>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Carolyn Brown: Well good afternoon everyone.
I am Carolyn Brown.
I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
in the John W. Kluge Center here at the library.
And it gives me great pleasure - that's not an exaggeration -
to welcome you here this afternoon for a lecture by David Grinspoon
who is the inaugural Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LC Chair
in Astrobiology.
It's a long title but there's a good reason
for it which you'll hear about.
The lecture today titled, " Terra Sapiens:
The Human Chapter in the History of Life."
And if that term "terra sapiens" is not familiar to you,
that's because you're hearing it here first.
Before we begin, please if you would turn off your cell phones
or at least get them mute so that they don't go off and interfere
with the program, and anything else
that might bong or bang or something.
Today's program is a product of the collaboration between NASA
and the Library of Congress to explore the humanistic
and societal implications of the field of astrobiology.
Science can ask questions about what exists, how it came into being,
and the physical processes that are likely to unfold,
but there are questions that science can't ask.
Questions about the meaning of our lives, some understanding
of who we really are as human beings,
and questions about what we do with what we learn
from the scientific process.
And the two sets of questions are complimentary and this Chair
and the Chair's program bring together those two elements:
the scientific and the humanistic, you might say.
The vision for this collaboration came from Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg
who is a Nobel Prize winner, but what's most important for us
in this context, is he was the founding member
of the Library Scholars Council which provides advice
to the Kluge Center and the Librarian, but also the Head
of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
So he combines two dimensions in his own purpose.
And it was Barry who came into my office shortly
after I assumed this position and said, "How about -
you know - sharing astrobiology?
Teaming up with NASA?"
to see if I would have an interest.
And I said, "Sure, why not?"
And this lecture today and the Chair is a fruition
of his imagination, and hence the name.
I'll say a few words about the Kluge Center.
It was established through a generous donation of John W. Kluge
to create a scholarly venue on Capitol Hill, where the finest,
most mature scholars and thinkers might have informal opportunities
to talk with members of Congress and other policy makers.
In other words, to sort of bring together the world of affairs
and the world of ideas in a way that there could be useful conversation.
The center also supports the rising generation of younger scholars,
some of whom I see over here, and we hope that in - oh - 20 or 30 years,
some of them will be back as our senior scholars.
And we also support a number of lectures such as this one.
And you can sign up for additional information if you would
like in the back and pick up a brochure.
I want to make a special note that the LC NASA Chair is --
Chair in Astrobiology is selected through a competition
and this competition for the Third Chair is now open.
The due date is December 1st.
So those of you who might imagine yourself in this role,
you might think about you still have time to apply.
And I would like to acknowledge our incoming Chair,
Steven Dick who'll be our Second [inaudible] Chair.
And Mary Voytek, I just saw her.
Where is Mary?
Oh there she is, hiding in the back, who is our wonderful inspiration
at NASA and makes -- actually makes things happen
so that the money comes and the program gets fun and the --
everything on that side happens.
Today's speaker, David Grinspoon,
as I said is the first Chair in Astrobiology.
David came to us from the Department of Space Sciences
at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science
where he was curator in Astrobiology.
His research focus is in comparative climate evolution of planets
and the implications that it might have for the existence of life
in the universe and actually on earth as well.
His book, "Lonely Planet: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life,"
won the 2004 PEN Centers, Literary Award for Research, Nonfiction.
Dr. Grinspoon was also awarded the 2006 Carl Sagan Medal
for Public Communication of Planetary Science,
and that one given by the American Astronomical Society.
During his 12 months at the Kluge Center,
he's been an extremely active scholar and public intellectual.
This is his third public appearance at the library.
He also established a number of workshops with local area colleagues
and has been out and about in town.
I hope he'll give us the full list before he leaves
so we know what he's actually been up to,
but you'll see posters here and there showing up.
I know he's continuing to do some of these high profile activities,
but he's also these days, writing like a maniac
to finish the book that he's working on.
So today officially ends his tenure as chair holder but he'll be staying
on a little bit to work on this book.
So it is with great pleasure that I ask you
to welcome our whirlwind scholar and First Chair
in Astrobiology, David Grinspoon.
[ Applause ]
>> David Grinspoon: Well thank you, Carolyn and thank you all for coming
out this afternoon, on Halloween no less, to hear what I have to say.
I'll try to keep this brief so we can all go trick-or-treat.
It's bittersweet being here today and realizing
that a year has somehow gone by since I showed up.
It's been an incredible experience being here at the Kluge Center
and at the Library of Congress.
The - as you can see - it's kind of a nice building, but the grandeur
of the surroundings are matched by the quality of the collections
and the quality and skill and collegiality
of the people that work here.
Carolyn runs an amazing organization here, the Kluge Center,
which is sort of a scholarly wing of the Library of Congress,
hosts an amazing array of scholars working
on really interesting projects.
And I think I was the only scientist here, but that didn't mean
that I didn't have anyone to talk to.
I've been schooled in many topics since I've been here
and found surprising synergisms between my work
and the work of the others here.
And it's just been a great experience.
And the library staff, the librarians
and the research specialists, have been so helpful in helping me
to navigate through the collections and find the materials
that have helped me to do my work.
So I'm tremendously grateful for the privilege, the experience.
So terra sapiens, as Carolyn said, that's a new term.
It's a term I've sort of invented and I'm --
at least it's at the working title of the book I'm working
on which will hopefully have a subtitle that --
you know, if that's the title, it has to have a subtitle
that tells you what the heck it means if you're browsing.
But literally it means, "Wise earth."
And it's my notion of a vision that we ought to carry into the future
as we think deeply about the human role in our evolution
and what's happening on the earth now as a result of our presence:
the presence of our civilization here.
And the work I've been doing here is trying to understand
that development, the sort of human development on earth
from the perspective of astrobiology.
Astrobiology is the scientific study of life in the universe.
That includes life on earth but geared towards trying
to understand the universals of life.
So what lessons does the history and the nature of life on earth carry
for us about the essentials of life, and how do we combine
that with our growing knowledge of the rest of the universe.
The planets in our solar system
and all the planets we're discovering far beyond,
how do we combine all that knowledge to become wiser about the prospects
for life in the universe, know how to look for it,
know how we would recognize it, and contextualize our own existence
in the light of all that new knowledge and our new perspective?
Well, if you were earth from an alien perspective,
say you were a very patient alien who had been watching earth
for billions of years, you would have noticed various changes
on the planet over all these eons.
But you would especially notice that something really strange
and really dramatic and new had happened very recently:
what's happening right now.
For example, if you are looking at the dark side - the night side -
of earth over all those eons, it would have been pretty dark
through most of that time.
Maybe there'd be the occasional lightening flash,
the occasional splash of aurora.
And then more recently, a few hundred, million years ago,
when the continents became forested,
maybe there'd be the occasional forest fire at night.
But still, pretty much unbroken darkness on the night side.
Until very recently, you'd see something that looked
like this springing into being.
The lights flickering on, first in the coastal areas,
and then spreading in networks throughout various parts
of the night side of earth.
And this would be in conjunction with other dramatic changes.
You'd see the composition of our atmosphere changing in new ways.
And then very recently, if you were watching carefully you would have
seen these strange little bits
of metal start flying off the earth only in the last 50 years.
And some of them even flying to the other planets
and sending radio signals back.
So something new and very different is happening on our planet.
Now I come to this topic from a career
in planetary science and astrobiology.
And if I had another half an hour, I would go into more detail about how
that perspective informs this study.
But I don't have that time unfortunately
so I'll tell you a couple of the punch lines of that.
What I do for my work as Carolyn mentioned, is I compare --
I do comparative planetology.
I study the evolution of earth and earthlike planets and trying
to understand through their similarities
and differences what it is that makes planets tick and what it is
that makes earth work and in some ways, similar to other planets
and in some ways its own little ball of water and rock and life.
So one thing we can say, one thing we've learned,
is that earthlike planets seem to start out fairly similarly.
Earth and Venus and Mars, our two nearest neighbors
and two most earthlike planets in our solar system,
seem to have all started with pretty similar conditions.
Not identical, but much more alike than they are now.
They all were watery and wet and warm apparently
when they were young, which is very interesting from the standpoint
of astrobiology because it may be that Venus and Mars had conditions
that we believe are the conditions that earth had
that were essential to the origin of life.
So that's pretty exciting and we're on the trail of trying to understand
if the origin of life could have actually happened
in these other places.
But, once the origin of life happened on earth
and apparently didn't happen or if it did, didn't stick as a phenomena
on our neighboring planets, then there was sort of a divergence.
And life has become a dominating force in the evolution of earth,
not just the life itself, this thin film on the surface of the planet,
but the physical nature of earth in many,
many ways has been dramatically changed by the presence of life.
So there was sort of a branching point, perhaps about 3 billion --
sometime between 3 and 4 --
we're still trying to pinpoint the time of the origin of life.
But there was a branching point and since that time, over something
like 3 billion years plus, the earth has been evolving under --
under the influence of forces that have not be greatly at work
on our neighboring planets.
So one thing we've learned is that earth is an odd ball.
It's in our solar system, really unusual.
In fact, it may be said, it was said here
by my colleague Colin Goldblatt, that the defining characteristic
of earth is planetary scale life.
Now, that was a divergence that happened a long time ago,
but very recently you might argue,
another branching point has been reached.
Much more recently earth has been under the influence
of a new type of geological force.
The global activities of humanity, defining what we refer
to as the Anthropocene Era, of course meaning anthropo,
human, the time of humanity.
This a fruitful concept.
It's a controversial concept for some reasons I'll get into
but it's sparked a lot of really interesting conversations,
this notion that humans have become a dominant force
of planetary change on the earth.
In a sense, what this means is the joining
of several different historical timescales
that we've traditionally thought of sort of separately in this --
and they're represented here on this graph.
The geological timescale, all these ages, the Triassic, the Jurassic,
which is famous because it's a Hollywood star, the Cretaceous,
the Paleocene and so forth, that's one way of thinking about time.
On the right here, the history of life, the succession of stage
in the evolution of life biological time.
And then in the center here, what we think of as history, human history.
The events and people and civilizations
that mark what we call history in -- as an academic discipline.
But in a certain sense with the Anthropocene, we're realizing
that these have all become conjoined.
That human history has now become a factor in the geological history
of earth and the biological history of earth.
And it's an interesting question whether they've become sort
of irreversibly conjoined.
That of course depends on the future.
Now, the Anthropocene has become a hot topic in earth science.
This is just one of many papers I could show you,
but there are special issues of journals and publications
and actually now, at least two professional journals, maybe three,
that are just devoted to the Anthropocene.
And if you go to our meetings, like the American Geophysical Union,
our big earth science meetings,
there are now sessions on the Anthropocene.
So it's become something that's in the air and is being talked
about by scientists and is proposed as an official new term
for the geological time that we're in now.
And it's now -- it has not been ratified, been made official,
but it's -- the proposal is out there under consideration.
And just very quickly and you know again, one could give a whole talk
on just this subject, the evidence.
But these are some graphs showing the change over time
of various factors that represent human influence on the earth.
And so for example in the upper left population is obvious one.
Water use, [inaudible] of rivers,
down near the lower right there's some you know more sort
of funny ones like McDonalds restaurants, and so forth.
But the point is, there's a similarity to the shape
of all these, and that's not coincidental.
This represents the accelerating influence of humans on the earth.
And you'll notice there's an inflection point,
a change in slope right around 1950 in all of these and that's the time
that scholars of the Anthropocene call "The Great Acceleration"
where -- for -- people can debate the reasons but there was --
and probably the reason had to do that all this was latent
and then joined the wars.
People were busy with other things and once the wars were over,
the economy and industry sort of pent up, let loose,
spurred on by the technological innovations that whether we like it
or not, are often the product of war.
But at any rate, this great acceleration led
to a massive increase in human influence
in all these different ways.
And then this next set of graphs shows you that sort
of these all represent the response of different aspects
of the earth's system to those provocations
by human civilization -- so called civilization.
For instance, upper left, obviously CO2 is one we hear a lot about.
On the top here there are other atmospheric gasses
that are doing something similarly, and then as you go
down various other things, having to do with the hydrological cycle
and the numbers of floods over time, biodiversity, species lost,
I won't go through all this, but I -- you know the evidence is there.
If anybody needs convincing, I can point you towards the papers.
But again, you see there's a similarity in shape to these --
the time history of a lot of these factors,
and that is not just coincidence.
Humans have become a dominant force on earth.
Now, one response to this by some scientists who are skeptical perhaps
of the significance
of the Anthropocene is to say, "Well, so what?
We're not the first species to come along
and radically change the earth.
What's so special about us?"
And that's true actually.
If you look through the long history of earth,
there's some dramatic episodes of other species coming along
and evolving and radically changing the planet to the point
where the earth became horribly polluted and led
to mass extinctions due to the result of species
that were here long before we came along.
For example, this chart shows you the rise of oxygen over time
and you'll notice that where it jumps
up just before 2 billion years ago, this is known as the
"Great Oxygenization Event."
That's hard to say, especially when you're on stage.
Oxygenization.
Say it five times fast.
Anyways, the Great Oxygenization Event is often thought of
or I think arguably is the most extreme chemical transition
in the history of earth.
When life discovered photosynthesis and started breaking up molecules
for energy, using sunlight, releasing oxygen,
making organic stuff to live on, it was a wonderful innovation for --
to spur evolution and to spur the amount of biomass on earth.
It was also a horrible ecological disaster.
All that oxygen -- oxygen is poison for organic life.
And we don't think of it that way because our ancestors evolved
to use it we breathe and we --
that oxygen creates a big chemical imbalance,
and if you're evolved the right enzymes,
then you live off that imbalance.
And you're like, "Great, oxygen.
I can breathe."
But if you don't have those enzymes
and you're organic life on a planet, you die.
So it led to a lot of mass death.
So this is interesting thinking about the role of humans.
What's different about us?
We're not the first species to come along and --
even we're not the first species
to come along seeking a new energy source.
That's all of these poor, innocent cyanobacteria were doing was trying
to find a better of energy.
And they did.
Photosynthesis.
And they destroyed the earth practically.
In fact, it's amazing how close they came to destroying the earth
because not only did they poison the atmosphere with oxygen, but they --
this probably caused a massive climate crisis.
There's something -- an episode that scientists call, "Snowball earth,"
where the earth became fully -- almost fully glaciated.
Frozen over.
And it could have come close to being irreversibly glaciated
where you get in this sort of stuck in this cul-de-sac
where if the earth is covered with ice, it reflects more sunlight,
which keeps the earth cold and it can't --
it can't unfreeze itself and some scientists think
that we actually maybe came close
to destroying the biosphere permanently.
So those cyanobacteria in one way of thinking
about it were not entirely innocent, but in another way of thinking
about it, they were entirely innocent
because they were just doing what life does which is multiply
and find new ways to survive.
So isn't that what we're doing?
How are we different from the cyanobacteria?
In what sense can we be said to have responsibility
or be something really new on this planet?
Well, in an effort to try to answer that question,
I've come up with a sort of taxonomy of catastrophe.
I looked at all the different kinds of changes
that can happen on planets.
And there are a lot of changes that happen over the life history
of a planet like earth and other planets.
And I've tried to abstract that into four major kinds
of global change on planets.
Classified with respect to biotic influence.
In other words, with respect to the role of life.
And so here's my list of four kinds --
the four main kinds of global change.
The first one I'll call "Natural Disasters."
And that's just when as the bumper sticker says,
"Stuff Happens," right?
Good things -- or bad things happen to good planets.
An asteroid comes along and causes a mass extinction
as famously happened 65 million years ago and wiped
out the dinosaurs and 90 percent of other species alive at that time.
Or they'll be a massive episode of volcanic activity
because of some super plume - volcanic super plume - in the mantle
and that's happened before too, leading to a massive climate change
and a lot of diox [phonetic].
Or even in this category you could say there are things
that sometimes happen out there in the galaxy.
Gamma ray bursts or supernova,
that if they're close enough can sterilize the life on a planet.
So this is all by way of saying that we do live in a dangerous universe
on a sometimes dangerous planet and stuff happens
that sometimes life has nothing to do with.
So that's what I'm calling natural disasters.
Natural, in this sense, natural's a loaded word, I'll come back to that,
but in this sense meaning that life had nothing to do with it.
Innocent bystander.
Okay, the next category of change,
which I'm calling biologically induced catastrophes,
I'm symbolizing here with the green leaf.
And because probably the best example of that is the one
that I already mentioned, the evolution of photosynthesis
which was you know -- must have seemed like a great idea at the time
of -- but except of course as far as we know, there wasn't anybody there
that had ideas in that sense.
But it was certainly a productive innovation for life and --
but the local effects were wonderful for those organisms.
The global effects over time were disastrous as the oxygen built up.
So that's what I'm calling a biologically induced catastrophe.
And these natural disasters as I mentioned,
Category 1 of global change will happen everywhere, every planet.
In fact, the good planets, the planets with life,
I argue will have more of them because a planet like earth
that has the kind of vigorous activity
that facilitates habitability with the kinds of chemical flows we have
and so forth, is active and therefore more likely
to have these sort of natural disasters:
at least the internally generated ones.
Category 2, the Biologically Induced Disasters, Catastrophes,
I argue will happen on any planet with life.
That life sooner or later -- because what does life do?
It finds new survival techniques and it multiplies
and maximizes its biomass.
It maximizes its ability to multiply
and occupy whatever territory it can.
And so sooner or later, that will probably lead
to this kind of catastrophe.
So I think all planets with life will face this first
and second kind of catastrophe.
Now the third kind is what I'm calling, "Inadvertent."
And that's sort of what we're going through right now,
symbolized on this graph by traffic.
And that is what I would call the action of sort
of so-called intelligent life: life that's very clever
and invents technology which greatly enhances its ability
to solve local survival problems, but eventually,
I think inevitably will produce global problems.
It's the -- this inadvertent category I'm calling the actions
of complex life that develops technology and does what life does,
again multiplies and increases its activity.
And at least innocently at first,
starts to cause global effects from that activity.
And this leads to what I've called "The Anthropocene Dilemma,"
which is that at some point in the development of this kind of life,
you have global influence without global control.
That's basically what we have now.
We are doing not just -- I'm not just talking about CO2,
but there's a whole range of technological activities
that we are carrying out now, where there's just no --
nobody's thinking or acting or deciding on the course
of these activities with any thought to the global consequences.
So this is -- and where you have influenced,
it's far beyond the domain of the control that's being exercised,
is where you sometimes get into trouble with technology.
So that's The Anthropocene Dilemma.
That the third category of global change.
And just a couple examples of that: obviously in the upper left,
this is the famous Keeling Curve, the increase of CO2 over time.
Something we are doing.
The consequences of that, the disappearance of the sea ice,
and many other consequences.
The lower left here is the famous hockey stick showing the changes
in temperature which have a lot of natural variability
but are becoming increasingly imprinted by the signal
of Anthrobigenic [phonetic] climate change.
And then on the lower right here, is the ozone hole.
The famous ozone hole.
Another example of inadvertent change
where we somewhat innocently again at first,
we're putting these chemicals in the atmosphere
that we thought were inert and perfectly safe.
And they are inert and perfectly safe down here
in the troposphere where we live.
Problem is when they eventually filter up to the stratosphere
and get broken up by ultraviolet light,
they start doing nasty stuff to the ozone.
And what's cool though about this example of the ozone hole is
that it's -- I'm using it as one example of this third category
of global change: the inadvertent.
But I also think it's a really good example of this fourth kind
of global change that I want to talk about now, which is "Intentional,"
because the ozone problem was recognized --
by the way, was recognized in no small part because of the activities
of comparative planetology.
It was people studying the upper atmosphere of the planet Venus.
One of my favorite other topics who said, "Hey,
chlorine's doing interesting things to oxygen on Venus.
I wonder if -- oh wait a minute, what about earth?"
And that led to -- we would have recognized it eventually
but we probably recognized it a few years earlier and got a jump
on the problem because we were doing planetary exploration.
Anyways, but we recognize this.
International agreements were made and the ozone hole -
the ozone problem - is being fixed.
It's not fully fixed because this is a long-term,
multi-generational problem.
It will take 50 years or so to be really on track,
but we are on track with it.
There's a couple wrinkles in that,
a couple things you may have read about, but the overall story is one
of recognition of this global agreements and fixing the problem.
So it's an existence proof that this fourth kind of change can happen.
You can argue and people do that this is much easier and there --
with the other problems we have are much harder
because of the economic consequences.
And that's inarguably true.
However, I think as a proof of concept, it's important.
So what are some other possibly examples
of this fourth kind of change?
This intentional change?
Well, I mentioned -- and what do I mean by intentional global change.
Well here's what I would call truly intelligent life.
And these are loaded words but I'm exploring a definition
of intelligence where intelligent life hasn't really evolved
on a planet if you don't get to this stage,
because what good is intelligence if you can't survive -
at least technological intelligence - if you can't actually live
with yourself for very long.
So I'm exploring a different definition
of intelligent life that incorporates this.
But at any rate, truly, intelligent life, acting with forethought,
awareness of its global roles and responsibilities
and the consequences of its action on a global scale.
So ozone replenishment is already underway.
The halting or reversing of global warming is currently
under discussion.
Now some days that discussion may discourage you
and some days it discourages me.
However, the fact that it is under discussion,
I see as hugely positive.
There is a global conversation going on now about this
that was not happening a decade or two decades ago.
And in the long run, this is the first step
and this is very positive and very important.
Other kinds of activities that I think also fit
in this fourth category,
geoengineering is currently under debate.
That's much more controversial.
Should we try to do something else to fix the problem
of global warming rather than the obvious thing,
which is to stop doing so much burning of fossil fuels?
I won't offer an opinion on that.
Now -- well, I think if we do that at all, we have to proceed
with caution and on the short run it's not the best solution.
In the long run for reasons I'll get to, I think it's essential
that we learn how to do geoengineering,
but if we think that's the whole solution to our problem now,
then I think we're in trouble.
Other items in this category: planetary defense.
The dinosaurs didn't have a space program.
We do. In theory, that ought to allow us to survive a lot longer.
And this goes in that category because it's human intervention
in what otherwise would be a natural disaster.
Seeing what's coming and doing something about it.
So we are learning what -- where the dangerous asteroids are
and we will be developing the ability to prevent them
from causing disasters on earth.
That's what I mean by planetary defense.
Now the terra forming of Mars, the idea that we could do something
to Mars physically to make it more like earth,
that may sound very science fiction to you and it you know --
thankfully it is - except it is something
that scientists are actually considering
as almost just a playful, intellectual exercise,
although people do have workshops about this.
How would you terra form Mars?
What would you do if you decided that it was a good idea
to change Mars to be more earthlike so that earth life could live there?
Now whether or not it's a good idea is a really interesting,
different question and I think you know, the short answer is
if there are Martians, it's a bad idea.
If there are definitely no Martians, which we cannot say yet,
then there's at least an argument to be made that it's a good idea
from believe it or not a deep ecology perspective.
If you love life, and you want there to be more life, and you want life
to be safe against any kind of planetary disaster and to live,
then arguably that -- the terra forming of Mars someday may be a way
that we can help to preserve earth life.
Anyways, it fits in this category and although I'm not a proponent
of trying to terra form Mars certainly
in any reasonably short timescale,
I do find the intellectual exercise really valuable.
The fact that scientists are getting together
and saying, "Well what would we do?
What would -- how would we do this?"
Because it's an exercise in thinking about how you would purposely,
intentionally transform a planetary climate as opposed
to the inadvertent bumbling way we are transforming our climate now.
And then in the longer run, we will --
assuming we solve our current problems and we're still
around in a few thousand years,
we will want to prevent future ice ages.
Our civilization has been very lucky.
We've evolved during a relatively stable time of climate on earth.
Over the long run, Earth is not benign for a civilization like ours.
It's a capricious planet.
Climate changes.
You do not want to live through another ice age where all
of North America is under a mile of ice
and where sea level is dramatically different from the way it is now
where the carrying capacity -- the agricultural carrying capacity
of earth plummets so that most people alive starve.
It's not a good idea.
But fortunately if we get to that point, we'll know how
to do something about it.
And that's why we're talking thousands of years at least now,
but it fits in this category.
And then even much farther, much, much farther in the future,
but again in this category of intentional change,
eventually if there's anybody here at that time,
if we've solved these more short term problems,
we will want to mitigate the inevitable runaway greenhouse due
to the evolution of the sun.
The sun is very, very slowly heating up.
Don't believe anybody who says
that the global warming we're observing now has anything
to do with that.
I'm talking about over billions of years now.
But nonetheless, this is a well-known fact by astronomers
and it's inevitable that some 1 or 2 billion years hence,
the earth would become uninhabitable to our kind of life
because of what's going to happen on the sun, unless somebody decides
to do something about it.
If we're really around for that long or if somebody is or our descendants
or the descendants of our machines or something else that comes along
and evolves, the descendants of the elephants after we wipe ourselves
out and they're all sitting there having meetings
and wagging their trunks around
and pointing their laser pointers, whatever.
Anybody who's around then, will want to do something about this as a way
of preserving not just themselves, but preserving all of earth life.
Okay, so now we've gone out to very long timescales.
Now coming back to the present, how are we to view the present
in the long sweep of time?
One of the potent aspects of the Anthropocene
as a concept is not just that it relates us --
it situates us in relation to our past, a deep past,
but it also by placing us in this long landscape,
this long temporal landscape of geologic time,
it gives us a different way to think about our future.
And what will the Anthropocene be?
If you imagine somebody a million years from now,
a million years hence digging up these rocks
that we're now debating whether to call Anthropocene rocks,
the rocks that are being laid down today?
This strange strata that has Twinkie wrappers
and Styrofoam and flopping discs.
What will that be in the history of the earth?
There are different kinds of strata in the history of the earth.
There are some that are basically just events
like I call it here the KT Boundary: the cretaceous tertiary boundary.
The centimeter thick layer of clay that was left by the asteroid
that wiped out the dinosaurs.
It's a very thin event recording a brief interval.
Is that what the Anthropocene will be?
Maybe, if it's just all about the burning of the fossil fuels and --
in an orgy of consumption and not thinking about what comes after,
then it might just be a layer.
But what if it's something longer?
What if it's the beginning of something like an epoch,
like the Paleocene that lasted for tens of millions of years?
Or even, there's a third option.
A few times in its long history, the earth has gone
through what can be called transitions.
Fundamental changes in the way the rules operate
such that there's a different --
a permanent different between the before and the after.
The origin of life.
The Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago when all animal forms
that are currently on earth exploded into being.
Those are transitions.
And is it possible that what we're actually seeing now
with this merging of the geological and the historical activities
and timescales of earth, is a transition
to a new phase in our planet's history?
Well that of course depends on what we do.
We have a choice here.
And what does it depend on?
Well it depends on how we deal
with what some several smart people have called
"The 21st Century Bottleneck."
There's several stages on the left here is a Sir Martin Rees,
the Astronomer Royal of England.
On the right is E.O. Wilson, the famous biologist from Harvard.
And these are books they wrote.
And Martin Rees in this book, "Our Final Hour," gives us a 50/50 chance
of surviving the 21st Century.
Maybe not great odds but it's a lot better
than you know, 10 percent chance.
It gives us a fighting chance if you've got 50/50.
It's better odds than my Denver Nuggets have
of winning the championship this year,
but I'm still rooting for them.
Okay anyways, so what is this 21st Century Bottleneck?
It's the convergence of all of these different technologies
which are accelerating and becoming globally potent.
So obviously the convergence of all these factors.
I've listed some of them here.
Population, energy, global warming, loss of habitat and biodiversity.
And then all these other scary technologies about nanotechnology
and biotechnology and the idea of a possibility of an accident.
That something could go wrong.
And the convergence of all these have led a lot of these people
and a lot of futurologists and thinkers to say,
"Well we're facing a choice that either by the end
of the 21st Century, we will have --
essentially become a new kind of civilization that really knows how
to globally handle our technology, or we will not be here anymore.
That it's approaching a sort of branching point.
And that may be dismal but the interesting thing is on the --
thinking about, if it really is 50/50,
that gives us a large chance of making it through.
And it's interesting to think about what might be on the other side
of that bottleneck because technology as I've alluded to,
carries all these threats, but it also carries the potential
for wonderful survival and health and feeding people
and keeping asteroids from destroying life and --
handled the right way, one can conceive of a civilization
where technology really becomes a potent tool
for increasing our ability to survive through all kinds of changes
that the universe might throw at us.
So this leads me to some thoughts about SETI:
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And I won't -- one could go off on a long tangent about this,
which I intend do in my book,
but here I'll summarize a couple of points.
This idea of a bottleneck, if this in fact as I've argued
with my four kinds of change, is actually probably a pattern endemic
to the development of technology on planets.
Then this leads to the possibility of a bifurcation
in the lifetime of civilizations.
In other words, if you look to get nerdy here for a second.
If you look at the function, the probably distribution of lifetime
of civilizations, it won't be a smooth function
where here's the most likely lifetime and then there's some
over here, some over here.
It will mean there's a cluster of a lot of short lifetimes,
and then something on the other end of the bottleneck,
completely different: the possibility
of a really, really long lifetime.
This is what I mean by a bifurcation.
Two very different kinds of outcomes.
And what are the implications of that for life
in the universe and for us?
Well, first of all it means that a lot
of civilizations might just not make it.
And this is John -- my friend John Longberg's [phonetic] cartoon of --
you know, his version of the habitable zone.
Planets might be too hot, too cold, in the middle.
Here's the one that was too dumb.
Well so, that's one possible outcome for planets.
But there's another outcome which is sort of tantalizing to think about.
If the Anthropocene is a branching point in planetary history,
then what about the ones that make it through?
Well the sustainable technological global civilization may
in fact become what I call quasi-immortal.
In other words, if natural disasters are no longer threats,
if self-imposed disasters are no longer threats
because you've somehow developed the wisdom and the global capacity
of intentionality, then technology becomes a very,
very powerful survival force.
And even -- and this is where I won't really go
into the long tangent, but you can actually do the math about this.
And I have.
You can solve equations where you put in different probability,
expectations, and see what happens in the universe.
And the answer is that if the chance of achieving such a state is finite,
even if it's very tiny, then these quasi-immortal civilizations must
exist in increasing and appreciable numbers in the universe
because they're like vampires.
Once they're created, they can't be destroyed.
They stick around.
And so even if the chance of creating one is very, very small,
if they essentially last for the rest of time in the universe,
then they will accumulate.
But the other -- so that's sort of a neat thought.
But the more disturbing aspect of that is
that it doesn't carry necessarily an optimistic message
about our own civilization.
It means that the human prospect is not closely linked
to the likely abundance of long-lived civilizations.
So it may be that these exist out there, but the chance
of any civilization at our stage becoming one is very small.
Nonetheless, if we discover extraterrestrial intelligence,
which some of us are trying very hard to do, it will at least serve
to prove that one can make it through this bottleneck
and be a hopeful example.
But as it is, this is -- this last point is what I call
"Cosmic Optimism," that they're probably is the chance of very,
wonderful survival out there and that we may or may not get to sort
of join that party, or as Franz Kafka put it once, "Is there hope?
Oh yes. There is lots of hope, but not for us."
[laughter] Okay, moving along from that point.
Now the Anthropocene, as I mentioned, whether
or not it becomes an official part
of the geological timescale, it's been very fruitful.
There's several interesting debates it has sparked.
Should it be an official geological era?
I'm not even going to talk about that one
because to me that's the most boring question.
The term is out there.
The concept is out there.
Unfortunately, most articles you read
about the Anthropocene will focus on this first one,
the debate about whether it's going to be official,
but that's not where the action's at.
Now slightly more interesting is when did it start?
Some people - you probably can't read this -
but some people think it started with the beginning
of agriculture thousands of years ago, when we really started
to transform the land of the earth.
Some people think it started with the industrial revolution,
the James Watt Steam Engine, where we started changing the atmosphere
and accelerated our change of the landscape.
Some people think it started with the radio isotope markers
from the first atomic bomb tests.
I've kind of favored that because I think it's very potent, you know,
the Prometheus tasting the fire and seizing the energy
from the gods and changing the earth.
And it leaves a marker that will be identifiable
for a long time in the geologic record.
However, recently in thinking about this, I've changed my mind.
I don't like any of those.
I have a new idea about when the Anthropocene started.
And that's it's -- it hasn't really started yet
or it's just starting now.
My view is that it really begins with the end of our innocence
with mass awareness of our role as world changers.
Because what's really new compared to the cyanobacteria,
or compared to about anybody is that not --
we're not just changing the world, but we know that we're doing it.
We can see that that we're doing it and that gives us a choice.
But it's not enough for --
certain individuals if you read history have been talking
about this for a century.
People have been aware of this.
But I think it's the mass awareness of our role as world changers
and the potential that that mass awareness creates
to actually change the program, change our behavior.
That that's what really creates something new on this planet.
So to me, it's self-aware global change that's what is a completely
new phenomena on this planet,
and therefore it is just getting started.
And that's good news because that means we have a choice as far
as what direction it will take.
Now last question in this debates.
Do we need to fundamentally rethink the nature of nature?
The Anthropocene has sparked some interesting debates within
and beyond the environmental movement as far as what does it mean
if we're really somehow in control, somehow dominating the earth,
then what do we even mean by nature
and how do we separate the human part of the world from the natural?
Or what does natural even mean anymore?
It sparked some really interesting debates.
Now I have to say that one thing I've encountered a lot of in talking
to people about this is what I'm calling "Anthropocene Shock."
People don't like the idea of the Anthropocene.
They find it disturbing.
And that's good.
That means they're paying attention because it is disturbing.
I mean, think about it.
Isn't it narcissistic and arrogance and self-aggrandizing to say that,
"I mean species come and species go?"
Who are we to say it's so important, that we're so important,
that our appearance on earth is a brand, new geological epoch?
I mean that's quite the statement.
Furthermore, it carries the obnoxious implication
that maybe we're elevating ourselves to god-like status.
Do we think we deserve to be in charge?
Do we know how to run a world?
No, we don't, but we find ourselves running one.
That's the problem.
Well, but this does smack uncomfortably of the sort
of biblical world created just for us.
Hasn't science throughout its history led us
in just the opposite direction of this?
Carl Sagan, who was a mentor of mine and who I don't have to tell you
who he is, one of the most famous scientists of the last century,
he -- one of the things he talked about frequently,
he had a book chapter with this title, "The Great Demotions."
He talked about how the progress of science has destroyed
so many human conceits of thinking that we're so important.
The earth is not the center of the universe.
We are just an animal embedded in the rest of life.
We have not been here for almost the entire history of the earth.
Our sun is not even in a special place.
Our galaxy is not even in a special place.
We're nothing.
We have no importance in the story of the universe.
He called these the great demotions and he saw this sort of shattering
of our conceits as a great achievement of science.
He said, "It is far better to grasp the universe the way it really is
than to persist in delusions."
Now with the Anthropocene, are sort of reversing that
and giving ourselves a great promotion?
I mean aren't we sort of saying, "Hey, we're important
in the story of the earth now."
And isn't that kind of disturbing?
And I would say yes and yes.
That is what we're doing and yes, it's very disturbing.
But the point of science, as Carl liked to point out is not
to comfort ourselves with feel good stories.
It's to try to find new ways to see things as they really are
and then deal honestly with what we learn.
And when we add up the evidence, there is no escaping
that earth has entered a new chapter, a new kind of chapter,
and therefore, the rules have changed and earth science has
to recognize the Anthropocene
because the earth is becoming unrecognizable.
Now just one - I know I need to wrap up shortly, and I'm going to -
but the -- just as an example of the kind of debate this has sparked
in the environmental movement, here is an article
that was recently published in the Earth Island Journal
by an environmental philosopher named Kathleen Moore.
And she doesn't like the notion of the Anthropocene.
She said, "Well yes, humans are changing the earth but,"
if you read some of these words,
she's talking about how we doom ourselves,
we destroy the prospects of other beings.
You know, this is moral monstrosity on a planetary scale.
And so she says, "Well, if we have to call it something,
let's not call it the Anthropocene.
Let's call it," she says, "we're probably
in the unforgiveable crime scene."
Or she says, "Let's simply call it the obscene epic."
And you know, I think this is representative
of a certain strain of thought.
Now the problem I have with that is that I think we have to be careful.
And I've been a lifelong environmentalist
and I very much consider myself environmentalist,
but I think we have to be careful of sort of misanthropy.
Of being antihuman.
I think you can love the earth without hating humanity.
And sometimes when I hear some
of these people talk about, "Oh we're so horrible.
We're so horrible," it almost seems like they want to be exempted.
Like if they say, "Well I acknowledge it enough,"
then they somehow absolve themselves of responsibility.
It doesn't work that way.
We're in this, we're in the world now in the situation we're in
and we have to find a path to the future.
If you look at the metaphors that we often use
to describe ourselves, they're so negative.
We're a cancer on the earth.
We're a virus on the earth.
We're criminals.
We're murdering the biosphere.
We're raping the forest.
I mean all this has a certain truth to it.
Our growth patterns are very cancer-like
in their exponential, runaway behavior.
And yet, I think we have to be careful with these metaphors.
I think we have to have some positive visions of the future
in order to change the way we think in the ways we need to,
in order to survive and do the Anthropocene in the right way.
I think that this negativity has the potential to verge into nihilism
and apathy that can be very dangerous.
So what about some new metaphors?
Well, what are we doing on this planet?
We suddenly find ourselves here.
We are you know, at the wheel of this truck going furiously
down this track, nobody's ever taught us how to drive.
That's one metaphor.
We're like babies.
We're like orphans.
Here we are.
Nobody -- there aren't any adults to show us how to run this planet
but clearly we better grow up and learn how to do it
because we need to survive.
There's a series of science fiction stories that I really love
and "Orphans of the Sky" here is one of them.
They're called generation ship stories.
And a generation ship story,
it's kind of classic science fiction story, where the idea is
that because it takes a long time to travel to other stars,
and this is true, longer than a human lifetime probably,
that you set off on a really, large self-contained ship
such that many generations of humans can live on that ship,
and the people that eventually arrive there, are the descendants,
several generations removed from those who set off from earth.
And it carries all kinds of interesting moral questions.
You know, who are you to decide, make decisions
which the future generations are going to have to live with
and it's going to determine their lives?
And in these stories, something always goes wrong.
There's been a revolution.
There's been a malfunction.
And people have reverted to some kind of primitive state.
Some kind of non-technological state
where they don't know that they're on a ship.
It's just the world they're on and it's running
by autopilot and running along.
And then some people, our heroes, our protagonists,
discover that they're on a ship.
They find a porthole and they see the stars and they go, "Whoa,
we're moving through some much larger space."
So they find a control room or a manual
that they can't read or something.
They realize that they're on a ship.
They're realize that everything they thought about their --
the nature of their world was wrong.
And they realize that they have to wake everybody up and get them
to see the truth about their reality or they're all going to die.
And they're embedded in the chain of decisions
where they're fully dependent on the decision their ancestors made
and depending on how they solve their current problem,
their descendants will have a future or won't have a future.
Now in a certain sense,
I think that's a good metaphor for where we're at.
Now with the scientific revolution, we've seen the stars.
We're realized, "Oh, this is the nature of our world."
And now we're realizing, "Oh, we're actually kind of running this place,
but we don't know how to run a world and we don't have a manual.
Hey everybody, wake up.
We have to figure out how to do this."
And it doesn't matter.
We can say our ancestors were horrible.
They did these horrible things.
They got us into this mess, but that doesn't really help us
with our current situation.
We have to take stock of where we are and figure out how to proceed
and have a vision of where we're going in the future.
So this is why I like the phrase "terra sapiens."
We have -- this is what I see as our task.
We have to create a wise earth.
In order for our civilization to survive,
we have to become a new kind of entity on this planet,
and learn to live comfortably over the long haul
with world changing technology.
How do we do that?
Well, this is -- you may be familiar with R. Crumb,
the underground cartoonist.
And this was a series of cartoons he did which was called,
"A Brief History of America."
And he did this in the 70s.
And see up in the upper left, it says [inaudible] scene
and then slowly you get a few little buildings and everything's all nice.
And then you know, it accelerates and then by the lower right,
you're like we're in the Anthropocene.
What do we do?
Well several years after this was published,
the editors of [Inaudible] Review asked R. Crumb
if he would do a follow up showing the outcome of the future.
And so he did.
He did another cartoon which showed three possible futures.
And here they are.
The top one he calls, "Worst Case Scenario: Ecological Disaster."
And you can see what that looks like
and we don't want to live in that world.
And then the other two, the middle one is what he called,
"The Fun Future: Technology on the March."
So it's like everything's going to be solved by great technology
and we'll be flying around in our saucers and having a great time.
And then the bottom one is the "Ecotopian Solution,"
where everybody's riding around in bicycles and living in treehouses
and we've just figured out how to live lightly on the land.
Well we don't want Number 1, so I submit that we're going to have
to find some combination of 2 and 3, where we learn to be more cognizant
of our footprint and we also smartly use technology
to help us solve some of these problems.
One of the -- I'm really slightly over time here, aren't I?
Alright, well I've just got two more slides I believe.
As I mentioned at the beginning, one of the wonderful things
about working here in the Kluge Center in the library in Washington,
has been the incredible community of scholars
that I've had to interact with.
Not just here in the library.
I have to say, I've met people from the Smithsonian and Georgetown
and George Washington and other local institutions
who are interested from different perspectives
in the same thing I'm interested in.
And here in the library with the number of scholars coming through,
I've had some surprising conversations
and unexpected fruitful interactions.
And one of them I -- well, I include a picture here
of a panel discussion we did earlier in my tenure here with myself
and a historian - an environmental historian -
names Jean-Francois Mouhot
and a literary scholar named Matthias Klestil.
And these guys were both interested in some
of the same things I am interested in,
even though they're not scientists.
We found we were all really interested
in new ideas about the environment.
And in particular, Jean-Francois said some things
that were really thought provoking to me.
He's interested in environmental history and he was talking
about Thomas Jefferson and about slavery.
And he made a really interesting comparison between the ethics
of slavery in Jefferson's day and the ethics
of climate change in our day.
In other words, he said, "If you read Jefferson's writing,"
I mean Jefferson's a paradox to a lot of us because you know,
here we are in the Jefferson Building and the Jefferson Monument
and he's you know -- all these wonderful words about freedom
and human dignity and respect,
and yet of course he famously kept slaves.
And how did he reconcile this?
Well Jean-Francois talked about a sort of moral deficit that people
like Jefferson in his day lived with, that they wanted energy,
they wanted power and in his case it was human power.
And somehow that was so valuable and they could not see a way
to preserve their sort of core way of life without that,
that they lived with this moral deficit
of doing something that they knew was evil.
And he was drawing a parallel to that with our current need
to power our civilization and we can't imagine giving up the things
that we have, and so we live with some of these behaviors
that we know are harmful and destructive.
So I thought that was really interesting and in a sort
of perverse way, hopeful because it showed me, it reminded me
that [inaudible] and societal values that seem rigid and fixed
and unchangeable, do change over the generations.
That humanity does evolve.
Slavery is not an acceptable part of our culture anymore.
You can point out that it still exists in the world,
but you cannot deny that there's been a massive shift in that.
And so this to me, is one example.
If you draw the example with Jean-Francois's example
with fossil fuels, then that implies that yes we can evolve here.
And you know, walking around the library
as you may have noticed is --
working here has been both distracting and inspiring
because everywhere you walk, if you want to be distracted
from what you're doing, there's some really interesting quotation
on the wall and you can stop and think about it.
And this bottom one is from the -- -
you see when you walk into the science reading room,
the main science reading room over in the Adams Building.
And it's from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison.
And it reads, "The earth belongs always to the living generation.
They may manage it then and what proceeds from it
as they please during their use [inaudible].
They are masters too of their own persons
and consequently may govern them as they please."
So in Jefferson's time, he was saying, "Hey, the earth belongs
to this generation that's here now."
And he equated that with personal liberty
which he saw as this lofty goal.
And it sort of made sense at that time.
The earth was infinite.
The west was infinite.
There was all this room for expansion.
We weren't doing anything that our --
bad to our descendants by doing what we would on the earth.
But now that reality has changed.
We've learned something new about the limits of the earth
and that moral, that moral value has to change.
And so this is just my way of saying you know, some --
being here has allowed me to be in contact with some of these ideas
and to really think about what it might take for us
to sort of get through this.
I really had a good time here reading some books that were
about the future, written in the past.
One of them, my little side project has been a brief history
of the future.
And for instance, this is a book written by J.D. Bernal
when he was a young man in 1929.
This book happened to be called, "The Most Brilliant Attempt
at Scientific Prediction Ever Made,"
by Arthur C. Clarke who ought to know.
And the very ending of the book, I would like to quote to you here.
He says, Bernal said in 1929, "We hold the future still timidly,
but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.
Having seen it, are we to turn away from something
that offends the very nature of our earliest desires?
Or is the recognition of our new power sufficient
to change those desires into the service of the future
which they will have to bring about?"
Is our realization, that we are changing the world enough
to actually change ourselves in such a way that will allow us
to change it in a way that we want to?
I think that's what Bernal, even in 1929 was asking.
And so, in conclusion, this really is my last slide.
I'm hopeful because I think it's so hard to read the future.
There's so much uncertainty.
And where there's uncertainty, there's room for hope.
Exponential, technological innovation is transforming our world
in surprising and accelerating ways.
We're connected to people elsewhere in a way that we never have been.
And that's at the beginning
and nobody knows how that's going to play out.
Possibilities that until recently seemed magical are now imminent
rendering the future frightening, exhilarating
and above all, unpredictable.
Where there's uncertainty, there is also hope and choice
and room for faith in ourselves.
And personally I believe that we are just getting started in this planet.
So from this cosmic vantage point on our evolutionary history,
in our current global situation, we have the option
to choose the future we want.
And with self-awareness, bravery and humility, to reach for the wheel
of history and steer a path toward infinite potential.
Then the real enlightenment can begin and we can start behaving
as human beings, care for our world,
and begin to contemplate our galactic destiny.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
So I've run a little bit over but we do have time for a couple questions.
Jason has the microphone which he will hand to the questioner.
We've got a question right here in the front row.
I'm going to make Jason run around a lot.
>> I'll try to be brief, but I was reminded of Stanley Kubrick's
and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 [inaudible].
That next evolutionary leap and it seems to me that you know,
one definition of man is homo [inaudible], the tool making animal.
If we get around to calling ourselves the Anthropocene
[inaudible], we might be [inaudible].
It might be well better [inaudible].
If we keep building machines
that are exponentially increasing brighter and smarter than ourselves,
I mean what reason would they have to keep us around other than pets?
>> David Grinspoon: It's a good question.
One possible future is that we are --
some people have recently been saying
that intelligent machines will be the last invention we ever make.
And it could be.
Personally I'm skeptical of that,
but I think the answer's nobody knows
if we could really create a self-aware, intelligent machine.
Obviously we can create machines with fast processors
and better memories and we currently are becoming a new kind of entity
in our partnership with those machines,
in a way that is actually facilitating a lot of you know,
some of the problems but also potentially a lot of the solutions.
Will those machines ever become conscious and start making decisions
on their own and then possibly leave us in the silicon dust?
I don't know and there are people
that have strong opinions about this.
And they're -- they're all uninformed because nobody knows.
It rests on an assumption about how the human brain works
and what consciousness is that we don't know the answer to.
So that is one possible future.
If the machines do become conscious and aware, it's by no means obvious
that they would just decide to leave us in the dust
and maybe be compassionate and we'll form some kind
of interesting partnership.
And you know, there's so many possible branching points
in this discussion one could go down,
but I think that some people take it as a given that that's
about to happen and there's famously people
who almost have a religion based on that.
And I think that they're -- that they -- nobody really knows.
Sir? Sorry Jason.
Oh here we go.
Here you go.
Okay.
>> The slide that showed some of the books that you're interested
in are interesting to you and others did not include,
"The Human Phenomenon," by Teilhard De Chardin.
Would you comment about the hominization of the earth
and the possibility that what's happening here is not
so much our influence on the earth as the earth's influence on us?
>> David Grinspoon: Yes, no, it's a great question.
I'm glad you mentioned Teilhard De Chardin and "The Phenomena of Man,"
his book because in fact, that was in one of my slides
which I was furiously deleting so I could be almost within the hour
and obviously I didn't furiously delete enough of the slides.
But as you might expect and you can tell, I can tell from your question,
he is an important influence and important --
if you trace the history of thought of how life
and then conscious life are becoming factors in the evolution
of the planet, then you have to mention the noosphere
which was the concept of Teilhard De Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky.
So some people even in the 19 teens and 1920s were aware
of what was coming and they called this the noosphere which --
the sphere of human intellect of the sphere of intellect,
changing the planet, which is really the same thing as the Anthropocene
which some people have now discovered the Anthropocene.
It's really the same as the noosphere,
only for them it was this speculative thing.
"Oh, wouldn't that be interesting way off in the future?"
Now it's sort of from a slightly more panicked,
like, "Wow, this is happening.
We better deal with it."
But it's the same concept and yes, absolutely, it's a dialectic.
Humans are changing the earth, earth is changing the humans,
as has been the case with life and that's the you know,
the [inaudible] hypothesis that earth and the life have been engaged
in this sort of historical dance with one another.
But it's not like one is just sitting there
and the other is evolving.
I think the same is true now with intellect.
That we have in fact become a part of the systems of earth
and they are obviously pushing back on us in interesting ways.
And as we evolve in the future, it's a matter of sort
of recognizing our role in that and not assuming
that we can just find the levers and control the earth.
It's more, how are we going to dance with the earth?
How are we going to garden?
But when you garden, you have to let the plants do what they do.
You don't just control everything, right?
One in the back here.
>> What are your thoughts about the relationship between humans
and animals in all these problems?
I mean are they of no consequence
or are they actually necessary for our survival?
>> David Grinspoon: Well gosh, that's a great question.
There's so many dimensions one could answer that.
The relations between humans and animals.
I mean for one thing, there are the intelligent animals.
And I didn't mean to imply with anything I said
that humans are the only intelligent creatures on earth.
I think we have a lot to learn for instance
from the intelligent [inaudible]
and how they've evolved these complex, social societies.
And I think that we have to you know,
not assume that we're the only intelligence and that we can't learn
and cannot increasingly develop an understanding
of our moral responsibilities towards those other intelligent
creatures we share this planet with.
Now as far as the total of life on earth, absolutely.
I mean we need the other species for all kinds of reasons.
As I mentioned in response to this other gentleman's questions,
we're embedded in these systems.
We don't know how to run everything without --
we're very much dependent.
So while we may be sort of you know, steering the sailboat
and moving the tiller, you know, we still have to read the currents
and the winds and a lot of that has to do
with our interactions with the other species.
So we are both dependent upon them and we have to be very careful
with our -- what we do with the -- to the biodiversity of this planet.
And of course, we have great moral responsibility towards them.
I can try to give a longer answer but that's - you know -
that's the short answer is that yes, very,
very important part of the equation.
>> I'm afraid we have to bring this to a close because we are way
over time, but you can continue the conversation informally,
and join us for reception in the back.
And let us thank our speaker again.
[ Applause ]
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