Reshaping Humanity - and Earth

Will signs of human civilization – our unguided plunge into an “Anthropocene era” – be visible and detectable to others millions of years from now, after all surface relics are ground to dust?  This article by Adam Frank - from The Atlantic - explores possible signs, like a layer rich in nitrogen from all the fertilizers we use (I think phosphorus may be a stronger indicator.)  

“Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now. And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic,” writes Adam Frank, astrophysicist, NPR blogger and author of the soon-to-be released book - Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth.

Frank continues: “When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties, or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts.” 

I might add that there could be signs of our recent fiddling with nuclear fission.  And our cities would leave anomalous ore deposits of patterned and interlaced metals.

Frank's article goes on to discuss how fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today, and some ways it resembles what may happen if climate change spins out of control. But it happened slower, then, not at the extreme rate we are driving this process. So no, that likely wasn’t a civilization.  

Many of you know I've pondered this notion fairly deeply, as the most-used pundit on the popular History Channel show: "Life After People."

One wonders if those who follow us will use that word, to describe us. “Civilization.”

== Reshaping Humanity ==

Are we reaching an important turning point?

A recently released book on AI, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers and the Future of Humanity by Gigaom publisher Byron Reese, delves deeply into the important questions rising from progress in Artificial Intelligence, automation, the end of work and - just what makes us human. Reese makes a case that technological advances have reshaped humanity just three times in history: 

- 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.

- 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare.

- 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state. And that we are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics.

I’d quibble with this timeline, which calls all of those inventive leaps more recent than they actually were. Indeed, in Existence I posit that a huge revolution of thinking must have taken place approximately 40,000 years ago when, within the span of a few centuries, our ancestors vastly expanded their toolkit and made art and religion major facets of their lives. And what’s the Industrial Revolution, exploiting fossil fuels to exponentiate what we could do? Indeed, I can think of at least a dozen accelerations that happened in narrow windows of time, that were probably the bio-human equivalent of sudden operating system upgrades.

We are doing one right now... and old style humans are so terrified that they're clawing at the rest of us, ready to tear it all down, rather than face the inevitability of change.

On Medium, you can read the preface to The Fourth Age, a worthy contributor to the biggest topic /discussion of our era.

Oh, while we're at it.... This article from Big Think lists ten books that explore the future tech of Machine Learning, Robots and Artificial Intelligence -- including Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark and Our Final Invention by James Barrat.

 == No, scientists weren’t talking “ice age” ==

One of the insidious lies told often about climate change is that“scientists believed back in the 70s that we were heading to an ice age.”  Never mind that surveys have shown that cooling theories constituted a minuscule minority of climate papers, since World War II and they were swiftly debunked. If you offer statistics, confederates blank out.

So let’s go to anecdotes, their prime food.  Like the 1970s film “Soylent Green,” immensely popular, depicting greenhouse broiling in a near future Earth,

Also in the 1970's Steven Spielberg directed a short movie predicated on global warming and air pollution, Los Angeles 2017. It was an episode of the TV show Name of the Game.

One of you, (Jerry E.) cited a science series that became a film shown in schools from Sputnik to the 1980s. The episode of Bell Science program The Unchained Goddess,which was shown on CBS television on February 12, 1958 discussed human-caused global warming. “I remember watching it on television, and I also remember it being shown in my "red state" rural school several times when I was a young child. At that time, Bell Science Series shows were a very big deal to any kid interested in science.” The most relevant two minutes of the program is on YouTube.

And yes, warming was the trend most-widely credited by a vast majority of the scientific community even back then, without satellite data. This is what we are reduced to. The all-out war on every fact profession, from science to the FBI, from journalism to military officers, has reached the point where we cannot deal with our mad uncles with evidence and statistics, only anecdotes.

Finally....

It’s long been debated whether early humans were responsible for the extinctions of large mammals, all over the globe. Apparently, new data is closing in on confirming the notion. It appears that humans drove North American ground sloths to extinction - along with most large mammals - around 11,000 years ago. More evidence arose in a startling human footprint – apparently running, that was pressed into mud very soon after a sloth pressed his. There are few possibilities other than the drama of a hunter chasing prey.  Wow.

David Christian's Origin Story: A Big History of Everything offers a comprehensive timeline of the universe, from the big bang to the evolution of life on earth....asking what the future may hold. Christian cofounded the Big History Project with Bill Gates.

Another book that delves into the history (and possible future) of life on earth: A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries about the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth, by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink. 

Researchers studying a Bajau community of traditional deep-divers in Sulawesi, Indonesia have found that these families have enlarged spleens that help them handle oxygen better.