BecomingEarthseedIntroduction
Becoming Earthseed: A Survival Guide for the Human Race
Introduction
All our eggs are in one fraying basket
This book is written from a Gaian perspective, that is, the perspective of James Lovelock's Gaia theory. This controversial theory states that in some respects, all life on Earth acts as a single organism, named for the Greek Earth goddess Gaia, which regulates Earth's environmental conditions in much the same way a human body regulates its internal environment. To pick a simple example: as warm-blooded creatures, humans automatically regulate our body temperatures to keep them in a narrow range somewhere around 37.5 degrees Celsius. Similarly, Lovelock believes that by regulating the levels of greenhouse gases in the air, Gaia has kept the range of temperatures on Earth's surface within the spread of less than 100 degrees Celsius necessary to support life, even as the Sun has grown gradually hotter over the past four billion years.
Please don't let this new-agey idea scare you off. I'm not some sort of Gaian mystic who worships an imagined supernatural Earth goddess, and in keeping with my commitment to the ideal of scientific skepticism, I can't even claim any certainty that Gaia exists as anything more than a useful metaphor. But there are three good reasons why the metaphor works well for this book, which I will come back to in a moment.
First, I have to explain what this book is about. Its title comes from the name of a fictional religion described by Octavia E. Butler in her near-future dystopian novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Without ever mentioning Gaia explicitly, Butler's heroine and founder of the Earthseed faith, Lauren Olamina, paints a picture of humanity as the seeds of a planetary organism--seeds that would one day be capable of "taking root among the stars." But before we could do that, the human race would have to rise from the hardest of times, the economic collapses triggered by our own abuse of Mother Earth. That's also what this book is about: healing our own living world and making new ones.
What does it mean to make a new living world? The process is called terraforming, and it involves "engineering" on a massive scale to give a planet abundant surface water, a breathable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, a suitable temperature range, fertile soil for growing food, and a world-spanning web of life, or biosphere, capable of sustaining these conditions. (Because the project is so huge and because nonhuman living systems do most of the work, "engineering" isn't quite the right word, but it will have to do.)
Now back to Gaia:
- The first reason to write this book from a Gaian perspective is pure poetry: if Gaia, the living Earth, is likened to a tree, then we can in fact become her seed. Scattered across the cosmos, we can fulfill for Gaia the destiny that all living organisms share: to reproduce and perpetuate the species. So far, Gaia is a species with only one member, a condition that makes her critically endangered given the many powerful and dangerous forces that exist in the Universe (including ourselves!)
- The second reason is that if we fail to see Earthlife as it is, as an interconnected whole, then any effort to heal it or to establish it on a new world will fail. Maintaining only shattered fragments of wilderness, as we're doing now, is like keeping Gaia in a coma, on life support, exquisitely fragile, when we could choose instead to bring her back to something resembling her former strength, hopefully within less than a century. Similarly, the slow process of bringing a dead world to life must be viewed, not as a series of separate steps, but as an integrated process driven by a partnership between humans and the new biosphere as a whole. To say that humans are the terraformers is in some ways misleading; it would be fairer to say that we will only till the soil and plant the right seeds, and the seeds will do the rest of the work to grow a new web of life that in time will become a "child" of Gaia.
- The third reason is an issue of shared perspective. Gaia, if she exists, is the only force known to us that has ever terraformed a planet before. Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless ball of rock with an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, water vapor, and volcanic gases. These gases are now trace elements in a life-giving troposphere overwhelmingly dominated by nitrogen and oxygen; the oxygen was undoubtedly produced by life, and the dominance of nitrogen may also be in some ways connected to Gaia's evolution. Part of the traditional theory of evolution states that life adapts to a changing environment, but the focus in Gaia theory reverses the arrow: life also changes its environment to suit its own needs. This is the core of terraforming: life remaking a world in its own image.
I'm aware that my subtitle, "A Survival Guide for the Human Race," is rather grandiose; it doesn't really fit with my generally modest personality. But I have three excuses for it, beyond the obvious marketing rationale. The first is that while I'm just a young software developer with a bachelor's in computer science, a minor in environmental analysis, and a passion for space exploration, I had lots of help available in writing this book. The manuscript was developed on a wiki site called AboutUs.org, and all the contributors' names will be listed at the end of the book.
The second reason is that this book doesn't really say anything wholly new. It is a summary, a Gaian synthesis of ideas and research that come from people with Ph.Ds and distinguished careers, bringing together scientific knowledge and policy plans from members of the environmental community with technological extrapolation and informed speculation from futurists and hard science-fiction writers.
The third reason is a little less modest. There's one thing I believe that I'm good at, and that's sweeping generalizations. A generally useless and sometimes even dangerous skill, it becomes very helpful when designing the basis for the Thousand-Year Institutions described in Chapter 5. If this book is to have any lasting impact, its message must in some sense be timeless, built around a set of core principles general enough to weather the gale-force winds of change that characterize the modern era. So I wrote a list of five such principles, and here they are:
1. Life is sacred.
I don't mean this in a strictly religious sense, though it is worth noting that from an evolutionary perspective, life is the force that created us. As such, if the church of science ever develops a pantheon of empirically verified "gods," Gaia will be a natural candidate. But what I really mean is that while Earthlife could be viewed as a tool that we use to sustain ourselves and that we may use in the future to build new worlds, we are also a part of the interconnected web of Earthlife that constitutes Gaia; anything we do to Earthlife, we do to ourselves. The general tendency of humans to ignore this principle over the past few centuries is the major reason why, before we can move on to making new Earths, we will need to re-terraform this one. This principle is also the reason why we should treat other species as partners rather than tools in our terraforming efforts. Genetic engineering, if we find we must use it to help life adapt to new worlds, must be applied with the utmost care and respect.
2. Change is eternal.
Ironically, Gaia herself is principally defined by her tendency to keep our planet's climate, acidity levels, and other important factors stable within the very narrow range necessary to support complex life. But Gaia's strength lies in her great adaptability. When times change--the Sun heats up a little more, a killer asteroid strikes, or a shift in the Earth's orbit takes us gradually into an Ice Age--Gaia changes too, all of her interrelated species evolving to find a new equilibrium. The lesson here is that all living worlds require continuous maintenance. Building a sustainable civilization on Earth is the hard part, but maintaining such a civilization will be far from easy. Likewise, a terraforming project will never truly be "finished," with a planet in a final and static condition hospitable to life. On a planet like Mars, which is small enough that it has a tendency to lose its atmosphere over time, this lesson is particularly clear: the terraformers, humans as well as other life, must constantly push back against the cosmic forces that constantly threaten the habitability of any planet.
3. Chaos is inevitable, but can be managed by life.
This principle derives from Sadi Carnot's famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy or chaos of a closed system, such as the Universe as a whole, must always increase. Life can build ordered structures such as cells, organs, organisms, and whole biospheres because life is an open system driven mainly by energy input from the Sun. (Heat from nuclear decay in Earth's interior is a lesser but important source.) Still, no matter how hard life tries, large-scale chaos is always breaking out in the form of wildfires, hurricanes, meteor impacts, and other natural disasters. Any plan aimed at sustaining a biosphere must include extensive contingency planning to ensure that it will be flexible enough to recover from such events.
4. Overly rapid change leads to unnecessary chaos.
This is the most important principle. The changes currently being wrought by civilization on our home planet need to be slowed down, as described in Chapter 2, if we want to keep Earth habitable for us. It is in our nature to be impatient, to want to see a thing finished in our lifetimes, but a headlong rush into the future is far more likely to bring catastrophe than a technological utopia. Also, unless medical science discovers a way to dramatically lengthen human life, it will not be possible for any one person to see both the beginning and the "end" of any terraforming effort that can be expected to succeed (perhaps not even the reterraforming of Earth). Remember that in the case of Mars and other dead worlds, we are trying to push a planet through all the phases of evolution that Earthlife passed through in its first 3.5 billion years, from a dead world to a living one stable enough to support fragile multicellular creatures such as ourselves. If we try to do it all in decades or even centuries, we will probably end up with a deeply unstable world chaotically oscillating between extremes. (Of course, we can still live on the new world while we're waiting out the millennia, by building self-sustaining colonies underground or under airtight domes or tents, as described in Chapter 8.)
5. Terraforming other worlds is humanity's destiny.
This principle is based partly on the ecocentric goal of reproducing Gaia as a whole, but also on the human-centric observation, stated by Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower, that "It's a destiny we'd better pursue if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs." In other words, all our eggs are currently in one basket, and we're busily slashing that basket to ribbons through pollution and the destruction of species and habitats. Even if we do avoid ruining Earth's habitability for human life over the coming decades, there is always the possibility that some celestial event could wipe us out (although Earthlife, especially the nonillions of incredibly hardy bacteria, will certainly go on long after humanity is gone). The long-term survival of our species really does depend on making more homes for ourselves. The orbital space colonies described in Chapter 7, giant metal cylinders spinning for centrifugal gravity, are far too fragile to serve as effective safeguards, even if they contain self-sustaining miniature biospheres. We need more solid ground to stand on.
