To The End Of The Earth

It used to be thought that we were about halfway through our planet’s history, and that conditions would continue in the way they have in the last few hundred million years until the Sun becomes a red giant in something like five thousand million years’ time. Sadly, this is not now considered likely, but that’s not really because of us or any damage we might be doing to the planet’s long term prospects. It turns out that our Sun has something more hostile in store for us in less than an æon. And at this point I should probably explain my words.

Firstly, I still use the long scale with large numbers, so for me a billion is 10¹² and so on – 1 followed by twelve 0’s. The short scale, where a billion is 10⁹, 1 000 000 000, is American and when I say “American” I mean both continents. It’s fairly wasteful to use up the words for numbers on lower values, so I don’t do it. That said, ironically from an English-using perspective, the short scale does line up better with metric multiple prefixes such as giga- for “billion” and tera- for “trillion” and so on. There’s also already a perfectly good word, “millard”, referring to a hundred thousand anyway.

Secondly, the word æon, from the Greek word ‘αιων meaning “age” or “generation”, and sometimes translated in the Bible as “world” in a fairly pejorative way, is a unit of time lasting a thousand million, or millard, years. From the same root stems the word “eon”, which is a division of time above “era”, so I’ll talk about that too. Earth’s past history is divided on the longest temporal scale into eons, namely the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic, this last being our current eon. From the Archean onwards, these are divided into eras (the well-known Palæozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic in the past 540 million years or so), periods (for example the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous), epochs (in our case the Pleistocene, Holocene and probably the Anthropocene), ages, for example the Meghalayan which lasted from some time in the Bronze Age and might be considered to have finished in the 1950s, and finally chrons, which in the case of the current Sub-Atlantic started around the time Rome was starting to expand. It gets a bit confusing because of the archæological Three Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron, and incidentally we are still in the Iron Age, which collides with the chrons.

With a couple of exceptions, Earth’s future is as yet unmapped as far as actual names for intervals of time are concerned, but it certainly isn’t unmapped according to scientific understanding, which of course could change easily. In fact it did just that in the past few years with the realisation that we haven’t got as long as we thought. I’ve already gone into a fictionalised history of the next two hundred million years which mainly amounts to Dougal Dixon’s work on ‘After Man’, ‘Man After Man’ and ‘The Future Is Wild’. This is somewhat feasible and somewhat based on science, though forty year old science, and has some degree of validity, but there is a firmer understanding of the probable near future, and also well beyond that until the Sun dies. Thus I’ll start with the next few million years.

It’s been proposed that we’re currently in the Anthropocene Epoch, but it isn’t clear when it started. The previous epoch, the Holocene, covered the time since the end of the last Ice Age, but in recent years it’s been reconsidered and now there’s a popular movement to divide the Holocene off from the past few years because of the major effect our own species is having on Gaia, hence Anthropocene – ‘ανθροπος + καινος = > human + freshness. All the epochs in the Cenozoic end in “-cene” because they’re relatively recent. The geological dating system uses “BP” to name particular fairly recent times, usually within the history of our genus Homo, which stands for “Before Present”, the “present” being defined as the year 1950. Consequently one suggestion is to date the Anthropocene from 1950. Another rather similar proposal is that it begin from the earliest nuclear weapons tests, since these have left a long-lasting change in the geological record by irradiating the world and changing its radionuclide signature. A third suggestion is that it begin with the Industrial Revolution, and finally Heather Davis has proposed that it start in 1492, since this is when Europeans began to conquer the rest of the world. Rupert Sheldrake, who articulated the Gaia Hypothesis, recently proposed that the Neocene will follow the Anthropocene in the near future, which basically coincides with the Singularity and marks the point where machines will sort the environmental problems we’ve created. This would make the Anthropocene ridiculously short, possibly less than a century, but Sheldrake embraces that, linking it to the acceleration of change, which may have started nearly an æon ago with the appearance of multicellular life. The future is of course unknown and our existence may have vast consequences of which we’re currently unaware and can’t anticipate, but there’s also what might be called the “geological future”, that is, the future as it will proceed assuming that human activity lacks major long-term consequences for the planet, which is probably less hubric and more Copernican, as it were.

Naming things doesn’t necessarily give you any control over them though.

The most obvious issue in the relatively near future is anthropogenic climate change. It isn’t clear whether what we do to the climate is far-reaching enough to end the recent spate of ice ages, of which there have been five from the Pleistocene onwards so far. It might even trigger one, because if Antarctic icebergs spread far enough they may reflect more heat into space and cool the planet. There are various ideas about the next ice age. The most popular seems to be that it will happen anyway, in about fifty millennia, which is when it’s “scheduled”. More recently this has been questioned, and some climatologists believe there will still be another ice age but that it will be in a hundred millennia, because by that point climate will have returned to the point where it would’ve been without our technology as it has recently been. Of course it may also be that we or our machine successors will just “re-wild” most or all of the planet and things will get back to “normal”. This degree of uncertainty regarding even the relatively near geological future might be seen as indicating that this is just idle speculation, but in fact it may not be because certain things are well-known and established scientific facts it seems unlikely we’ll be able to avoid, such as entropy, and those can be predicted fairly confidently.

A lot of this is covered in the popular video ‘Timelapse Of The Future’:

I’ve covered this before here, and there are similarities between this post and that one and its successor, but I hope I’m saying something fresh here too.

Fifty thousand years from now, the day will be one second longer. This is because the lunar tidal action on Earth gradually slows our rotation. I’ve previously been curious about how long it would take before the year has exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, and if this change is linear, leap years will become unnecessary by the time each day is fifty-nine seconds longer, almost three million years from now, and before that date they could be rarer, say every five years by six hundred millennia from today. To be honest, I find the idea that the Gregorian calendar would still be in use by then absurd, but there are similar assumptions made about the likes of long-term contracts and economic planning, so maybe it will, and Y2K is an example of a problem caused by assuming such things would not be in place for longer than a few years.

A quarter of a million years hence, Lō’ihi will break the surface of the Pacific Ocean, although it may of course be either deeper or shallower by then depending on which way sea levels go. This is the next Hawaiian island, to the southeast of Hawai’i itself. This will continue as the Pacific plate and the hotspot shift over many millions of years and the islands to the northwest erode away. By six hundred millennia from now, the chances are that an asteroid one kilometre in diameter will have hit us, although this could happen at any time. The energy released by this would be equivalent to around sixty times the detonation of every nuclear weapon in the world. There’s a modelling tool for asteroid impacts here.

Around a million and a quarter years from now, a red dwarf star called Gliese 710 will be very close to the Solar System, less than a quarter of a light year away. By two million years hence, judging by previous events when this has happened, the ocean will once again be alkaline enough for coral to recover. This acidification occurs because of the increase in atmospheric CO₂. Ten million CE will be around the time the Afrikan Rift Valley will be flooded and the new continent, which Dougal Dixon named Lemuria, will start to move across the Indian Ocean. Also by this time, even without a mass extinction most species around today will have died out and, I hope, been replaced. Fifty million years from now the map of the world will look roughly like this:

(I actually think this is exaggerated in the sense that it assumes the rate of continental drift to be faster than it in fact is).

Around 200 million years from now, there will be a new supercontinent, whose exact shape is hard to predict because nobody knows much about which way Antarctica will move. This restores the planet to the situation as it was before the dinosaurs evolved, and makes for a large amount of desert with extreme temperatures near the centre of the continent, very hot during the day and very cold at night. It will also increase the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, and means a single world ocean and a single landmass covering 29% of Earth’s surface. While this continent is in place, the Hadley cells either side of the Equator will move to 40° either side of it. This will increase the already high percentage of desert land by a further 25%. This supercontinent will have broken up by about 450 million years from now, leading to the kind of climate found here during the Age of Dinosaurs, and also at around this time the likelihood of a mass extinction from a gamma ray burst, which will cause it to rain concentrated nitric acid, means it’s likely to have happened by about this time.

There may just be time for another supercontinent to form about 600 million years from now, by which time there will be no more total solar eclipses because of our satellite’s widening orbit, but there will still be annular eclipses where some of the Sun’s surface remains visible.

Then, unfortunately, a major catastrophe will ensue. Up until this point, a process referred to as the carbonate-silicate cycle has kept considerable amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Rain dissolves this gas and acidifies, landing on rocks and gradually dissolving them. Calcium and bicarbonate ions are washed into the ocean, where it’s incorporated into the hard parts of organisms such as plankton, molluscs and coral. This sinks to the ocean bed, where it’s buried and ends up in the magma under the crust. Volcanic eruptions then return this to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. But the Sun is gradually getting brighter, and by this time the light will be strong enough to start weathering the rocks faster than their carbon can be released back into the air, and will also start to dry the land, reducing rainfall and therefore carbon reaching the sea. The rocks will also harden, slowing continental drift and since that’s responsible for throwing up new volcanoes along the edges of the plates, these will erupt less often. At a certain point, around 600 million years from now, one form of photosynthesis known as C₃ will cease to operate due to insufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This will lead to a gradual decline and eventual extinction, first of green herbs such as annuals, then deciduous trees, then broad-leaved evergreens and finally conifers. I would expect that during this time, evolution would lead to other plants occupying their vacant niches. That said, there’s still C₄ photosynthesis, which can function at a lower level of carbon dioxide, and there are many plants which use this type, particularly those in the spurge family, and they already look quite alien and futuristic:

Photograph of Euphorbia helioscopia, taken in Machida city, Tokyo, Japan. Croped & resized.
Date
17 May 2006
Source
Own work
Author
Sphl

Water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and consequently this evaporation of water from the oceans and elsewhere will start to raise surface temperatures. Because of less photosynthesis, oxygen will also fall and therefore the ozone layer will break down and there will be more oxidation at the surface due to more ultraviolet light penetrating to ground level, removing even more oxygen from the atmosphere. By 850 million years or so in the future, C₄ photosynthesis will become impossible and the cycle run by the sun through plants will cease to function. This means that only animals who don’t breathe oxygen or rely on plants for food, directly or indirectly, could survive. This would, for example, include worms living in geothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean who feed on bacteria. However, the ocean will also be disappearing and once the average surface temperature exceeds 47°C 1.1 æons from today, the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere will start to run a feedback loop through the greenhouse effect, causing runaway evaporation from the oceans and a slide into a situation where the only life which can survive will be in places like lakes and caves at the tops of mountains or near the poles, and finally not even that. 1.6 æons from now only bacterial and archeal life will remain, and 2.8 æons hence even the poles will be at 150°C.

I find this all rather claustrophobic and suffocating, which is a bit of a weird reaction. I look around at the trees in the park, the people, badgers and spiders in this household, note that I can breathe the air and that there is evidence of human activity all around in the form of houses, roads, vehicles, furniture, whatever, and it really saddens me that it will come to an end so soon, but I also find it weird because we’ve got 800 million years to go. However, they used to think that Earth would stay in about the same state for about as long as it had already existed, so theory has robbed us of three or four æons of life. There’s only enough time for another two supercontinents, by contrast with maybe ten which have happened before on this world. But the future is in fact unknown and may not be like the past, or continue trends which began then. We have intelligent tool-using life now, and those tools may find a way to lengthen our stay, or alternatively hasten our demise. Also, if some of us were to leave this planet permanently and entirely to settle elsewhere, that gives us more hope, if hope is the word. But a Doomsday Argument-like scenario makes that unlikely. Then again, maybe it isn’t up to us. Maybe another species of animal will start to invent more advanced tools and technology before the carbonate-silicate cycle breaks down. Maybe there will even be such beings around as it starts to happen. Who knows? The future is unknown.

Let The Bodies Pile Up In Their Billions

It’s been mentioned that They might just be planning our extinction. That is, it may be that the ruling class, having realised that the planet is in trouble and that automation makes most workers unnecessary, might just have quietly decided that if the majority of the human race gets wiped out by various disasters it might be no bad thing for them. I’m going to call this Their Extinction. Although they might have miscalculated and believe themselves to be invulnerable when they aren’t, in which case it will literally be their extinction, I don’t actually mean that they will themselves die out but that the scenario they have in mind is their solution to their problems, which are not our problems. But there’s also Our Extinction: the extinction that we can own. This is what’s been referred to as voluntary human extinction, or anti-natalism. It’s been summed up, perhaps inaccurately, as “Live Long And Die Out”, and is also called anti-natalism because it’s against the idea of having any more babies.

On the one hand, then, there’s the STARK Conspiracy, a fictionalised version of the first plan written up by Ben Elton in his I assume well-known novel and later TV series ‘STARK’. On the other is VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’ – the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It must be borne in mind that the former is fictional, and therefore probably doesn’t reflect reality. We have to be very cautious at this point about conspiracy theories, and in fact that should probably be addressed first.

Conspiracy theories give the illusion of explanation when in reality they only serve a psychological purpose of giving people a sense of certainty and a superficial hypothesis to account for perceived situations. Most of the time they have no basis in reality, although occasionally they have. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, did turn out to be real. In the unlikely event that you don’t know what this was, the CDC deliberatedly infected Black men with syphilis spirochaetes and refrained from treating them to study the progress of the disease without treatment. Not only were they infected, but of course they passed it on to their sexual partners and children. There was no informed consent. This took place between 1932 and 1972. That, then, is a real conspiracy. They do happen. They may not be the point though. The point is really that we live in a situation where large-scale conspiracies are possible and can be influential. In other words, this world with this system, antisocial people controlling society, the ability to wield large scale power, corruption and so forth. Conspiracies, which are in any case probably not as widespread as they seem to be, are a symptom, not the disease. Whether the disease is endemic to the population or not amounts to a political stance. But exposing conspiracies may be pointless because clearing one up leaves space for another. That’s all assuming that major conspiracies exist of course.

There’s also the question of how much a conspiracy “theory” is even a theory. It’s usually more a hypothesis with strong confirmation bias. We think there’s a conspiracy and go on to perceive positive signs of one everywhere. They don’t seem to be testable or falsifiable propositions so much as belief systems which cause one to seek confirmatory evidence. Hence it might be better to call them “conspiracy hypotheses” just to encourage one to bear in mind that they are not rigorously arrived at on the whole.

The next step is to bear in mind the superficiality of their explanatory power. There are ideologies and social and political theories about economics, politics and the social realm which one may agree or disagree with but have sophisticated approaches to society. For instance, there’s the trickle-down theory, which I’ve chosen because I disagree with it but it’s considered respectable. This is the idea that the rich should be taxed less because their wealth will enable them to provide greater employment opportunities for the poor, whose income will therefore increase. And it is true that money doesn’t generally just sit in banks doing nothing, but is often invested and used elsewhere. My point being that I appreciate the reasoning behind this and have a limited amount of respect for it, but I do have some. It makes more sense than the idea that the Illuminati are running the world right now. Incidentally, even if they were it wouldn’t make it any worse than it already is, and might even make it better (but read the blog post if you like).

One conspiracy which did turn out to be true, and was on a larger scale than some, was the one involving Cambridge Analytica. It’s tough to make a case for that being irrelevant although it remains so that a different form of democracy and media and social media ownership and influence would have made it harder for it to succeed, so it is still symptomatic.

We’re left, then, with cock-ups. That’s rather flippant, but to be more serious about it, there are concerted attempts to do things surreptitiously, and there’s the general inability and incompetence of muddling through and hoping things will be okay. It isn’t at all clear what’s happening with Their human extinction. Science strongly supports the existence of various issues whose confluence could be expected to wipe out the species, such as anthropogenic climate change, plastic pollution, oceanic acidification and the appearance of new pandemics among humans. There’s a remarkable response to this among governments which either involves complete silence and failure to address the problems or denial, and it isn’t clear if this is disingenuous or not. It’s possible that they are psychologically speaking in denial about it, and of course that’s an early stage of grieving. Alternatively, it might just be propaganda and they know the score, and given the fossil fuel lobby’s successful decades-long obfuscation, that seems more likely.

The question then arises, if they know, what does it mean that the general public is unable to perceive a response to the crisis? Does it mean they’re doing nothing, or are they doing something so unpopular that the public would find it unacceptable? The problem is that silence is hard to interpret. We do know that the majority of the human race is in mortal danger. That much is undeniable. A clue as to what might be happening could be found in the current mass murder of the poor which is taking place in the UK.

In the past, undesirables have of course been rounded up and put in concentration camps, which are a British invention. This is a fairly expensive solution, although it does allow for the spread of lethal infections fairly easily, for which treatment would be counterproductive. In a move reminiscent of care in the community, it’s now possible for people to be killed in their own homes or on the streets through benefit sanctions or by encouraging assault against them, and this resembles the idea of privatisation – “individuals and their families” – quite closely. Therefore I imagine the plan is to encourage the degradation and habitability of the planet until it becomes impossible for poor people to survive. Perhaps “encourage” is the wrong word, as it suggests agency. It’s more a question of the problem of potentially uncoöperative poor people whose services are no longer required due to automation by allowing them to die. This is a fairly straightforward, not really conspiratorial scenario which resembles other policies in its laissez faire quality. In fact it isn’t so much a policy as the absence of one.

Ben Elton had a somewhat different idea of what was planned, and although his novel had a humorous purpose he’s known for his axe-grinding. ‘Stark’ has been described as “their solution”, and it’s only a very limited one although it kind of is. Elton envisaged the rich engineering an economic crash which rendered the resources more affordable, followed by the construction of a self-sustaining orbital habitat to which the super-rich would escape, but also envisaged them killing themselves after a few years due to something like boredom and disillusionment. I can’t remember the plot that well, but if it did involve going into orbit, the question is, what happens next? How should we feel about their descendants, assuming there are any? Is there another social struggle after most of us have died? Would their children be responsible for the ecocide committed on this planet and the extinction of the vast majority of the human race?

Something I keep meaning to get round to talking about here is the concept of “Up Wing”. The concept has changed over the past few decades, but there are suggestions that Left and Right be replaced by Down and Up. Brian Stableford calls these “Green” and “Grey”, but that isn’t quite what I mean. Up wing politics supports the idea of technological progress and Down wing believes that technological innovation has become detrimental to the human race. In the context of human extinction, the idea that technological innovation is harmful to us is not simple because in a way, some people would prefer us to die out as that could promote the recovery of the biosphere. This is still not the place, unfortunately, to go into too much depth on this issue, but I often feel it’s a major thing I’m not mentioning with big flappy ears, wrinkles and a proboscis. I’ll get round to it someday. But I will say, in spite of my endless invective against capitalism, this is not the whole story.

Moving on, there’s “our extinction”. The meaning of “our” here is quite limited because I’m not personally convinced by this position, although it might be better to orchestrate it rather than having it thrust upon us. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, also known as VHEMT, espouses what’s known as “anti-natalism”, in this case with a Green tendency. I first came across VHEMT in the early 1990s in connection with Earth First!, a group with which I have major issues, but I can see the point of VHEMT itself. The movement takes a humorous approach to the issue of environmental devastation, although the underlying message is serious. The thesis is basically that the existence of human beings on this planet, in their current state at least, is harmful to all life on Earth and therefore that we should stop having children and deliberately die out, as peacefully as possible. In fact I get the impression that they believe that no manifestation of human life and culture on this planet or off it is positive for the biosphere. Right now, it does appear that if we were all to disappear tomorrow, the planet would quickly bounce back from the damage we’ve done, and this chimes with James Lovelock’s earlier opinion on the Gaia Hypothesis that human arrogance alone makes us believe that we can have a long-term impact on the survival of life on this planet, and that we metaphorically amount to a case of the common cold, which Gaia could easily shake off. Rather disturbingly, Lovelock has now changed his mind and now believes that the Singularity will save the planet but that if we continue in the same vein life will indeed become impossible here. In any event, VHEMT are not misanthropic, but actually want to spare us all from the disasters which will ensue if we continue as we have been. They also acknowledge that the chances of everyone deciding to stop breeding are effectively zero, but that it’s still worth trying, presumably because good will is the only moral impulse (this is Kant’s idea incidentally – I didn’t get this from them). This is reminiscent of my attitude towards veganism, or rather a plant-based diet, in that although I believe it’s essential for human survival given current conditions, that doesn’t mean I think most of the human race will ever adopt such a diet. Nonetheless it isn’t about that for me. It’s just about not being part of the problem in that respect. In other ways I am part of the problem. Likewise with VHEMT. Interestingly, they also have a concept of THEM – Terrorist Human Extinction Movement – which is the military-industrial complex and amounts to the tendency I described in the first part of this post.

They also want to clear up some misconceptions. They are pro-parent, pro-child, voluntary and life-affirming. They believe that children who already exist deserve a good life, which is in fact one motivation for them advocating this view – the starving children cliché. Given that children exist, they also need good parenting. They are not imposing the idea on anyone, i.e. they don’t believe in enforcing anything like abortions, sterilisations or contraception. Finally, they are life-affirming: they don’t want more people to die than are dying already or for people to kill themselves.

I hope I’ve given them a fair press there. It’s also quite persuasive to argue that if a person in a rich country, particularly a middle-class person, has children, those children will then probably go on to consume and cause more damage to the planet over their many decades of life, as would further descendants and so forth up until the point where human life on this planet becomes unsustainable. I do not, however, agree with them.

VHEMT abuts onto several other issues in an interesting way. One of these is the GSM community. If the idea of sex for physical reproduction is abandoned, it makes it harder to argue for heterosexuality being better than homosexuality, and of course if the infliction of existence is seen as a negative, it could even make sex for the purposes of procreation morally inferior to sex where procreation is impossible. However, I wouldn’t entirely agree with that portrayal of queerness as many lesbians, gay men and trans people do in fact want children, and gender dysphoria can even include the negative perception of one’s own barrenness or sterility, because one may be technically fertile but is unable to procreate in the manner which is congruent with one’s gender identity. There’s also the concept of freedom from children. Patriarchy often means that initially similar circumstances gradually drift towards more rigidly circumscribed gender rôles because of such factors as potential employers’ expectation of the nature of one’s parental responsibilities and the biological clock.

Antinatalism generally is often motivated by other reasons than simply hastening the demise of the species. Although I personally consider the coming into existence of a sentient being as morally neutral, it’s undeniable that into every life a little rain must fall. There are claims that our memory is selective and that we rationalise our suffering to minimalise it, partly because we are instinctively driven to stay alive, reproduce and raise children.

There is a sense in which I am myself antinatalist, though not usually about humans. I would far rather not be infested with parasites than have to debate myself over the moral quandary of killing them, and I would definitely prefer houseflies not to breed in my home. I’m also pro-choice, so to that extent it does apply to my own species. In a sense, anti-natalism could be seen as assessing the quality of human life sufficiently negatively that it means that it is usually or always better not to be born. That said, we do have children, although we limited it to two because that amounts to zero population growth if universalised. I should point out that I only really believe in zero population growth for the developed world because of our greater potential for environmental damage, the lower need for support from one’s children and the easy availability of contraception. I wouldn’t impose that on others in the majority of the world, and I wouldn’t even impose it on anyone else. It probably goes without saying that most vegans are probably antinatalist with regard to farm animals, and I’m no exception. I don’t believe that farm animals should continue to be bred and a lot of the time the breeds themselves have been modified with purely human benefit in mind. I do, however, believe in animal sanctuaries if livestock (horrible word) farming has ended.

There are a few issues with human extinction being a positive thing. We don’t appear to be moving towards a managed or planned extinction for a start, and this is problematic because if we leave our machines running, as it were, the risks to various localities become considerable. We have stored toxic chemicals, biological weapons and nuclear facilities, and if any of these fail without human supervision, the environment in the vicinity at least will be severely damaged and at best take a long time to recover. On the other hand, mass extinctions can be increase biodiversity. The problem with this view, though, is that it focusses on proliferation of variety rather than the suffering and death of the creatures going extinct or otherwise being harmed.

There’s a long history of communities which decide not to have children and die out. Entire religious sects have done so. The Shakers, for example, founded in the eighteenth century, were celibate after admission, although they allowed people to join when they were pregnant and they adopted children. The sect found it difficult to support itself economically because mass production was bringing the price of the kind of goods they made by hand and sold down, and there was a constant decline in membership, which peaked at six thousand in the early nineteenth century. There appear to be only two left although they hope others will join them. This is the reason I don’t think movements like VHEMT will succeed: they won’t pass their ideas on to new generations of their own and belief systems acquired during childhood are the most durable for adults. Therefore they would have to rely on converting people, and I just don’t think this is going to happen, so for me it isn’t a question of whether it’s desirable but how likely a planned extinction is by this method.

One of the arguments the founder of the movement, Les Knight, made for human extinction was that even if we were able to achieve harmony with the planet in the short term, this could later change. This seems erroneous to me because the forces of oppression need to win every battle but the forces of liberation only need to be victorious once, provided they’ve truly won, and a sustainable society is only possible if society is liberated.

There’s also the Medea Hypothesis, the “evil twin” of the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the claim that life tends towards self-destruction of its environment. For instance, a few æons ago microörganisms began to produce oxygen via photosynthesis, which poisoned most of the other organisms alive at that point and it took the planet many millions of years to adjust. In general, microbes are seen as responsible for the catastrophes associated with this, and therefore the idea of stewardship by humans could make sense. Maybe we could monitor the biosphere for threats and prevent them. Believers in this hypothesis would attribute the current crisis to it, although this time it isn’t instigated by microörganisms. However, we technically have a choice. Given that some time in the next æon there will be another Medean event, when the Sun wipes out all complex life on this planet leaving only microbes, the presence of intelligent tool users at that point, even if not human, or in fact any successful establishment of biodiverse settlements elsewhere in the Cosmos could have led to the survival of the kind of complex life which originated here. So maybe we owe it to the Universe to continue to survive.

Boris Johnson has recently been criticised for his alleged statement, “let the bodies pile up in their thousands” in response to lockdown measures. He may well not have said this. However, it is the case that the policies his and other governments pursue guarantee that the bodies will in fact pile up in their billions unless something is done. It seems there are three options: their extinction, in the sense that we all drift into a situation where almost everyone dies; our extinction, where VHEMT’s idea catches on universally, and the scenario where we survive. That last scenario is incompatible with capitalism of course, which makes it improbable, but if we did, stewardship to prevent future non-human caused disasters would seem to be morally incumbent upon us.