The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today, entitled "How Humanity Will Survive." Although I read the paper regularly, I rarely -if ever- read the editorials. The reason is very simple. WSJ editorials are totally predictable and not very interesting. Whatever the most conservative thinking of the day is, the WSJ is there to be its cheerleader. The more extreme, the better. And with the recent Murdoch takeover it can only get worse. Although frankly it is hard to see how it could possibly get any worse than it already is.
But today's editorial caught my attention because of the title and the inset, "Start with space tourism." And the point of the opinion piece is simple. There is a good likelihood that some catastrophic event will kill us all unless we escape to another planet. And because this is the WSJ, don't count on the inept government to help us here. Even a government of friends of the WSJ. Private enterprise will lead the way to salvation. See what I mean about predictable? You have the fairy tale ending, the Hollywood ending, and the WSJ ending.
The idea that we have to escape is not new. Many people believe we will have to, including Stephen Hawking and a lot of his fellow physicists. And the reason is quite simple. These guys know their math and they that our growth is unsustainable. They know we are headed for disaster even if things look good now. They know statistics and understand fluctuations. And so they can imagine global warming on a freezing day, unlike most of us. But then again, they are smart.
The editorial states that on average a mammalian species lasts two million years. That means we better hurry up. They also list the Fermi paradox or the failure of evidence of intelligent life. Maybe the intelligent life self-destructs? Although all species run out as they destroy their niches, intelligent ones probably run out faster as they are better and more efficient at exploiting. That may not be Fermi's but is a paradox for sure. The smarter you are the shorter your existence will be.
And then there is the list of things that can go wrong. High on the list are space disasters. The intellectual drivers of this group are physicists and astrophysicists. They are the bomb designers of the Manhattan project and their progeny. It was they who postulated the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs. An event that has now entered into the minds of kindergarten America.
Meteor impacts, planetary collisions, black holes emitting radiation, nuclear holocausts, etc. A worthy end to a worthy species so to speak. Whatever your conviction, you have to admit it sounds better than depleting resources and polluting yourself to death. And furthermore, a potential catastrophic impact requires action, and a positive (read war) attitude, instead of conservation (read retreat).
There is little doubt that action is better for business and the economy. And that is the theme song of the WSJ. So what if it expedites our demise by a few thousand years? The writer of this piece is unlikely to be witnessing extinction in any case.
I have little doubt that catastrophic events do happen from time to time. And there is plenty of evidence for meteor impacts and other disasters of cosmic scale. But I doubt that it will take an event of that magnitude to erase humanity from the planet. Furthermore, the way we are going, it seems rather unlikely that we will last long enough to witness any such an event. These events are very rare. And two millions years is a very short time indeed. If we even make it that long. Keep your fingers crossed.
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