#3: Enough Rope to Hang Ourselves
Dying wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so much trouble.
Anatomy of a Paradox
There are billions of stars in the Milky Way, of which our Sun is only one. Though Earth is the only rocky planet we know of that is colonised by life, that doesn't mean there aren't others. In fact, the idea that life can only have come into being on Earth, that Earthlings are special, is laughable. Where there is water, energy, and a suitable atmosphere, there is always the risk that life will come into being. Life is like love: it finds a way. And life is like a plague: it spreads where it can.
In the most “extreme” regions of the Earth, we find thriving, teeming, multitudinous life. Once technological progress got truly started, it didn't take humans long to link up the Earth, to put it euphemistically. But when we look out into the universe, we see no life. We hear no chatter. Nobody has made contact. Nobody is out there. Between us and the countless, inevitable thems, there is an empty vacuum that appears to have never been traversed.
This is a “philosophical problem” known as the Fermi-Hart paradox. We assume, as is reasonable to do, that it is almost certain that life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, and we also assume, as is reasonable to do, that it is likely that a species will evolve which is capable of developing interstellar travel given enough time—we have the technology, after all—so it’s strange that the Milky Way is not home to several highly advanced interstellar civilisations already. Or even one. Not even a single probe or signal has reached us.
This leads many to conclude other life must not exist at all. But this is a strange and pathetic answer, a sort of morbid wishful thinking designed to preserve our sense of hope. If the galaxy is not home to an intergalactic civilisation now, it never will be. The true resolution to the “paradox” is obvious. Life kills itself.
Parasitism
Parasites appear to us as an affront to life, something that should not be. Their mere existence makes life into something awful, cruel, and monstrous, undermining any faith that this universe was carefully made with us in mind. Darwin claimed there was grandeur in his evolutionary view of life, that the process of natural selection produced “endless forms most beautiful,” but he still could not bring himself to affirm nature’s methods as divinely inspired. He once wrote:
“I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars…”
Ichneumonidae, or Ichneumon Wasps, are a family of parasitoids containing tens of thousands of species. Technically, a parasitoid is not the same thing as a parasite, the primary difference being that a parasitoid always kills its host. Ichneumonidae are exceedingly successful predators, found all over the world—except for Antartica. They kill or paralyse their victim with a powerful venom, then they either inject their eggs directly into its body, or deposit the eggs close by and leave. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feast. The thought of this fate disgusts and haunts us, but it is an extremely successful evolutionary strategy, and nature doesn’t give a shit about ethics. For the crudely karmically-minded it may be pleasing to know even parasitoids have parasitoids: Trigonalid wasps parasitise Ichneumonidae larvae. But here there is no free will, no morality, and no guilt—only a violent and strange world, a chain of monstrous infestations. No wonder Darwin lost his faith in God.
Parasitism is successful because there are always more hosts to use and discard. But what if the hosts were killed off entirely? And what if life itself could exist only through undermining its base? If life could only continue by destroying its host environment, if life did not naturally regulate its environment to guarantee further life, if the continued liveability of the Earth was an accident of feedback processes that do not necessarily work for the continuation of life, then life itself would seem to have an inherently suicidal vector. This is palaeontologist Peter Ward’s position, which he calls the Medea hypothesis. Life does not guarantee further life, it accelerates its own demise. As he writes in his book:
“Habitability of the Earth has been affected by the presence of life, but the overall effect of life has been and will be to reduce the longevity of the Earth as a habitable planet. Life itself, because it is inherently Darwinian, is biocidal, suicidal, and creates a series of positive feedbacks to Earth systems (such as global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane content) that harm later generations. Thus it is life that will cause the end of itself, on this or any planet inhabited by Darwinian life, through perturbation and changes of either temperature, atmospheric gas composition, or elemental cycles to values inimical to life.”
If the Gaia hypothesis states that living organisms interact with their environment to ensure the environment remains habitable for life, the Medea hypothesis states the exact opposite. What, according to Ward, makes life Medean?
All species reproduce beyond the carrying capacity of their environment.
“Life is self-poisoning in closed systems.” That is, the byproducts of metabolism (CO2, urine, faeces) are toxic, quickly becoming lethal in closed spaces.
Species compete for resources within an ecosystem, causing either extinction or emigration.
Life produces positive feedbacks in Earth systems, destabilising the environment. Through hundreds of millions of years, these features of Darwinian life have led inexorably to several mass extinctions, largely associated with decreases in oxygen or increases in CO2.
This adds up to a “rather destructive inherent nature of life”. Ecosystems are progressively depleted of resources and polluted by waste. Natural selection favours traits that make a species more efficient at consuming resources at the expense of their less fit competitors. This should be self-evidently true: after all, natural selection created us. Ideologues will blame the ecological crisis on capital, Westerners, the enlightenment, or whatever boogeyman they like, but industrial civilisation did not spawn out of Hell, it is not “unnatural”—by Ward’s account it is the historically accidental but biologically inevitable outcome of Medean (that is, Darwinian) principles. And human beings were never “at one” with nature. Nature is never “at one” with itself. The process of mass extinction cannot be arrested, only decelerated and accelerated, and mostly entirely by mistake. Life is suicidal, says the Medea hypothesis, self-terminating in abrupt and violent meltdowns of the biosphere. The evidence is overwhelming, not least because we’re living it as you read this.
There is a problem with the narrative here, though it’s a subtle one. Medeanism is, quite simply, a fusion of three ideas. The first is Darwinism, of course. The second is the fact that the past persists into the present. Irreversibility is built into nature, producing perfect equilibrium on long timescales: a slow and merciless descent to zero. The third component of Medeanism is the quasi-subjective belief that these two components give us the right to claim that life is suicidal. Non-subjective and agentless tendencies towards disaster and disease do not require a belief that life is suicidal, but Ward smuggles in this anthropocentric bias with full awareness of what he is doing. Ward is not using “suicidal” metaphorically. He means it. Because if life is not inherently doomed, if it is in fact merely suicidal, then it can be treated.
Ward ultimately claims that humanity can upset the Medean order and intentionally administrate the Earth’s environment and ecological systems so that life can go on indefinitely. Why does Ward think we can escape Medeanism after arguing compellingly that it is an inherent feature of Darwinian life? Because he has to. The mere suggestion we’re on our way out is too morbid, too hopeless for him to consider. When asked by a Microsoft employee what he thinks of dire warnings that it’s too late for his dreams of technological mastery, Ward responds:
“That’s irresponsible... That’s a prediction, but it is a prediction that leads to such hopelessness that nobody does anything, right? If it’s hopeless, why do anything? And you can’t take that point of view. We have all these—there’s gotta be somebody in here with kids. And if any one of you has kids then we just cannot take this point of view where it’s hopeless… It’s a probability but it’s not totally gonna happen, so I just don’t think we have to go there.”
Of course, we are only dealing with probabilities. Don’t worry about carbon dioxide concentration, biodiversity collapse, runaway processes or the heat sinks in the oceans. We don’t have to go there. You matter, and you can make a difference, as long as you do what you can. It is selfish and irresponsible to say this world is dying. You can’t take that point of view. We will not give up. We will not be quitters. We will imagine Sisyphus happy. Science is making progress all the time now. It’s pure nihilism to say we’re all doomed. Aren’t you going to try? Don’t you think it’s a bit privileged of you to say we should just lay down and accept defeat? You know it won’t be the Western nations that bear the brunt of climate change. It’ll be the poorest nations, the underdeveloped ones, the ones we plundered. So it’s all well and good for you to sit back and smirk at how we’re all doomed when you know perfectly well that you’ll be just fine. You have a foul liberal-individualist outlook. All this talk about extinction and annihilation and how unimportant human beings are! Don’t you know how that all sounds? And it isn’t even true.
We have a purpose on this earth, to create a community of love and peace (and stable economic prosperity) without the tyranny of the commodity or the firm. We are not parasites in an alien world which has no need for us and no interest in our survival. We are the fuel and the drivers of the engine of history, we will save civilisation for ourselves and our children. Haven’t you thought of the children? For their sake, for all our sakes, we must continue believing that there’s always a way out.
Metastasis
Is there any hope for us? Does the Fermi-Hart paradox have any happy solutions? Or was life doomed from the start?
Imagine an alien civilisation that has worked out nuclear fusion, granting it clean and practically limitless energy. In the course of this discovery they have burned enough fossil fuels to seriously disrupt their climate and doom themselves, but there is a habitable planet nearby that they are capable of reaching with their current spaceflight technology. In an act of international cooperation, each nation elects their best and brightest to colonise this new world. 1000 pioneers are launched into space; the rest are left to die. When these exceptionally intelligent and compassionate survivors arrive on their new planet, they find a suitable atmosphere and abundant life. And because they have taken the painstakingly developed science of the old world with them, they have no reason to repeat the old world’s mistakes. Nuclear fusion allows them to live in green egalitarian abundance, but only for a moment. They must still hunt, forage, or farm, placing them in direct competition with other species, if not each other. As their populations grow they must clear more and more land for living space, killing the creatures that call these ecosystems home. They must still extract resources to construct and maintain their nuclear plants, their solar cities, their utopian way of life. The end of history is a beautiful dream, but only a dream: there can be no peace between civilisation and nature. Even if it takes millions of years, the ecosystems of this new planet will eventually succumb to the constant attacks of civilisation, and our heroes will have to find a new home. Vicious and nomadic, life has to keep moving or it has to die.
It is lucky to be left behind on a dying world. And miserable to be a pioneer. Our terror of death tells us the opposite is true. But is it so much better for life to flee its own shadow forever? Until the stars go out?