We need to go to Mars. Not for a footprints-and-flags mission, to take some photos and return with a few Mars rocks, but to colonise, and to stay. It won't even be as expensive as most people think. The SpaceX company can launch a normal satellite today for ten times less than NASA did it with the Shuttle. It's possible and affordable.
Still, it's a big project. People will probably die to achieve it. So why bother?
For me, the main reason is that we can't save Earth's environment. That should be obvious by now. For all the international deals, right back to Rio in 1992, the ecosystem is still being destroyed. Forget climate change, even. The bigger problem is the simple destruction of species and habitats, and we can't stop it. Even when we try we just cause a new disaster. Bio-fuel was meant to reduce fossil fuel use, but instead it only smashed the forests where orang-utans live, as land was converted to farms to grow the bio-crops. Now orangs face extinction. We tried to be good, and instead just shifted the disaster to another place.
The problem is too many people. Everyone born needs - at a minimum - water, food, clothes and a roof. That's before we think about jobs, or cars, or healthcare and all the other basic needs. All of that means humans have to exploit the Earth a little bit more. Globally we now use more than 50% of the fresh water first, before any other species. That means everything else put together has less water than humans, which is a recipe for catastrophe. We make 100 million new pieces of clothing every year, which works out at a bit more than 12 per person - not a huge amount, but the total is enormous. It's very hard to see how these numbers can be reduced without a population drop.
But that's not going to happen. Nobody will vote for a government that plans to limit births. Even people who know the risks won't. I know a man who understands the risks of over-population, is dedicated to Green issues - and has 4 children. That's how the world reacts to this; they agree we need to reduce human numbers, but then assume the need doesn't apply to them. And the result? The UN used to say world population would be 9.5 billion by 2100. Then 10.2 billion. Now it's 11.1 billion, because birth rates are just not dropping very fast. And remember, we need population not to stabilise, but to go DOWN, or sheer pressure of numbers will see the world driven to ecological disaster.
And so, Mars. It's so far away that large numbers of people will never be able to move there, however advanced technology might become. But we can move trees there, and animals, and build copies of the habitats on Earth. The various species will survive, and perhaps in a thousand years we could re-seed the Earth, and repair some of the horrendous damage we've done.
Humans don't learn. Sumerians, early Chinese, Maya, the first peoples of North America... they all pillaged their environment until it collapsed. This time we're doing it world wide, but we have a way to save something from the wreck. In doing so, we can save ourselves too.
Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Earth. Show all posts
Saturday, 22 December 2018
Friday, 2 November 2018
Leave no Footprints
There was a report this week that in the Cerrado region of Brazil, the savanna is being cleared for fields to grow soybeans. Huge areas are being burned all the time. It's doing enormous environmental damage and driving species to the edge of extinction.
It made me think about the idea today that we can save the world if we go meat-free two or three nights a week. But we can't. If we abandon beef the fields will just be converted to grow soybeans, or sugarcane for bio-fuel. That's already happening - the orangutan is in critical danger because of forest clearance for bio-fuel crops. So we reduced fossil fuel dependence to save the world, and instead smashed the ecosystem of Borneo.
The truth is that there are simply too many of us. Too many humans. We need too much land, too much water, and using one product instead of another only moves the disaster to somewhere else. We have to reduce our demands on the land, not just change them. And we know it can be done, because there are cultures from the past which did it. Most famous of these are the Plains Indians, whose ancestors slaughtered pretty much everything except the buffalo, leaving a threadbare ecosystem to their descendants. The Indians learned to take what could be taken without damage - "leave no footprints", they said, no mark that you'd been there at all. In a different way the Garamanta of North Africa did it too, living in one city amidst the Sahara as they did. It must have meant tight restrictions on water use and on food, and population control too.
Those are our choices. We could leave fewer footprints, by taking less from the land. It means a drastic reduction in standard of living; we'd have to use half the energy we do now, half the water, and much less food (at least in the developed world). Or we could reduce population, globally, by several billion people.
Both options are unpalatable and both are ridiculously hard. No voting public is going to elect a party that limits the right to have children. Even if it did, how do you enforce that abroad, in Africa for example? Or India? As for reducing our standard of living, don't waste my time. Voters opt for whoever they think will give them the most money and gadgets the soonest.
But here's the kicker. Another report this week estimates that the number of vertebrates worldwide has fallen by 60% since 1970. More than half of nearly every species except humans gone in half a century. And with losses like that the ecosystem will soon collapse, and human beings will see a catastrophic fall in numbers and living standards anyway. And we can't stop that happening, because we won't vote for it.
In a thousand years there really might be no human footprints left on the Earth.
It made me think about the idea today that we can save the world if we go meat-free two or three nights a week. But we can't. If we abandon beef the fields will just be converted to grow soybeans, or sugarcane for bio-fuel. That's already happening - the orangutan is in critical danger because of forest clearance for bio-fuel crops. So we reduced fossil fuel dependence to save the world, and instead smashed the ecosystem of Borneo.
The truth is that there are simply too many of us. Too many humans. We need too much land, too much water, and using one product instead of another only moves the disaster to somewhere else. We have to reduce our demands on the land, not just change them. And we know it can be done, because there are cultures from the past which did it. Most famous of these are the Plains Indians, whose ancestors slaughtered pretty much everything except the buffalo, leaving a threadbare ecosystem to their descendants. The Indians learned to take what could be taken without damage - "leave no footprints", they said, no mark that you'd been there at all. In a different way the Garamanta of North Africa did it too, living in one city amidst the Sahara as they did. It must have meant tight restrictions on water use and on food, and population control too.
Those are our choices. We could leave fewer footprints, by taking less from the land. It means a drastic reduction in standard of living; we'd have to use half the energy we do now, half the water, and much less food (at least in the developed world). Or we could reduce population, globally, by several billion people.
Both options are unpalatable and both are ridiculously hard. No voting public is going to elect a party that limits the right to have children. Even if it did, how do you enforce that abroad, in Africa for example? Or India? As for reducing our standard of living, don't waste my time. Voters opt for whoever they think will give them the most money and gadgets the soonest.
But here's the kicker. Another report this week estimates that the number of vertebrates worldwide has fallen by 60% since 1970. More than half of nearly every species except humans gone in half a century. And with losses like that the ecosystem will soon collapse, and human beings will see a catastrophic fall in numbers and living standards anyway. And we can't stop that happening, because we won't vote for it.
In a thousand years there really might be no human footprints left on the Earth.
Thursday, 18 October 2018
What Happened?
What we know about our deep history is outweighed, many times, by what we don't know.
I'm researching Heian era Japan, as I've mentioned before. The period ended in 1185 AD, not that long ago, yet we know almost nothing about how people lived. We understand most of the social order, the upper echelons of society, but that's about all. We don't even have much of an idea what people ate.
It's the same everywhere. There's still argument about how the Giza pyramids were built: by thousands of slaves, or by a smaller group of more professional men. No one really knows. People argue over who the Sumerians were and where they came from. Historians and archaeologists bicker over who the Hyksos were, who conquered part of ancient Egypt in 1650 BC and who were "possibly from Western Asia". In other words, the best we can say it that they most likely came from somewhere in one half of the largest continent on Earth. Not exactly precision, is it?
This tells me that as a species, human beings really don't remember much. Give us two generations and a minor dislocation - a war, a famine, plague - and we forget most of what we knew before. It happens amazingly fast. When Rome fell information was stored in dozens of major libraries across the Empire, but 50 years later nobody knew how to build Roman roads, or even the buildings that had filled every town. The philosophy of ancient Greece was forgotten in Europe completely, and had to be relearned from the Muslims a thousand years later. That staggers me. How can a whole continent forget all that wisdom?
Part of the answer is that we destroy it deliberately.
That post-Roman loss was led by the Catholic Church, which set out to destroy any book and all learning that wasn't approved by the clerics. Knowledge came from God, they said, not any other source. The Church did it again in the Americas in the 16th Century, trying to wipe out whatever they could of the former cultures. Rome tried to obliterate all memory of the Druids. History is full of examples like this, and it makes me so angry I can hardly speak.
That was my heritage. It was mine by right, and these bastards took it away.
It's important we remember this, and try not to let it happen again. Because we're entering a very tough period now, globally, with the horrendous damage we've done and are still doing to the world. 7.7 billion people is too many for the Earth to support for very long. We use too much water, too much land. I think there's going to be a crash, and the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it's going to be.
I hope we preserve what we can, because if we forget our past there's nothing to stop us doing the same stupid things again in the future.
I'm researching Heian era Japan, as I've mentioned before. The period ended in 1185 AD, not that long ago, yet we know almost nothing about how people lived. We understand most of the social order, the upper echelons of society, but that's about all. We don't even have much of an idea what people ate.
It's the same everywhere. There's still argument about how the Giza pyramids were built: by thousands of slaves, or by a smaller group of more professional men. No one really knows. People argue over who the Sumerians were and where they came from. Historians and archaeologists bicker over who the Hyksos were, who conquered part of ancient Egypt in 1650 BC and who were "possibly from Western Asia". In other words, the best we can say it that they most likely came from somewhere in one half of the largest continent on Earth. Not exactly precision, is it?
This tells me that as a species, human beings really don't remember much. Give us two generations and a minor dislocation - a war, a famine, plague - and we forget most of what we knew before. It happens amazingly fast. When Rome fell information was stored in dozens of major libraries across the Empire, but 50 years later nobody knew how to build Roman roads, or even the buildings that had filled every town. The philosophy of ancient Greece was forgotten in Europe completely, and had to be relearned from the Muslims a thousand years later. That staggers me. How can a whole continent forget all that wisdom?
Part of the answer is that we destroy it deliberately.
That post-Roman loss was led by the Catholic Church, which set out to destroy any book and all learning that wasn't approved by the clerics. Knowledge came from God, they said, not any other source. The Church did it again in the Americas in the 16th Century, trying to wipe out whatever they could of the former cultures. Rome tried to obliterate all memory of the Druids. History is full of examples like this, and it makes me so angry I can hardly speak.
That was my heritage. It was mine by right, and these bastards took it away.
It's important we remember this, and try not to let it happen again. Because we're entering a very tough period now, globally, with the horrendous damage we've done and are still doing to the world. 7.7 billion people is too many for the Earth to support for very long. We use too much water, too much land. I think there's going to be a crash, and the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it's going to be.
I hope we preserve what we can, because if we forget our past there's nothing to stop us doing the same stupid things again in the future.
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