages solar irradiation by means of space mirrors and the concentration of greenhouse gases by means of CO2 absorbing/desorbing plants. The planet is managed as a giant garden, optimizing its biological productivity. The Sahara desert is now a forest and the thermohaline currents pump oxygen in the northern regions, full of life of all kinds. The solar and wind plants used during the previous millennium have been mostly dismantled, although some are still kept as a memory of the old times. Most of the energy used by humankind is now generated by space stations which capture solar energy and beam it to the ground in forms easily usable by humans. Research in controlled fusion energy continues with the hope that it will produce usable energy in 500 years. Humans are now less than one billion, they have optimized both their numbers and their energy use and they need enormously less than they had needed in the more turbulent ages of one thousand years before. The development of artificial intelligence is in full swing and practically all tasks that once had been in the hands of humans is now in the “hands” of sophisticated robotic systems. These robots have colonized the solar system and humans now live in underground cities on the Moon. The new planetary intelligence starts considering the idea of terraforming Mars and Venus. The first antimatter powered interstellar spaceships have started their travel to far away stars.10.000 years from now. There are now less than a billion human beings on Earth who live in splendid cities immersed in the lush forest that the planet has become. Some of them work as a hobby on controlled nuclear fusion which they hope will produce usable energy in a few thousand years. The New Intelligence has now started terraforming Mars. It involves similar methods as those used for controlling the Earth’s climate: giant mirrors and CO2 producing plants that control the Martian atmosphere, increasing its pressure and temperature. The terraforming of Venus has also started with similar methods: giant screens that lower the planetary temperatures and immense flying plants that transform CO2 into oxygen and solid carbon. That will take a lot of time, but the New Intelligence is patient. It is also creating new races of solid state beings living on the asteroids and orbiting around the Sun. The exploration of the galaxy is in progress, with spaceships from the solar system now reaching a “sphere” of about a thousand light years from the sun.
My best case scenario:The monetary system crashes and Da Goobermint organizes quickly to keep food production and distribution going. Shortages of fuel take all private carz off the road and people adapt utilizing more bicycles and walking, along with various public transport systems that are kept running a while with the diminished fuel supply. JIT Trucking is also kept running by conserving fuel, long enough for transition to be made to local production.
A huge Public Works Project is undertaken with people educated in permaculture and small scale renewable energy construction, and a Land Reform Act is passed with Groups of People issued Land Grants all over the country. Groups can either self-organize or a computer program puts people together based on a questionnaire they fill out about their belief system. The Land Grants are issued in a Random Order via Lottery, and you get to pick your spot when your number comes up. The size of the Land Grant depends on the current resources available where it is located in terms of Water and Soil Fertility. The size is calculated to support the Group size +20% (to allow for fluctuation in reproduction).
Metal Tools and Farm Implements are produced and distributed out as long as possible, and die off is gradual and organic mostly from Old Age as the population returns to the land.
The other part of the Public Works Project involves decommissioning and removing the spent fuel from Nuke Plants. The fuel si all collected, vitrified and shipped to the Marianna Trench where it is sunk in a subduction zone at the ocean floor. Specialized Boring Capsules are designed which gather speed during the fall to the ocean floor and begin to spin rapidly. When they hit bottom, they bore into the crust at the subduction zone.
Industrial plants are shut down and cleaned up also as small scale cottage industries take hold around the country. Mother Nature does her part also, gradually degrading and rinsing out pollutants. Ecosystems recover, and carbon content in the atmosphere begins to fall. Extreme Weather events begin to lessen in frequency.
A century from now, a remaining 1B or so people on the planet live in Harmony with Nature, maintaining a relatively steady state of human biomass. Story Tellers travel around the country on Horseback and around the World by Sailboat, and information is passed on verbally throughout the world. Memory spans are vastly increased, and Wisdom is selected for naturally, and Homo Sapiens evolves to Homo Superioris, eventually gaining paranormal abilities with the ability to leave the body at will and travel the cosmos as a Quantum Flux able to instaneously appear anywhere in the Universe, visiting other planets with the ability to Incarnate in a symbiotic fashion with other life forms on these planets.
Human Sentience persists for Eternity, as the Quantum Flux can also jump from Universe to Universe in the Multiverse, once this Universe either cools to Absolute Zero in perpetual expansion, or Collapses back on itself for another Big Bang.
Ugo relies on the old Star Trek meme of Matter-Antimatter Engines to drive this type of society Star Trekking in the long distant future, glossing over the small problem of precisely where we will get hold of the copious amounts of Antimatter necessary to annihiliate Matter in the Perfect Matter-to-Energy Transform. Dilithium Crystals aren’t Ubiquitous on Earth, not even at Chinese Strip Mining Operations for Rare Earth Minerals. LOL. Here on Earth Ugo does come up with the slightly more plausible idea of huge space based solar collectors, however exactly how we will jack that much hardware up into space over the next century or two with depleting fossil fuel supplies is left unexplained.
Returning from the world of Sci-Fi and fantasy thinking to the REAL WORLD of Collapsing Economic Structures, Depleting Resources and Population Overshoot, the real questions worth pondering on are not 10B Year Long Timelines for Universal Existence, but much shorter timelines in the lengths of Years, Decades, Centuries and maybe as far out as Millenia, but further than that is really a moot point, since the eventual Extinction of Homo Sapiens is a virtual Lock. If you can answer the question of what the World will be like in YOUR neighborhood in a Decade’s time, this knowledge people living now can actually USE to better prepare for the world to come for them. The outcomes won’t be precisely the same everywhere, there are different parameters in different locations clearly. So being able to make a fairly decent prediction on this timeline also allows people to make better choices in Migration, if they indeed even have the ability and economic resources to migrate at all, which most really do not. I mean really, if you currently are living on $2/day in a Mumbai Slum, you’re not going to be buying a Plane Ticket to New Zealand to find a better life. Most people are pretty well stuck where they are, at least on the nation-state level.
Off the keyboard of RE
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
Friend us on Facebook
Published on the Doomstead Diner on September 8, 2013
Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner
This week on his Blog The Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer took a look at the REAL long term outcomes of Collapse, on a 10 Billion Year long scale for Homo Sapiens, which basically takes us right to the end of the Working Lifespan of the Sun, the main source of Energy driving forward all life on Earth, not just Humanity.
This is not the first set of such speculations, in fact it is a direct response to a similarly titled article by Ugo Bardi on his Blog Cassandra’s Legacy last year. Ugo in fact did a bit more in his treatment of the issue, first he chronicled the LAST 10B years up to today, and then presented 2 possible long term scenarios, one more upbeat and hopeful, the other a bit more doomy and gloomy.
The question is, WHY are both these Collapse Bloggers concerning themselves with such long term outcomes anyhow? Generally speaking at best most people are only concerned with what will occur to them in what remains of their lifetimes, perhaps at most extending into the lifetime of their Children & Grandchildren. After that, what does it really MATTER how long Homo Sapiens survives here? EVENTUALLY we will die out under almost any scenario you care to dream up. So how different is it for YOU if Extinction comes in 100, 1000 or 1,000,000 Years? Unless you believe in Reincarnation and that said Reincarnation can only occur on THIS planet, in THIS corner of the Universe, it doesn’t matter at all when Homo Sapiens goes the way of the Dinosaur here.
The lengths of time being bandied about in both Ugo and JMGs posts are quite enormous, Geological Time Scales really. In fact we have nowhere near 10B years possible for continuation of Homo Sapiens on this Planet, the Sun goes Red Giant and consumes the Earth long before that, and even long before THAT as the Sun burns up its fuel supply of Hydrogen and starts burning more Helium, it will get hot enough to boil off all the oceans on the planet and make it quite unlivable for ALL carbon based life forms we know, INCLUDING my favorite Extremophiles, the Tardigrades.
The Main Sequence
The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of life. Every second, 600 million tons of hydrogen are converted into helium in the Sun’s core, generating 4 x 1027 Watts of energy. For the Sun, this process got going 4.6 billion years ago, and it has been generating energy this way every since. But there isn’t an unlimited amount of hydrogen in the core of the Sun. In fact, it’s only got another 7 billion years worth of fuel left.As the Sun creates more helium at its core, the Sun burns a little more hydrogen. This causes the output of the Sun to go up. You won’t notice it now, but in about a billion years, the output from the Sun will have increased by 10%.
A more luminous Sun is bad news for Earth.
In 1.1 billion years from now, the Sun will be 10% brighter than it is today. This extra energy will cause a moist greenhouse effect in the beginning, similar to the runaway warming on Venus. But then the Earth’s atmosphere will dry out as the water vapor is lost to space, never to return.
In 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40% brighter than it is today. It will be so hot that the oceans will boil and that water vapor will be lost to space as well. The ice caps will permanently melt, and snow will be ancient history; life will be unable to survive anywhere on the surface of the Earth. The Earth will resemble dry hot Venus.
So really, you are talking MAX about 1B years from today for life to exist on earth in any form at all, because once the water boils off, life of any sort we are familiar with cannot exist. Indeed, Tardigrades can remain Viable near Absolute Zero and throughly dehydrated and Pop Back to Life once back in an environment with liquid water around, but they don’t “live” while they are dehydrated in the near absolute zero temps of space. Liquid Water is ESSENTIAL for life as we know it, all the chemistry which life is organized around occurs in Aqueous Solution of one sort or another.
When you consider this fact of life (sic), its actually probably long before all the Water actually Boils Off the surface of the Earth that life disappears in 1-3B years, it really just has to get hot enough that most of the water is Vapor and whatever tough little Tardigrades remain can’t cool themselves enough and end up dehydrating. So maybe good Outside Possibility for some higher plant & animal life forms is another 500M years. When you look at how long it took Dinosaurs and other Vertebrates to develop originally, this timescale is on the order of 100sM of years.
As you can see, this whole Biz began back there in the Pre-Cambrian period around 600M years ago, culminating in anatomically modern Homo Sapiens only in the last 100K years or so, though Proto-Homos existed a good deal earlier than that going back maybe 2M years. So what do you think the odds are that say our good friends and co-inhabitants of the Earth right now, the Tardigrades who are capable of handling a good deal tougher environmental situation than we can will have enough TIME and good fortune to evolve toward Sentience before the planet becomes uninhabitable even for THEM? IMHO, the likelihood is quite small. JMG does overcome this barrier by starting with Raccoons and Crows as the progenitors of sentient species, but based on the current spin out it seems unlikely that any higher organisms have a real good chance of survival when multiple Nuke reactors go super-critical and/or there is a phytoplankton collapse due to ocean acidification.
John Michael Greer thinks at least SOME Homo Sapiens will last a good deal longer than Nature Bats Last’s Guy McPherson’s mid-21st Century prediction for Near Term Human Extinction, he’s projecting out numerous Civilizations of Homo Sapiens rising and falling here over the next bundle of Millenia before finally sputtering out a million or so years down the line.
A hundred thousand years from now:Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes. Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle. The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did.A million years from now:The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal. Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.
1000 years from now. In the year 3000 A.D. the ecosystems of the planet have completely recovered from the damage done by human activities during the second millennium. A sophisticated planetary control system manages solar irradiation by means of space mirrors and the concentration of greenhouse gases by means of CO2 absorbing/desorbing plants. The planet is managed as a giant garden, optimizing its biological productivity. The Sahara desert is now a forest and the thermohaline currents pump oxygen in the northern regions, full of life of all kinds. The solar and wind plants used during the previous millennium have been mostly dismantled, although some are still kept as a memory of the old times. Most of the energy used by humankind is now generated by space stations which capture solar energy and beam it to the ground in forms easily usable by humans. Research in controlled fusion energy continues with the hope that it will produce usable energy in 500 years. Humans are now less than one billion, they have optimized both their numbers and their energy use and they need enormously less than they had needed in the more turbulent ages of one thousand years before. The development of artificial intelligence is in full swing and practically all tasks that once had been in the hands of humans is now in the “hands” of sophisticated robotic systems. These robots have colonized the solar system and humans now live in underground cities on the Moon. The new planetary intelligence starts considering the idea of terraforming Mars and Venus. The first antimatter powered interstellar spaceships have started their travel to far away stars.10.000 years from now. There are now less than a billion human beings on Earth who live in splendid cities immersed in the lush forest that the planet has become. Some of them work as a hobby on controlled nuclear fusion which they hope will produce usable energy in a few thousand years. The New Intelligence has now started terraforming Mars. It involves similar methods as those used for controlling the Earth’s climate: giant mirrors and CO2 producing plants that control the Martian atmosphere, increasing its pressure and temperature. The terraforming of Venus has also started with similar methods: giant screens that lower the planetary temperatures and immense flying plants that transform CO2 into oxygen and solid carbon. That will take a lot of time, but the New Intelligence is patient. It is also creating new races of solid state beings living on the asteroids and orbiting around the Sun. The exploration of the galaxy is in progress, with spaceships from the solar system now reaching a “sphere” of about a thousand light years from the sun.
My best case scenario:The monetary system crashes and Da Goobermint organizes quickly to keep food production and distribution going. Shortages of fuel take all private carz off the road and people adapt utilizing more bicycles and walking, along with various public transport systems that are kept running a while with the diminished fuel supply. JIT Trucking is also kept running by conserving fuel, long enough for transition to be made to local production.
A huge Public Works Project is undertaken with people educated in permaculture and small scale renewable energy construction, and a Land Reform Act is passed with Groups of People issued Land Grants all over the country. Groups can either self-organize or a computer program puts people together based on a questionnaire they fill out about their belief system. The Land Grants are issued in a Random Order via Lottery, and you get to pick your spot when your number comes up. The size of the Land Grant depends on the current resources available where it is located in terms of Water and Soil Fertility. The size is calculated to support the Group size +20% (to allow for fluctuation in reproduction).
Metal Tools and Farm Implements are produced and distributed out as long as possible, and die off is gradual and organic mostly from Old Age as the population returns to the land.
The other part of the Public Works Project involves decommissioning and removing the spent fuel from Nuke Plants. The fuel si all collected, vitrified and shipped to the Marianna Trench where it is sunk in a subduction zone at the ocean floor. Specialized Boring Capsules are designed which gather speed during the fall to the ocean floor and begin to spin rapidly. When they hit bottom, they bore into the crust at the subduction zone.
Industrial plants are shut down and cleaned up also as small scale cottage industries take hold around the country. Mother Nature does her part also, gradually degrading and rinsing out pollutants. Ecosystems recover, and carbon content in the atmosphere begins to fall. Extreme Weather events begin to lessen in frequency.
A century from now, a remaining 1B or so people on the planet live in Harmony with Nature, maintaining a relatively steady state of human biomass. Story Tellers travel around the country on Horseback and around the World by Sailboat, and information is passed on verbally throughout the world. Memory spans are vastly increased, and Wisdom is selected for naturally, and Homo Sapiens evolves to Homo Superioris, eventually gaining paranormal abilities with the ability to leave the body at will and travel the cosmos as a Quantum Flux able to instaneously appear anywhere in the Universe, visiting other planets with the ability to Incarnate in a symbiotic fashion with other life forms on these planets.
Human Sentience persists for Eternity, as the Quantum Flux can also jump from Universe to Universe in the Multiverse, once this Universe either cools to Absolute Zero in perpetual expansion, or Collapses back on itself for another Big Bang.
Ugo relies on the old Star Trek meme of Matter-Antimatter Engines to drive this type of society Star Trekking in the long distant future, glossing over the small problem of precisely where we will get hold of the copious amounts of Antimatter necessary to annihiliate Matter in the Perfect Matter-to-Energy Transform. Dilithium Crystals aren’t Ubiquitous on Earth, not even at Chinese Strip Mining Operations for Rare Earth Minerals. LOL. Here on Earth Ugo does come up with the slightly more plausible idea of huge space based solar collectors, however exactly how we will jack that much hardware up into space over the next century or two with depleting fossil fuel supplies is left unexplained.Returning from the world of Sci-Fi and fantasy thinking to the REAL WORLD of Collapsing Economic Structures, Depleting Resources and Population Overshoot, the real questions worth pondering on are not 10B Year Long Timelines for Universal Existence, but much shorter timelines in the lengths of Years, Decades, Centuries and maybe as far out as Millenia, but further than that is really a moot point, since the eventual Extinction of Homo Sapiens is a virtual Lock. If you can answer the question of what the World will be like in YOUR neighborhood in a Decade’s time, this knowledge people living now can actually USE to better prepare for the world to come for them. The outcomes won’t be precisely the same everywhere, there are different parameters in different locations clearly. So being able to make a fairly decent prediction on this timeline also allows people to make better choices in Migration, if they indeed even have the ability and economic resources to migrate at all, which most really do not. I mean really, if you currently are living on $2/day in a Mumbai Slum, you’re not going to be buying a Plane Ticket to New Zealand to find a better life. Most people are pretty well stuck where they are, at least on the nation-state level.