Our purpose as a species is to survive

A very long time ago, the Earth's atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide. That's a pretty common composition for rocky planets; carbon dioxide is made by all sorts of things, while oxygen is a rarity. Oxygen doesn't tend to stick around, it's too reactive.

Then somewhere in the oceans of ancient Earth, life began. And eventually, one of the lifeforms produced, as a byproduct of devouring the resources in its environment as fuel for reproduction, oxygen.

We think of oxygen as this bountiful, life-giving substance that everything depends on. To the life forms of the time, it was poison. And wherever these oxygen-producing life forms spread, they started wiping out patches of living things. Until there were too many creatures producing oxygen, and the planet reached a tipping point, and everything that was dependent on the carbon dioxide atmosphere died.

The atmospheric composition fluctuated from there, with oxygen and CO2 levels rising and falling depending on how well plants and algae were doing. Because they are, as they always have been, the only real source of oxygen on the planet. Plants give out oxygen, and animals breathe it in and give off the planet's own default atmospheric waste product, carbon dioxide.

And then we came along and started playing with fire. Fire eats oxygen in bulk and turns it back into carbon dioxide, among other things. In normal quantities, fire was integrated into the oxygen/CO2 balance sheet; wildfires and routine vulcanism were part of the equilibrium.

It turns out that even a few hundred thousand people farming and clearing land and cooking and doing all the things early humans used fire for had already started changing the environment. The end of the ecological balance that we depend on has always been built into our ability to change our environment. We're very dependent on a stable environment, but changing our environment was the survival tactic that allowed us to thrive.

There are those who believe that this is a condemnation of civilization, and intelligence itself. We should have remained animals, they reason; then we'd never be in this mess.

But without our ability to change our environment, we'd already be extinct. Our species was down to ten thousand individuals or less at one or more points in history; it was our ability to adapt by modifying our environment that allowed us to survive when other species perished. Without our abilities, without tools and fire, we'd have been extinct long ago.

This intelligence, this ability to carve the world into different shapes, to make things with fire, has not been wasted. We've used it to build shelters which keep our children and parents safe from the elements, and to provide nourishment. We have used it to explore the universe around ourselves, to delve into physics and astronomy and mathematics and chemistry and biology, to understand ourselves and our world. We've cured diseases, treated illness, ameliorated disabilities. We made music. We made art.

Mostly, though, we learned to communicate. We're these little bubbles of matter who are aware that they're bubbles of matter, and we really like talking about how amazing and weird that is. From gestures to speaking to writing to virtual reality, we keep finding new ways to show each other what the universe looks like from our own perspective. We keep inventing new ways to understand each other.

Now that we're facing a new balance in our ecosystem, one that will render the surface of the planet uninhabitable to us, we're going to have to adapt again. We've developed a whole new set of tools since the last time the planet went haywire, and I think they'll be sufficient to keep a few of us alive through this next, much more serious population bottleneck. If we dig in, build shelters that will withstand the new elements, learn new ways to use energy, we might make it through again.

We're a species of animal that's evolving to survive extinction events.

It's our prime evolutionary imperative, and we're about to fulfill it brilliantly. If a handful of people, scattered in habitats across the world, can surive this apocalypse, we'll have done something that no other species could even conceive of. Anticipate, plan for, and put measures in place to assure our survival in an extinction-level event.

Every other species just rolls the dice and hopes their local habitat won't be too badly affected.

If there's anything we're built for, if our species has any purpose, it's this. Darwin called it Survival of the Species for a reason. This is what we're programmed for by billions of years of survival.

No matter how beautiful the creations of nature have been in the past, their struggles for survival have always been in vain. Something was always going to wipe them out eventually, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Well now we know what's coming. The atmospheric equilibrium that we depend on is coming to an end. Other species understand this on an instinctive level, and are responding by moving northwards, by moving higher, moving deeper. Some have already gone extinct. A few will hopefully figure out ways to adapt as their environment changes.

It's time to do what we do best. Adapt and survive. Unfortunately, survival will be resource-intensive, in a world where resources are rapidly becoming scarce. I expect that only the wealthy and powerful will be able to put together the technologies, materials and land necessary to create sustainable self-contained habitats.

The need for them is becoming apparent. There are already places where the atmosphere isn't breathable for days or weeks at a time. There are already weather phenomena which are choking people to death. We depend on a very particular mix of atmospheric gases for our intelligence and our survival as large mammals, and that mix has changed, and is continuing to change at an accelerating pace.

Hopefully, some of the wealthy and powerful have already figured this out. Hopefully some of the rapid advancement we've seen in renewable energy, materials science, botany, environmental engineering and so on recently will make this possible.

If enough of them figure it out and act fast, the species will continue. Given the nature of our survival instincts, odds are they will.

If the climate crisis takes long enough to unfold, hopefully the technologies they develop will propagate into the public sphere and come down in price, thus ensuring that more self-sufficient habitats spring up around the world. Additionally, some brave and creative souls will take it upon themselves to create their own arcologies; some already are.

For a time, humanity will huddle in our shelters, barely defended from the planet turned hostile outside. But as we get better at survival, as we learn how to live in our new environment, we'll come to the realization that we have learned that we can live anywhere. In surviving the death of our habitable atmosphere, we'll have come to the point where we no longer require terrestrial planets to survive. We'll have taken our survival into our own hands.

When we recover enough to start looking towards space again, we'll find the challenges of living on Mars, on Titan, in the asteroid belt, in space itself, a lot less intimidating than we do now. We'll be veterans of a hostile world, able to survive pretty much any extinction event the universe can throw at us.

Extinction is for animals. We've evolved to overcome it.

Our purpose as a species is to survive.

Submitted December 24, 2016 at 06:17PM by MrVisible http://ift.tt/2hjqtbM