Extinction is the rule, and we humans are no exception

Wednesday, 27 April 2022

Damien Grant is an Auckland business owner, a member of the Taxpayers’ Union and a regular opinion contributor for Stuff, writing from a libertarian perspective.

OPINION: The American astronomer and planetary scientist, Carl Sagan, gave a lecture in Glasgow back in 1985 where he stated, “by far most of the species of life that have ever existed are now extinct. Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

Comforting stuff. Sagan was enthusiastic about looking for extra-terrestrial life and was confident we’d find it. I don’t share his optimism. We’ve been searching for decades and found nothing.

Frank Drake, an American astrophysicist, developed a theory that although the possibility of life evolving was intensely tiny on any specific planet, given the nearly infinite number of planets intelligent life must exist.

Drake concluded, back in 1961, that the nearest advanced life capable of sending radio waves would, on average, be within a few hundred light years of earth. The Fermi paradox confronts the problem that if advanced life is so likely, why can’t we find any evidence for it?

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Is anybody out there? Scientists have postulated that technology harnessing radio waves could be the start of a slide to an extinction event.

One possibility is that abiogenesis, the development of complexity from simple organic life, is highly improbable. Life does not guarantee the evolution of intelligent life capable of developing Wordle or sending electric cars into orbit for the sheer hell of it.

But there is another answer, postulated by Frank Drake. Advanced life inevitability self-destructs.

Carl Sagan himself speculated in a 1966 book that the short distance between developing radio waves and nuclear weapons could be responsible for the lack of space-hopping aliens. This theory became known as the Great Filter, which is a perfect answer to the Fermi paradox.

Christchurch’s VE Day celebration in 1945. Such jubilation ushered in a prolonged period of relative peacefulness in the world.

How likely is this?

In 2011, Stephen Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of our Nature, looked at the long-term decline of violence over the last millennium.

He credits a number of factors, including the development of the nation state and their monopoly of violence. He also cites the moderating influence of commerce, the rise in the power and influence of women, modern communications and the increasing adoption of reason in human affairs.

He points to the Long Peace, the post-World War Two period of relative harmony, as evidence of his hypothesis.

This argument was aggressively rebutted by the pugnacious Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who became famous for his book The Black Swan. Taleb asserts that humans are not very good at estimating or predicting outsized negative events. This can include things as unremarkable as a stock market crash to an asteroid impact.

Taleb estimated that the time between conflicts killing over 10 million people is, on average, 136 years. The decades since the last conflagration is too short to draw any meaningful conclusions.

An 11 megaton nuclear bomb tested by the United States on Bikini Atoll. There’s a good chance that such a mushroom cloud would be the last things many humans saw before a civilisation-ending event.

The spat between Taleb and Pinker degenerated into ad-hominem back and forth that was both entertaining and illuminating.

Taleb concludes that no trend can be determined, but notes the prospect of a war that results in the extinction of all humanity cannot be ruled out. [Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected; it previously said that Taleb concluded a war resulting in human extinction can be ruled out.]

Damien Grant: A wealth tax is far more pernicious than a capital gains tax.

I am on the side of Taleb in this debate, but I would go further. I believe that the evidence points to us self-destructing.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 there was, relative to the recent centuries, a pause in the size and severity of global conflicts. This ended with the death of a certain Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914.

We have enjoyed merely 77 years since the fall of Berlin in May 1945 and the absence of large-scale military conflicts is often credited to the existence of nuclear weapons. To adhere to this belief is to pretend that the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis did not exist, that the 1983 nuclear near-miss can be ignored, or overlooking the fact Nixon considered dropping nukes on Hanoi.

And these are what we know about. There will be others, and right now Vladimir Putin is openly sabre-rattling with his thermonuclear toys. He is probably bluffing. Probably.

Just as the claim that alien life must exist because the sheer number of possible locations over impossibly large time horizons, so to must we accept that each year the risk of an unconstrained nuclear exchange is greater than zero, and that given enough years we will eventually hit the jackpot.

There seems to be a near miss once every two decades, and once a nuclear war starts there is a non-trivial risk of an exponential reaction. Humanity might not end, but civilization would. There would be no more re-runs of Friends beaming out to the cosmos for aliens to find.

But this is to demonstrate a failure of imagination. The spread of technology and democratisation of science has allowed even backwater states like North Korea to develop nukes, and in the coming centuries isn’t it conceivable that teenagers will be able to cobble them together in their parent’s basements?

Albert Einstein speculated that black holes existed in 1916 and a century later physicists have been cooking them up in their labs.

The ability of intelligent life to discover things that can eliminate intelligent life seems obvious to me. You cannot control knowledge nor eliminate the lone actor who would willingly end all life.

It may take a millennium from here, but I think we understand both the march of science and the malevolence of a small minority of humanity to appreciate the inevitability of our destruction.

In his 1961 book Fact and Fiction, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man. “For the present, it is nuclear weapons that cause the gravest danger, but bacteriological or chemical weapons may, before long, offer even a greater threat.”

As we look to the heavens I fear that we are the only creatures in the universe to comprehend its enormity. We are the inevitable creation of the possibilities created by its vastness, destined to discover its secrets and use the power of that discovery to condemn ourselves to oblivion.

Now. What’s for lunch?