Speculation on Proxima B and the Future of Humanity

Most of you have probably already heard the amazing news. An earth-sized planet has been found orbiting a ‘nearby’ star, and it might have water on its surface. Hooray!

Now for the bad news. A lot of people don’t seem realize how many orders of magnitude of difficulty leaving the solar system is over going to Mars, and how many more it is to get to Proxima Centuari. And we’re probably a lot further from getting humans safely to Mars and back than a lot of people think too. In a word, or rather three, space is hard.

Finding Proxima b is a baby step. It has taken 20 years to go from finding any planet to finding potentially habitable planets. My hope is that in another 20 years technology advances to the point where we can directly image these planets, and take spectra of the planets. The spectra would reveal what the atmosphere is made of. If we find planet atmospheres with water vapor and oxygen, or other gases that are far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, then we can start jumping up and down in our excitement about an actual living world. — You wouldn’t be a happy camper if you relocated to Proxima Centuari’s planet

Man, The Explorer

I don’t want to focus here on the difficulties the trip or the radiation would likely pose. Instead, I’d like to consider a broader question — one posed famously by Carl Sagan all those years ago, “if we do not destroy ourselves, we will, one day, venture to the stars.”

There’s a slightly less optimistic way of framing this, of course. And that is that homo sapiens are fundamentally an invasive species. Turning it on its head, it remains no less true: “If we don’t always find new ecosystems to invade and exploit, we will one day destroy ourselves.”

This premise, that we are fundamentally invasive, may strike humanists and optimists alike as offensive, but it is grounded in more than mere opinion.

In America, thirty genera of large animals — some very large indeed — disappeared practically at a stroke after the arrival of modern humans on the continent between ten and twenty thousand years ago. Altogether North and South America between them lost about three quarters of their big animals once man the hunter arrived with his flint-headed spears and keen organizational capabilities. Europe and Asia, where the animals had had longer to evolve a useful wariness of humans, lost between a third and a half of their big creatures.
Australia, for exactly the opposite reasons, lost no less than 95 percent. …
The question that arises is whether the disappearances of the Stone Age and disappearances of more recent times are in effect part of a single extinction event — whether, in short, humans are inherently bad news for other living things. The sad likelihood is that we may well be.
According to the University of Chicago paleontologist David Raup, the background rate of extinction on Earth throughout biological history has been one species lost every four years on average. According to one recent calculation, human-caused extinction now may be running as much as 120,000 times that level. — A Short History of Nearly Everything.

What Ethics?

There is more argument on this subject than a quotation can cover, but when we consider the course we’ve carved for ourselves from prehistory right on into the future, the over-arching theme is very hard to ignore. If this is correct, the seemingly least ethical options may wind up being the most actionable. Will we become the plague that spreads to the stars, or the meteor that purges the tree of life on Earth of some of its prominent limbs? Only time will tell, but more to the point, are we actually certain that option A is superior to option B, when we remove our ingrained desire to survive at all costs?

These are both big topics to go into. Book length ones, if done properly, and I don’t imagine I’ll provide many final conclusions here, but I can offer some thoughts toward unpacking these mutually intertwined ends.

The marked effect, for instance, on mega fauna when humans showed up to the party doesn’t seem to indicate a very flattering image of our nature. On the ethics side, there are John Gray and Nietzsche books that probably cover this better than I’m going to at 8:30 am, even if I wouldn’t personally lift the thesis wholesale from Genealogy of Morals or The Soul of the Marionette. (Both of which I recommend.) I’ll ask you this — where in the world do our morals reside, if not in us?

Answer as you will. My own answer is straightforward enough: our values are a matter of what we think. Kant can suck a dick. Of course, I do have a moral compass. But I’m not under the impression that my moral beliefs have any more material force than to some extent conditioning my own decisions, (and probably less than I imagine when it really comes down to it, especially in a catastrophe.) It should be evident that morals are a ‘soft’ means by which culture controls behavior — but the flow almost always works in that direction. Historically, very few individuals have changed the flow, at least without resorting to genocide. And the ‘determinism’ side of the equation can ask easily enough what social forces the Alexanders or Stalins were reacting to, and acting out.

Rather than digress into a jaunt along the myopic path of ethical relativism, I only mean to point toward the end result of our beliefs — to which values prescribe where we turn our eyes, what we look for and what we avoid — rather than wring our hands about a world devoid of compass. In doing that, I will admit that I’m glossing over a lot and committing a flagrant act of reification (“social forces”), but that’s where this discussion always gets complex, and the end result is pretty much the same. To this end I really recommend Delanda’s A New Philosophy of Society to anyone interested in a model of society that doesn’t require essentialism.

Voluntary Extinction

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction — one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. — Rust Cohle, True Detective Season 1.

What use are the real prospects of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, when placed side-by-side with our biological and social imperatives? When it comes to regulating our demand on the carrying capacity of the planet, I’d rather we have fewer children for a while, but not enough people are going to do that for it to probably make much difference. In other words, the values of such a movement would need to permeate a substantial swath of society, and yet in reality, mass movements are almost always the result of subconscious forces, rather than a prescribed, individual decision. Trumpism is one example of many: it was hard to predict precisely because we rarely recognize mass psychology at work until it latches onto a cause or explicit ideology. That doesn’t mean those forces derive from that cause. Quite the opposite.

We’re subject to human nature such as it is wherever we go, environmental pressures can bring out some radically different behaviors. That arguably isn’t changing what we are in the sense of our ‘condition’. It’s small hope if the idea is kind of Star Trek utopianism.

But there’s absolutely no assurance those results would follow our desired moral arc. It might just as well be an atrocity. Ultimately, no one stays alive long enough to see that the moral arc of the universe itself actually curves nowhere in particular.

But what about progress, and the world is better than it’s ever been! We have, arguably, seen improvements in our quality of life, and the statistics can stack up very neatly for progress since the close of the last World War. The picture we paint of data is still sadly prescriptive. 50 years of “progress” — check it out in 10,000, my friends.

For some advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the more modern parts of the world, they tell us, war has practically disappeared. A litter of semi-failed states, lacking the benefits of modern institutions and modern ideas, the developing world may still be wracked by every kind of conflict — ethnic, tribal, and sectarian. Elsewhere humankind has marched on. … With the spread of democracy and increase of wealth, these states preside over an era of peace the like of which the world has never seen.

…

Talk of state terror and proxy wars, mass incarceration and torture only dampens the spirit, while questioning the statistics is to miss the point. It is true that the figures are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties unaccounted for. But the human value of these numbers comes from their opacity. Like the obsidian mirrors the Aztecs made from volcanic glass and used for purposes of divination, these rows of graphs and numbers contain nebulousness images of an unknown future — visions that by their very indistinctness are capable of giving comfort to anxious believers in human improvement. — The Soul of the Marionette.

Wherever We Go, There We Are

So, will we venture to the stars? We yearn for it because it represents the opportunity for endless expansion. In realistic terms, it is unlikely, but possible. However, we cannot help but bring ourselves along with us. Even AI will likely be graven in our own image.

In the final reckoning, the only lasting loss if we vanished — beyond our own — would be the void of meaning. This would be the real price our vanishing from the world. Bower birds might decorate their nests, but we’re the only animals we know of on earth to create art.