Extinction

 It's hard to recapture the mood today, because the skies are blue, the sun is shining, and I haven't yet turned on the news, but yesterday it kind of seemed like humanity might be coming to an end. Not only do we have two nuclear-armed superpowers once again squaring off against each other in Eastern Europe, but we also had more than a few fresh reminders each day of the relatively slow-burn apocalypses we seem to be living through already: the pandemic and climate change.

I was barricaded within four walls yet again yesterday, after all, to hide from the raging Omicron variant outside; a friend was forwarding me tweets about how future mutations of the virus could take it in a more, rather than less, deadly direction; and I happened to catch a few articles over the course of the week about how the Siberian permafrost is melting, releasing long-frozen stores of carbon in what threatens to become a self-perpetuating chain reaction—one of the dreaded "feedback loops" that could accelerate human-caused climate change even further. 

Oh, and—most salient of all for my inner emotional balance—it was a grey, sunless, and cold winter day in the greater Boston area. So I was trapped inside by more than just the never-ending pandemic. 

If you are the sort of person who, like me, prefers to savor rather than counteract a given mood, no matter how bleak, simply because it is an experience, and one never knows when it may come again, then I can recommend no better companion for a cloudy day at the end of the world than Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene. The novella, which can be finished in the course of a single such gloomy afternoon, describes the thoughts of an old man who is stuck inside by the weather, as he putters around the house and contemplates his own and humanity's coming extinction. 

Published in 1979, on the very threshold of our gathering awareness of the threat of human-caused climate change, Frisch's book already reflects back to us our contemporary fears about irreversible ecological destruction. "[I]f the Arctic ice were to melt"—goes one of the refrains that echoes through the old man's mind in the course of his weather-bound days—"New York would be under water, as would Europe, except for the Alps." (Skelton trans. throughout).

This larger problem is mirrored in the man's immediate surroundings. He is convinced his house might shortly be toppling over in a landslide, and an epidemic of cherry blight is depopulating the surrounding flora in the Alpine valley he inhabits. Meanwhile, the encyclopedias he reads to pass the time are no distraction from these concerns: he seems to ponder mostly over pictures and descriptions of ancient saurians, wiped out by a mass extinction event with no way of knowing they would one day be dug up and memorialized by humankind. 

Is it unlikely that human beings could ever come to a similar end as the dinosaurs, in the remotely near geological future? Maybe, but my reading and listening of the past week were more than a little disconcerting on this score. And I don't just mean the podcast about the 1918 flu pandemic, and the reminder it provided of how much worse still the COVID crisis could have been, or could still become; nor the geopolitical brinksmanship we're witnessing the past several weeks over Ukraine. I mean too the threats to human continuity that haven't been quite so politicized or argued-over, but that are real nonetheless. 

Volcanoes, for one. I made the mistake earlier this week of sampling the sublime terror of reading old articles about the threat of a major eruption from one of the world's slumbering calderas. Nothing can convince one so readily of the possibility of human annihilation as a reminder that it has very nearly happened before, from just this cause. Simon Winchester, in a 2010 piece in the Guardian, informs us that only 72,000 years ago—a blink in evolutionary time—a volcanic eruption in Sumatra buried the world in ash and likely reduced the global human population at the time to only 5,000 individuals. 

A smaller eruption in 1816 didn't cause nearly so much loss of life, but was potent enough nonetheless to affect weather and climate patterns around the globe, essentially causing a "year without a summer." Winchester notes that it was precisely this rainy and bleak season that gave the world Mary Shelley's gothic romance Frankenstein. 

Likewise, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who does not mention the potential impact of volcanoes on these events, made the same connection simply by studying records of grape harvests in rural France. 1816 was an exceptionally cold and wet summer throughout Europe, he observed, and it was precisely the rain in Geneva that forced Byron and Shelley's circle to spend the season indoors writing ghost stories. 

So, good things can come out of ecological adversity, one supposes. Up to a point. But so too, Ladurie reminds us, can famine, pestilence, holocaust. 

There are those among us, of course—the faux-hardy—who might say at this point: "so what?" Humanity might come to an end at some point. Very well. The dinosaurs too had their geological moment in the sun. Ours will likewise not last forever. And that's okay. The universe does not revolve around us, and it will continue to exist as it has done, even if we were to no longer find a place in it. As Geiser, the central character in Man in the Holocene concludes, in a moment of final resignation, acceptance, and despair: "The rocks do not need his memory."

Here, though, is where I—and Geiser himself in some of his earlier moods—must beg to differ. For there is a sense in which the universe revolves around humankind, and in which the rocks do need our memory in order to exist. 

And that is that we are the only creatures we know of who are conscious of the existence of the rocks, or of any of the rest of the vast inanimate material that makes up most of nature and the universe. Might there be others? Perhaps. But we have no guarantee of it. I am not among those who believe there is any prima facie reason to think there are similarly sentient creatures out in the far reaches of space ("Probably," as Geiser puts it, "there are whole Milky Ways without a trace of brain matter"); so we could be it. We might be the universe's only shot at ever being aware of itself. 

This is the sense in which the naturalistic atheism of modern scientific cosmologies has simultaneously minimized yet also exalted humankind's place in the universe. On the one hand, it has taught us our smallness and insignificance in space and time. We exist on a small and by no means particularly important rock in a vast and mostly empty galaxy. Likewise, we appear only recently in the Earth's history. In one of Gesier's encyclopedias, he encounters the fact that humankind in its modern evolutionary form appeared only in the Pleistocene—the second–most recent geological era. We are newcomers to the planet. It existed long before us, and may go on long after us. 

But at the same time, we are the most important thing in the universe that this scientific worldview has disclosed to us. Because, even if there were endless geological eons before we came onto the evolutionary scene, we are still the only living creatures to have any knowledge or consciousness of any of that evolutionary history. In a godless universe, we are the only ones who can tell this history. We are the only reason it will ever be known. 

Let it be said we emerged only as recently as the Pleistocene or the Holocene. So be it!, we retort, for we are the very ones who gave to those epochs, or any of the earlier ones, their names. There would be no Devonian, no Cambrian, without us, even if we weren't there to witness it. Geiser pauses, in his readings, over the account in Genesis of Adam "naming" the other elements of creation for a reason. We are the godlike creators, for we are the only reason that the rest of creation ever rose to conscious awareness. 

But does this, in turn, matter to anyone or anything but ourselves? "The ants," reflects Geiser, "are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. [...] Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names." Nature would, that is to say, go on persisting and with perfect indifference, even if all of humankind were to be wiped out, and no one there to categorize or think about it. Nature still exists, even without Adam and his naming.

Or does it? Here is where intrude the kind of logical positivist riddles that force us to ask: what exactly does it mean to "exist" independently of human perception and consciousness? Is not existence itself a human concept? A tree falling in the forest may not be said to make a sound, if no one is there to hear it, as the clichéd imponderable goes; and so too, the universe may not "exist"—in our usual meaning of the term—if no conscious intelligence is there to be aware of it. The universe needs us in order to exist, as much as we need it. 

One of the other repetitive thoughts that besets Geiser in Frisch's novella concerns "whether there would still be a God if there were no longer a human brain, which cannot accept the idea of a creation without a creator." The scientific naturalist who has long since bit the bullet on atheism may think they have escaped this dilemma. "No, there wouldn't be," they say, "and there isn't one now." But they can start to see the difficulty, perhaps, if we substitute a few terms: 

"Would there still be a universe," we can ask, "if there were not a human brain—or some similarly sapient brain—to form a conception of it?" Do the rocks in fact get along just fine without us? Or is there some sense in which they really do need us to remember them? One of the themes of Thomas Hardy's poetry is that memory is the only tenuous thread that connects anyone or anything to post-mortal existence. He imagines the shades of past people fearing a kind of "second" death—after the first, bodily one, comes the greater death of being forgotten. 

Do the rocks, or the fossils of the dinosaurs, perhaps need our memory, then, after all? Can they really be said to "exist" without us—or someone—being aware of them? It depends, perhaps, on what we mean by "exist," but in the human sense of the term—quite possibly the only one we can have access to—the answer is no. 

This, then, is why the continued existence of human beings is quite possibly the most important thing in the universe. To be sure, this is only true (to Geiser's point) from our own perspective. But my point—in turn—is that ours may be the only perspective there is. We may be the only things that have a perspective on the universe. Because we may be the only things that perceive, have consciousness of it, in the full sense of the word. To destroy us, then, would be to destroy the universe. 

Most humans, of course, will not need a lot of further convincing of this on an individual level. We are pretty concerned with our own continued existence as a unique personality. But we need to think too about, and plan ahead for, the continuity of conscious life beyond the extinction of our individual selves. We need to fight for our species' collective survival in a universe that does not guarantee it. 

One step in the right direction would be to stop destroying each other or the planet that we depend on for life. Let's start there. 

And meanwhile: geologists, is there something, please, that we can do about those volcanoes?