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Will We Survive The Future? (with John Green!)
In this episode of Surviving Deep Time, host Callie Moore and guest John Green delve into the concept of the Anthropocene Epoch, exploring humanity's profound impact on the planet as evidenced by...
Will We Survive The Future? (with John Green!)
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Speaker A
It's a cool, crisp, clear day, and you're standing at the edge of a shimmering lake in the center of a dense evergreen forest. This lake is fairly small. You could walk around its entire perimeter in about 15 minutes. But it contains some big implications that some argue could define our current period of time. This little unassuming body of water is called Crawford Lake, but its name, in the Wyandat language spoken by the indigenous people native to this region of what's now Ontario, Canada, means where we have a story to tell. As you gaze into the still blue gray waters, you see only your own reflection staring back. There's no obvious indication that what lies beneath the surface is something with potentially enormous significance, something that reflects more than just a human face, but human actions too, because this lake is unusually deep for its size, deep enough that it's upper and lower layers never mix, which keeps the sediment layers at the bottom almost totally undisturbed. As those sediment layers have been deposited on top of each other year after year, they formed a unique historical record of environmental change, one that spans around 1,000 years in the past, right up to the present day, where you are now. And within those muddy layers is one that dates to the mid 20th century, a dark brown stretch of sediment that resembles the others, but contains something not found in any previous layer. It's a sprinkle of radioactive plutonium fallout, a consequence of the increased testing of nuclear bombs in the 1950s. This marker is a glaring signal of humanity's effect on the world, of events that occurred thousands of miles away, having a global impact so big they left a mark at the bottom of this sky. Canadian Lake. That signal will persist in the depths of Crawford Lake for millennia to come, which is why some researchers have argued that it should be formally recognized as what geologists call a golden spike. This boundary would mark the end of the Holocene epoch, which has spanned the last 11,700 years, and the start of a new period of geologic time, one defined by the effects of human activity on the modern world. The Anthropocene Epoch. It's just one of many possible golden spikes that have been proposed. And its significance to science, to society, and to those who come after us is at the center of a heated debate. Not everyone agrees that Crawford Lake should contain the golden spike that defines the start of the Anthropocene, or whether the Anthropocene should even be considered a new division of geologic time at all. But regardless of where, when, and even if we draw a formal line on our timescales, the concept of the Anthropocene represents something undeniable. And just because our ancestors have made it through every major period of upheaval in Earth's history, so far as we've seen on these adventures, that doesn't mean that our survival through future changes is guaranteed. This lake may seem tranquil and unassuming to your eyes, but as you stare at the view, you find yourself asking a profound and nerve wracking question. We have become a force of nature, but will we survive ourselves? Hello and welcome to Surviving Deep Time, a podcast that gives you a human's eye view of what trying to survive in the past might have looked like. I'm Callie Moore, one of the hosts of PBS Eons, a YouTube channel about the history of life on Earth, and I'm here with John Green to figure out if we will be dead or thriving in the Anthropocene epoch. Hello, John.
Speaker B
Hi, I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker A
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on and talking about the Anthropocene. You're probably the leading expert, I guess. I. Expert?
Speaker B
I'm the leading expert in aspects of the anthropocene like diet Dr. Pepper. I'm not sure that I'm much in the way of a geologist, but I'm excited to have this conversation, not least because I agree with the geologists who have decided that we're probably not yet, or at least we're not ready to name yet, that we're in a new epoch. But. But I still think it's interesting to talk about the Anthropocene because I think we're going to get there and I think we will look back on this time as. As part of it, probably.
Speaker A
For sure. For sure. And what's really neat is in all of our previous episodes we've looked into the deep past and this one we're kind of looking forward in our last episode, which is great. How often do you think about the concept of the Anthropocene?
Speaker B
Quite a lot, because I think about where I am in time a lot and I'm in an interesting moment. I think of all the humans who've ever been born. About 120 billion humans have been born. Over 100 billion were born before 1800, which is when I start to see big human changes where, you know, we're spewing a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Or you can say that it began with the plutonium that came with nuclear explosions. But regardless, it seems to me that I'm living in a time where humans are Extremely, unprecedentedly powerful, which is both good and bad news. I think it's easy to say that it's just bad news and I think sometimes we are a little hard on humanity, but in some ways we've really used our power to do interesting stuff like make Billie Holiday records and figure out what's keeping the stars apart and all that stuff.
Speaker A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've done some truly amazing things, for sure. Also bad things, but some really good things, of course.
Speaker B
Yeah, both. It has to be both. And.
Speaker A
Yeah, and like you said, you need to talk about the good with the bad. So it's not all doomsday all the time.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A
So what's your opinion on the current debate of the Anthropocene? Do you like the idea of having it formally designated as a new geologic era? Epic.
Speaker B
Well, I'm quite fond of the Holocene and I think we're probably still there, or at least, like, I don't think there's enough evidence, at least according to the body of geologists that I'm familiar with, we're not in a place where there's enough evidence to say that we're living in an Anthropocene. And so I'm not going to be the one who says that. Even though I wrote a book called the Anthropocene Reviewed. I'm not going to pretend that I know more than the experts on this front. I do think that, um, we're going to look back on this time or whatever comes after us will look back on this time as a time when humans were really powerful. But I also think that they'll look back on that time. They may look back on that time going back to 10,000 years ago or going back to 11,000 years ago, because humans have been a little bit powerful that whole time. It's just only since industrialization that we really started to rev our engines, both literally and figuratively.
Speaker A
Yeah. And it's interesting about, like, how long lasting our impact will actually be. Like, will. How much of us will be preserved in the fossil record? I'm sure we will have stuff in the fossil record, but like, how much compared to how much we've done.
Speaker B
Yeah, I think a lot of us won't be preserved, probably. Especially if we don't hang around for a while. I think if we hang around for a while, like, if we make it through the next few thousand years, I think we've got a good chance to end up a pretty significant development in the fossil record. But if we were to go kaput right now, I think that, you know, there would be some remnants of us, but only. Only some.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yep. We be buried in mud, people, anoxic mud. That's the way. Preserve your bones for future generations.
Speaker B
But we would also need, of course, if we go kaput, we would also need something in our stead to be naming eras at all. Right. We wouldn'. Have an Anthropocene because there wouldn't be a creature on Earth that could name something like the Anthropocene or have the idea of an Anthropocene.
Speaker A
Right. Yeah, I didn't think about that. Like, you have to have somebody to name it.
Speaker B
Yeah. And so if it's not us, who's it going to be? I don't think it's going to be like raccoons, you know, I like raccoons, but I don't think they. I think in a world without us, it would take quite a while for there to be a species that developed enough to be able to name things.
Speaker A
Oh, my gosh, I would love it. Seeing a little raccoon typing.
Speaker B
Yeah. You know, it's not out of the question. They've got good hands for it, but I don't know. I don't know. I don't. That's the other thing about humans is we're very hard on ourselves and always talking about what a terrible job we do of having all this power. And I think we do do a terrible job of it in many ways. And we are catastrophic and everything. And there's no. No sense in denying that. But I don't think that raccoons would be any better than us. I don't think dolphins would be any better than us at this. At this job. We just have a really. We. Weird job right now.
Speaker A
Right, right. We are the ones holding all the power, for sure.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker A
So for a little backstory for those that might not know, the Anthropocene Working group is responsible for formally deciding the start date and which golden spike represents it. So they have a list of 12 places, including Crawford Lake, that were identified as possible candidates, and none have been approved yet. And the spikes mostly date to around the changes that occur in the mid 20th century. They have sites that record specific conditions through time without gaps. So that's one of the real important things. You need to have a really good succession of layers without any big gaps. So you can really see the changes that humans have created, whether they be natural or not so natural. And again, they take many forms. Two of them are at coral reefs, so coral reef skeletons can preserve continuous records of environmental change and warming seas over the last few hundred years. There's also a core from a peat bog in Poland. Yeah, which I love, Pete. You gotta love peat. That preserves a clear layer of ash from fossil fuels being burned at power stations. And then, of course, an ice core from the Antarctic ice sheet, and that records snow fall levels and atmospheric methane levels over time. So there's quite a few of these things. My personal problem with most of these is where are you going to drive a spike into an Antarctic ice sheet that's going to stay? How do you get a golden spike to the bottom of a lake that anybody could ever see it again? So that's mainly my. My problem with the golden spike for the Anthropocene is it seems like all the places that they're talking about are very temporary. Like.
Speaker B
Right, right.
Speaker A
We'll probably be buried and turned to coal someday. So that's tough for me, too.
Speaker B
But all of this is contingent upon the Anthropocene actually working in the sense that we have to stay around. Right. And I think we will. But a lot of people are quite worried about that on its own. You know, like, a lot of people are worried about, like, whether the species can survive the next few thousand years, because I think it will. You know, we're headed into some weird days for sure, whether that's because of, you know, we're only, what, 70 years into the atomic era, so we have no idea how long we'll be able to handle that much power, let alone how long we'll be able to handle, you know, the potential power and catastrophe of artificial intelligence or whatever other, you know, eschatological fear you might have. I happen to have all of them at the same time. But, you know, I think we've. We've just. We mostly have to make it into the Anthropocene. I think in order, in order to be able to really name it, I think we need to be like a couple, at least a couple thousand years into the Anthropocene to be absolutely sure that we're in an Anthropocene. And we're definitely not a couple thousand years into it.
Speaker A
No, we are definitely a blip right now where we're right. We're real short timers on this. Yeah, for sure. So do you think that Crawford Lake could be a good candidate for the golden spike and what makes other markers of human activity, like, possibly more reasonable choices?
Speaker B
Well, I like Crawford Lake because the layers of sediment, they are a good, good continuous record. And, you know, we could put that golden spike there and somehow. And have it be there and have people know it's there and have people be able to dive to it or whatever. I think that could be really cool. In general, I feel like the evidence will emerge in the future. Even though I think we're in the beginnings of that moment, I think that it won't be until the future. And this is something I really appreciate about the working group, is that they're still kind of. They're still thinking about this, because it may be that the right way of understanding this or imagining this hasn't. Hasn't emerged yet. Hasn't occurred to us that it isn't one of those 12 proposed golden spikes, that maybe there's. There's another one that. That we haven't quite identified yet.
Speaker A
Yeah. And I mean, we could even go back further in time and find markers of human change, like thousands of years ago. So, yeah, there's the late Pleistocene megafauna extinction that started around 50,000 years ago. And by about 10,000 years ago, all of these big giant animals were gone.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker A
And could have been driven partly, at least, by human hunting. And that just shaped ecosystems.
Speaker B
Yeah. We're probably at least partly responsible for the end of giant sloths and whatnot. And that's one thing I think about. I think about the way that we've kind of reshaped things with rock quarries, with. With our. Our megalithic structures, which will remain. I mean, some of which have been around for thousands of years as it is, largely because they've been preserved, consciously preserved by humans. But still, that could be around for hundreds of thousands of years. There's no reason why the great pyramids of Egypt couldn't hang around for another series of thousands of years. But I don't know. I mean, I think the biggest shift is industrialization and its outputs, its outcomes, from nuclear energy to air traffic travel to carbon emissions to antibiotics. Like, you know, industrialization is so big that it's hard to. But then I also think about the Colombian exchange. Right. Like, starting in the. Starting in the 16th century, all these things that had lived in one world suddenly lived in two worlds. Whether we're talking about horses being in the. In the Americas or tomatoes being in Afro Eurasia or cassava being in Afro Eurasia. All these things moved around because of us. And so we've. We've had a profound, profound impact on the story of not just ourselves, but. But life and geology on the planet. I just don't know if we're at the place yet where the impact has Been as profound as, say, like a meteor that kills all the dinosaurs.
Speaker A
Boom. That was a pretty easy one. That's pretty cut and dry. Just space rock obliterate. Yeah, easy peasy. That's probably the easiest extension of it.
Speaker B
It's also on my list of apocalyptic worries, by the way. We can't get rid of that one. That one should still be here.
Speaker A
Living on the edge of the kill zone of the Yellowstone super volcano.
Speaker B
Also another big one.
Speaker A
Another big one. Another big one. Yes. That's kind of. Oh, that's going to be a really bad day. That's going to be such a bad day.
Speaker B
I mean, not just a bad day. It's going to be a bad millennia, potentially.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker B
Yeah.
Speaker A
It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while. Yep. And then we didn't even mention the agriculture evolution.
Speaker B
You know, like, of course we've reshaped plant life, plant life on the planet really dramatically in the last 12,000 years. It's one thing I like about the name of the Holocene is that like, it, it, it encompasses a little bit of us. Yeah. Agriculture has been a profound shift and the way that we, the way that land use works, I mean, did you know, I just found this out and it blew my mind. There is more land in the United States devoted to the cultivation of turf grass than to all other plants. Wheat, corn, soybeans, everything really. Turfgrass, Turf grass. More turf grass than corn or wheat. Like those endless fields of corn in the great state of Indiana where I live. Pale in comparison to the amount of turf grass that we grow in our front lawns.
Speaker A
Yes, lawns are a real stickly point for me. I wish it would go away.
Speaker B
I don't love a lawn. I have to say, I don't love a lawn. We have a tiny, we have sort of a postage stamp lawn, but most of our lawn has been turned into a meadow and it's lovely and there's lots of birds. I just saw a woodcock yesterday.
Speaker A
Oh, nice. Yeah. It's amazing how fast wildlife comes back when you change these like, mono crops back to something a little bit more natural. How many bugs return and the birds return and the predators return? My, my parents, their last dog died several years ago and now their yard is full of possums and raccoo cocoons and woodchucks and hops and other little species of birds. And it's just like this wonderful little habitat that was created after the dogs died.
Speaker B
I think this is worth remembering that, like, if we do Go. And I hope we don't. I think we're the most interesting thing that ever happened on planet Earth. And like I said, I'm broadly in favor of humans. But if we do go, life on Earth is going to be fine. Complex life. Unless we really obliterate things with, you know, just a massive nuclear winter or something, complex life on Earth will keep going and we'll do interesting stuff and evolve in interesting ways, and it doesn't. It doesn't need us. You know, like, we always talk about the end of the world. You know, I grew up Episcopalian in the Christian faith tradition, and we talk a lot about the end of the world and apocalypticism and in Christianity and in other major world religions, and we always talk about the end of the world. But of course, it's not the end of the world. The world's going to be fine. It's just the end of us.
Speaker A
Yep, yep, agreed, 100%. And it sounds like you're fairly optimistic, but how optimistic, pessimistic are you overall about our planet's future and our species future?
Speaker B
Well, I think we're in for some weird days, you know, and I think climate change is going to be catastrophic. Even if we do manage to limit it to, say, 2 degrees Celsius or 2 and a half degrees Celsius, it'll still be. It'll still have a profound impact on many of our lives and on the lives of our descendants for generations to come. And that's kind of the best case scenario. And I think we also have a lot of challenges when it comes to other aspects of industrialization. The power of weaponry, the power of computing and artificial intelligence and all kinds of stuff. We got. We got threats in every direction, and I don't want to pretend otherwise, but I'm optimistic because humans have often figured out really complex problems. You know, we've often. We've often made it through tight, difficult moments. And really, there hasn't been a time in human history where it was uncomplicated to survive. You know, one thing I remind myself of is that if we've been around for like 300,000 years, say, there have been about 120 billion humans. Most of those humans never lived to be 20. It's possible that most of those humans never lived to be 10 because child mortality was so high, and then adolescent mortality was fairly high. So, like, dying between the age of five and 15 was, was, you know, reasonably common. But. But child mortality was incredibly high, like, you know, 40, maybe even 50%. And in that sense, we're doing pretty good. You know, like we've decreased child, child mortality by 60% just in the last 30 years. That's pretty impressive, right? That's pretty good. It is. And I see, so I see some reasons for hope there. You know, like I think it's easy to get focused on our problems and we should be focused on them. They're terrifying. But I do also see reasons for hope. I see that we can just as what comes. Part of what comes with this power is a really interesting ability to solve problems together, to co collaborate across space and time and more efficiently than we've ever been able to before. Way more efficiently than people could 500 years ago when they didn't even, you know, a lot of people didn't even, or 600 years ago when we didn't even know that we were one world necessarily. I see some cause for hope there, but it could go either way. Callie, I'm not going to lie to you. There are days when I think we're not going to make it through this and there's going to be nobody to name the answer. Anthropocene.
Speaker A
Yeah. It's been a tough one because if we think about the most successful human species so far, if we think about longevity, that would be Homo erectus. And they survive for almost 2 million years.
Speaker B
Almost 10 times as long as we have.
Speaker A
Exactly. So like you mentioned, we've been around for about 300,000 years as anatomical humans. We'd have to make it to around 1,700,000 AD to reach up to them.
Speaker B
Yeah, that seems that would mean that we're in the first like 15% of human history, which does seem questionable. Right. Like, I understand why people are dubious of that. I understand why people are a little worried about that one. But I think, I still think we might be, I think we might be in the first. You know, if I think about this in, in terms of like, like soccer, because I, I watch a lot of soccer. I think we might be in the first 15 minutes of our 90 minute game or, or even the first five minutes. But we will have to get through some really big problems. Right. And we're, we're new to being the only human species. Right? Like if, if, if we distill human history down to a calendar year with January 1st being the emergence of modern humans and today being December 31st, I don't think Neanderthals go extinct until November.
Speaker A
Right. Yeah, it would have been really recently.
Speaker B
I know it was pretty recently. And so maybe we won't be the only Human species. Or maybe we won't be the only thing we think of as, as a human species.
Speaker A
That's going to be interesting.
Speaker B
Maybe that's part of how we get through.
Speaker A
Yeah, it could be. I mean, that's probably part of the reason why we got through in the first place. But knowing that at least one of our ancestors made it for 2, 2 million years is, I think that's hopeful.
Speaker B
Like we got, I think so.
Speaker A
We got some time. We got some time.
Speaker B
I think so. And you know, I, when I talk to my kids about this stuff, which I do sometimes, they often bring up the, this fact that like, humanity will end, you know, that like we have a temporal range, just like all species have a temporal range. There's a time we get to be here and there's a time after that and they'll be like, well, you know, like the oceans are going to boil in a few hundred million years. And I'll be like, we don't have to worry about that, guys. There's a zero percent chance that we're going to be here then.
Speaker A
No, we are not going to watch the Earth be engulfed by a red giant sun.
Speaker B
No, no, no, it's gone by then. We'll almost definitely be gone. And if we're not gone, we'll be like a multi planet species that's figured out a bunch of things that we can't even imagine how to figure out right now.
Speaker A
Exactly.
Speaker B
Probably. I think we both know, Callie, we've both looked into the deep past. It's not looking great for us. Long, long term.
Speaker A
No, not long long term. And also, I don't know if I. For the end of our, our little, our little home either. Yeah, our little galaxy. I don't think much.
Speaker B
I mean, I think, I think complex life will find a way for a really, really long time. Like I think the idea of life on Earth will survive for a really, really long time. I don't know how long a part of that story will, will get to be, but I think that, I do think, I do think we're in the first half still. And so I think we'll live to see an Anthropocene one way or another and a pretty Anthropocene. But I hope that we, I mostly hope that the Anthropocene doesn't suck for us and for other, other creatures. I mostly hope we do a good job of the Anthropocene because I think this is kind of, it's the first. If it does end up being an epoch, it'll be the first epoch. And correct me if I'm wrong, it won't be the first epoch where like one species is overwhelmingly determining what's happening, but it will be the first epoch where one species knows what it's doing.
Speaker A
Yes, that is very true. Yep, yep, I agree with that for sure.
Speaker B
So that's interesting. Yeah, we'll have a. We'll have some choices, hopefully.
Speaker A
Yes, I do hope we have choices and we make good choices. Let's make good choices. That's what I tell my friends when they go out to party. Make good choices.
Speaker B
That's right. That's right. Yeah. And in some ways humanity is going out to an incredible all night rager and we need to make good choices. Even though the temptation. Temptation to make bad choices is really profound.
Speaker A
Real profound and real easy. Oh, man. They're right there for you to make for sure.
Speaker B
Oh, yeah.
Speaker A
All right. So now that we're familiar with the Anthropocene, we've got five existential risks that humans need to figure out. Which of the following are you most optimistic about our ability to deal with? So we got climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, infectious disease, and nuclear war.
Speaker B
Well, this might surprise people who are familiar with my work because I've spent the last few years studying infectious disease and obsessed with the deadliest infectious disease in the world, tuberculosis, which is the subject of my new book, Everything Is Tuberculosis. But I'm most optimistic about our ability to deal with infectious disease. I am not particularly optimistic about our ability to deal with any of those things. I think that they're all going to be huge challenges. But I think that we have shown an ability as a species to respond really quickly and really effectively to emerging infectious threats. Now we could have responded much more effectively. We could always respond much more effectively. And hopefully we learn lessons in the future. And I want to emphasize that I'm not. Not that optimistic. I'm just more optimistic than I am about the other things.
Speaker A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
But I think, like, I'll just, I'll use tuberculosis as an example. We could live in a world without tuberculosis in five years if we decided that we wanted to. If we decided to commit a lot of resources in that direction, we could absolutely live at least live in a world where tuberculosis doesn't kill very many people. And it's not thought of as a public health threat that we could reduce the number of people who die of tuberculosis every year by way more than 1 million really quickly if we decided that was a big priority for humanity. And so I'm optimistic about our ability to deal with that just because I think we have fairly good tools now, whereas I don't think we have the same tools to deal with something like climate change or to deal with pollution. And I'm really pessimistic about our ability to deal with biodiversity loss just because we have done such a poor job of it.
Speaker A
It. Yeah, yeah, that's a bad one.
Speaker B
What about you?
Speaker A
Yeah. Infection. I. I don't know. I think I'm kind of with you with the infectious diseases because just the reasons that you mentioned, we've got tools. We've got tools at our disposal to.
Speaker B
Deal with and we don't always do a good job of deploying those tools. But I think like in an emergency, we, we, we, we. Well, I don't know. Now, again, I'm not that optimistic.
Speaker A
I know because some of the other ones, like climate change, like, like we kind of have the tools, but it's more of like everybody needs to change everything they do about their entire lives yesterday to kind of.
Speaker B
And we need to change. And we need to change big systems that are really hard to change. Like, we need to change, like how we make concrete. And we need to change how we transport goods. And we need to change. There's so much. Now Hank would say, my beloved brother would say, well, we've shown that we can, you know, continue to have long, healthy, productive human lives while lowering carbon emissions. And I'm optimistic about our ability to lower carbon emissions. I'm just concerned about our ability to get them to zero. Fast enough.
Speaker A
Yes. Yeah, we definitely aren't working fast enough. So infectious disease, we've all seen how dangerous and disruptive they can be. And these are likely to become way more frequent due to human activity, of course. And climate change and human modification of environments can extend. Expand the range of diseases and disease vectors like mosquitoes and ticks. Like, they're on their way here to Montana, which I'm not real stoked about, you know, and bringing old diseases to new places. You know, like mumps and measles are all of a sudden popping their ugly little heads. So we've also got malaria and Lyme disease to worry about. So maybe everybody just needs to get Lyme disease. So they're all like allergic to beef and meat and then we won't eat so much beef and meat anymore.
Speaker B
My. I'm not sure that's my preferred path.
Speaker A
No, me neither.
Speaker B
To reducing, to reducing animal consumption. But it's so it's. It, you know, when we only like, like I said, when we look at Our challenges, they are so profound, they are so intense. But we have to remember that, like, we. We've also shown an ability to solve incredibly complex problems.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker B
And so. And our ability to solve problems together is better than it's ever been. My mentor and hero, Paul Farmer, liked to say that resources are limited, but they're less limited than they've ever been. And I think that's true. And I think we need to do a better job of distributing and allocating our resources. For sure, it's insane to me, and I don't mean to harp on tuberculosis, but it is astonishing to me that the deadliest infectious disease in the world is curable. That it's such an indictment of humanity that we know how to treat, prevent and cure an illness that still kills 1.3 million people every year. It just shows that having the knowledge is only half the battle. The other half the battle is distributing resources effectively to actually address the crisis. And. And that's not just true for tuberculosis. It's true for everything.
Speaker A
Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And as we spread out more, we encroach into wild spaces, and so we increase the risk of zoonotic diseases spilling over into humans. So you got our. Everybody loves Covid and Ebola and hiv. These are all things that have jumped from animals to us.
Speaker B
I wouldn't have used the verb love.
Speaker A
I know. Know. I am trying to be. Everybody was like, cal, you got to be optimistic.
Speaker B
Oh, I see. I see.
Speaker A
I'm trying to. Yeah. No, I hated Covet. No, I'm. No, I. I did not like it. But definitely the most recent one in memory.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to worry about zoonotic diseases. We have to worry about old diseases developing resistance to our existing tools, especially bacterial illnesses. We have to worry about. About emerging threats, new novel diseases that can become endemic and just be an ongoing horror, which is, I think, unfortunately, going to be common in the future. Like you said, climate change is going to. Is going to make it so that more, you know, more diseases are spreading to places we haven't seen them in the past. We might see malaria reemerge in rich countries like it. Like I said, it's gonna be hard, but we can do hard things.
Speaker A
Yep. For sure. I was reading for the mo. Most of the time. We can do hard things. When I was reading your book, I had a moment of shared experience with you and your staph infection. I, too, am covered in staph.
Speaker B
Oh, you're colonized by staff. It's a fun one.
Speaker A
Oh, yeah, yeah. And I got a huge staph infection actually on my ears. And the doctor said something exactly. That your doctor said, like, if you would have had this happen to you, like, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, you would be dead. You would die.
Speaker B
Yeah, you.
Speaker A
There would be no more you. But luckily, we have things. And none of my staff was resistant, thank goodness.
Speaker B
Oh, good.
Speaker A
Yes.
Speaker B
Oh, good. Because that's that. And it should scare you. I mean, drug resistance is a huge issue when it comes especially to bacterial infections. But. But you're right. I mean, you know, I. I would have. I would be dead several times over if I'd been born before 1945 or gotten. Or gotten a staph infection before 1945. So I am extremely fortunate to be here. And I guess maybe that's part of why I'm optimistic is because, you know, yes, microbial resistance is a massive issue, but it's also an issue that's only 75 years old. Like, the first person who ever received penicillin who. Who died. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough penicillin in the world to. To stop their. Their staph infection from killing them at the time. But that person's daughter is still alive. Like, that's how recent penicillin is, that the. The first person who ever received it. Their kid is still here.
Speaker A
Yeah. It's crazy how. How close all of modern medicine is to us, and we just. Yeah, it's just here. We just. I have a headache. Take some aspirin, you know.
Speaker B
Yeah, we take that for granted. Aspirin's actually pretty old, but, yeah, the rest of them are.
Speaker A
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Why do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about infectious diseases? Like, we've talked about a little bit of your personal impact with staff and tuberculosis. Researching tuberculosis, Big outbreaks are inevitable to some degree. So are we prepared for the next one, you think?
Speaker B
No. No, we're absolutely not prepared. That's an easy question. We weren't prepared for Covid, and we have not done nearly enough to be prepared for the next pandemic. And that's. We. We've hopefully seen how profoundly disruptive to the social order an illness can be. But there are ways that the next pandemic could be vastly, vastly worse. And our failure to prepare for those pandemics is a real issue. I do think that we've shown an ability, maybe we've learned something about the speed at which we can respond, the speed at which we can develop MRNA vaccines and stuff like that. If the next pandemic is Viral, but, but we're not prepared and we need as a social order to be more prepared to think way, way more about threats. Not just infectious disease, though, also climate change, also pollution, also nuclear winter. There's plenty of threats out there. And I think in the dreary grind of daily life, it's easy to focus on needing to pay the mortgage and not the kind of existential threats that are in front of us. And that's not just true for individuals, that's also true for, for social orders as a whole. And I think we need to do a better job of committing more resources to the big threats, for sure.
Speaker A
I 100% agree. What's kind of cool to me, I think, is that with infectious disease we have kind of this deep time perspective. I mean, disease has been constant in our evolution for forever and we've met many strange new diseases before, which is really neat. For example, genital herpes. Oh, wow, what a one. To kick off this thought process. But it's thought to spill over into our genus Homo between 1.4 and 3 million years ago in Africa via contact with Paranthropus, another genus of the hominins that is like a cousin to us. Yeah. So even a different species of human gave us an infectious disease.
Speaker B
Tuberculosis is also older than modern humans. There have been versions of, you know, previous human species before us that got tuberculosis. So yeah, it is. I, I agree, like, deep time is kind of a comfort in this way because we see how we, you know, often survive or like species often survive, even pretty catastrophic pandemics. But then you also see examples of how species don't.
Speaker A
Yes, I know. Oh, man. So many. And oh man, we have several examples here to, to go over. I mean, even pubic lice is from gorillas and it jumped over to us around 3 million years ago.
Speaker B
I didn't know that.
Speaker A
Yeah. Which is another great. Well, we did an episode on that. If anybody wants to know more, there's an eon episode about pubic lice, which I couldn't believe we got the green light for, but we did. Yeah. And we probably picked up pubic lice from gorillas. Yeah. Around 3 million years ago. But it was probably either by sleeping in their nests or from hunt. Hunting and butchering them, so.
Speaker B
Oh, o. Okay.
Speaker A
Yeah.
Speaker B
That makes you feel a little better.
Speaker A
Yes.
Speaker B
Great.
Speaker A
Good catch. Yeah. Don't get your minds out of the gutters. And then there's also the yellow fever mosquito around 6,000 years ago that evolved to become a human specialist because the Sahara turned from green Lush savannah to the desert we know today. And so they had to figure out something to eat and it was up us. And now we get all of their diseases that they bring with them too. So yeah, the deep past teaches us that increased contact with other species along with climate shifts increases the risk of new diseases and disease vectors becoming a problem for us humans. So yeah, we're just gonna have to keep running into this over and over and over again.
Speaker B
I think, I think you're right.
Speaker A
Well, there's so many pressing issues. I don't even know. I don't think we can rank these, but we may have you rank these on your lovely five star our scale at the end. But climate change, boom. Yes, let's talk about that next. Assuming that humanity blows past the 2 degrees Celsius limit, which would push, push the climate beyond the range in which human civilization developed. I mean, what's that going to look like? I mean we could find out relatively soon, maybe within our lifetimes, which is terrifying. The world has already warmed around 1.1 to 1.3 degrees Celsius. And with current policies, we're on track to reach 2.47 degrees Celsius of warning by 2100, which is a lot.
Speaker B
Yeah, that's a lot. It's scary. It's scary. And I think it'll profoundly shift humanity and I think it'll have really catastrophic effects. And, and it's, and is so often the case with this stuff. The people who will suffer the most are the people who are least responsible.
Speaker A
Yep, yep. We're going to run into all sorts of stuff like more frequent extreme weather events. Events which we're already seeing this more frequent and pronounced heat waves. We actually have a thing called a heat dome in Missoula now, which is awful. There's sea level rise, food and water insecurity. I mean climate change is really wrapped into so many things.
Speaker B
Yeah. For sure. And even into infectious disease. As we, as we were just talking about, I don't think that climate change has to be the end of the species, but I do think that we've just, it's the perfect human predator in some ways because it is, it unfolds slowly and it requires a massive shared global response, which are two things that we're really bad at doing as a species. Right. We're bad at like, we're good at collaborating, we're bad at collaborating as one and we're really bad at responding to slow motion threats for sure. And so yeah, it freaks me out for sure. It keeps me up at night.
Speaker A
Yep. I worry about these things too. So I'm assuming you're a little bit more pessimistic about our ability to deal with climate change than.
Speaker B
I think we'll survive it as a species, but I think it will be catastrophic. I think like we have to be able to hold those and, and, and, and we sort of decide how catastrophic. Right. So like we have a lot of say still in what it looks like. And that makes me a smidge optimistic because I think that as we see more of the consequences of climate change, hopefully we'll get more serious about addressing it. And I think we have made important steps, it's just that we haven't made enough steps yet.
Speaker A
Exactly. I totally agree with that. We need more paleontologists, more people need to think on the deep time scale.
Speaker B
Absolutely.
Speaker A
Things that we're doing now are going to affect for thousands, possibly millions of years into the future. Yeah, but most people don't think on those vast timescales, which. I get that, I get that. I'm not one of those. I think on vast timescales all the time. My whole life is a vast time scale. But again, speaking of the deep past, I mean humans have endured and survived periods of immense climate change before, which is really neat. And this is both regionally and globally, so whole. Hopefully we can learn from these instances, I really hope. But they all these changes possibly had a huge impact on our evolution. There's this idea in anthropology called variability selection hypothesis, which mainly argues that some of our most basic characteristics, our most basic human traits, our behavioral flexibility, our ability to adapt, those types of things evolved at least in part as a response to a period's natural climate and environmental fluctuations that our ancestors had to endure over the last million years. So big brains, tool use, complex communication, cooperation could have all been partially driven by the need for early Homo to adapt to changing conditions in Africa. So maybe this is when we speciate. Maybe this is.
Speaker B
Maybe, maybe. I would think that would be kind of interesting. I don't know if we speciate in, in the way that we speciated in the past or if we speciate in like a sort of hybrid technological way. I have no idea. But we're, we're definitely in an interesting moment.
Speaker A
Very interesting moment. Yeah. Because we also have to deal with things like sea level rise that's going to completely change the land use around us, you know, because like when the massive glaciers of the last ice age melted about 10,000 years ago, some low lying areas, like where the neighborhood Neolithic people lived in Britain were completely sunk. So this would be like Doggerland. It's just gone. Everybody lived there and it was a good time. And then the glaciers melted, and then they had to migrate to new, less threatened places. So maybe this ability to migrate kind of helps us along too.
Speaker B
Let's hope.
Speaker A
Let's hope. Yeah. All right, so climate change, kind of pessimistic, kind of optimistic. It's a, it's a slow burn disaster that we're gonna have to deal with at some point in time. But maybe, maybe doable. Maybe doable. I hope, I hope it's doable. I hope all of these are doable. I hope we get our poop in a group and figure this out. My grandpa is 101 and I want to live longer than him, so there has to be a habitable planet for me to live in.
Speaker B
That's a good goal. It's a good goal. And you're pretty young too. You gotta, you got a lot of lot ahead of you if you're gonna be a hundred one.
Speaker A
Yeah, you know, I got some time. I got some time. And so humanity also has time to make this better. So Cali can live to be in her hundreds, you know, that's the goal for everybody. Get me to 100. One of the scariest I think about just because I love nature, I love life, I love planet, I love lamp is biodiversity loss. And many scientists have proposed that we're currently in the sixth mass extinction, which absolutely terrifies me because I know way too much about extinction events. But they think that the extinction rate right now is estimated to be a thousand times greater than pre human background rate, which is a lot. That's a lot. And it's largely due to human activity. And causes differ of course by species, with hunting, pollution, and climate change all playing a role. But the main driver by far is habitat loss due to land use change, mostly turning natural landscapes into farmland or lawns like we've just discussed. Yeah, which is. Oh, it's so terrible. I mean, there's so much cool life out there. And, you know, it may not feel like it sometimes, but we humans are still part of the biosphere. We may live inside, and it feels very clinical and clean, but we are still part of the biosphere. And we are reliant on ecosystems for our survival. And as they become more fragile, so do we. So we rely on biodiversity for food, medicines, material, and a range of other ecosystem services. Plus, you know, like I mentioned, biodiversity is part of what makes the world so beautiful. I mean, butterflies and birds and bugs and mammals, all of this stuff makes the world so wonderful. And human existence, I personally think. I think a lot of people would agree that human existence gets generally more miserable as the more depleted ecosystems become.
Speaker B
Sure, sure.
Speaker A
So how optimistic or pessimistic do you feel about biodiversity loss?
Speaker B
Well, I mean, I'm definitely pessimistic about it. In the short run. I think that we have caused a tremendous amount of extinction, and there's not a lot of evidence that we're slowing down yet. But I do think in the long run, I'm optimistic about it in the sense that, you know, diversity of life tends to recover from, from things. But I don't, I don't really want to be a species where that's, that's our defense, you know, Like, I don't really want to be a species where we say, well, it's okay because life finds a way and, and life will recover. And there were, you know, there were fewer butterflies 50 billion, 50 million years ago, and then they figured out a way to exist. I want, want humanity to do a better job of preserving biodiversity for all the reasons that you said, but also because we are in uncomfortable ways, in ways that I don't think that we've gotten used to yet. We are, like, meaningfully stewards of what kind of life gets to live on this planet.
Speaker A
Right? Yeah. And it can't just be the cute things. It can't.
Speaker B
Right.
Speaker A
It can't do things.
Speaker B
And we've done a. Like, you know, I think in my book the Anthropocene reviewed, I write about how if you can't be useful to humans like cows and chickens, the second best thing you can be is adorable. Like, remind us of our children with big eyes and expressive faces. But that can't be. That can't be the way that we decide what kind of life lives on Earth. Like, then we're going to end up in some kind of cute dystopia where there's all kinds of cute mammals and no possums.
Speaker A
Right. And we need the possum. Possums. Possums are neat.
Speaker B
Possums are great.
Speaker A
I think possums are kind of cute. So maybe. Well, weirdo on that one.
Speaker B
Well, you're a weirdo on that one.
Speaker A
Yeah. And maybe the baby's hanging off the back, not so much, but just your normal run of the mill, pink nose possum. It's kind of cute. It's kind of cute. I'm getting, I'm getting real.
Speaker B
Are you getting some looks?
Speaker A
I'm getting some looks. Ah, one person in the room agrees. Okay. Oh, okay. And now I got some argument that the babies on the back are the cutest part of possums.
Speaker B
I don't know, it's weird. I don't find possums particularly cute myself, but I do think they should be here. And I don't think that, you know, I think it's uncomfortable to be the arbiters of what gets to be here. And I think that our. We should, we should, but. But I think we have to take that seriously because that's the role that we've ended up in one way or another. And the only way to walk it back would be to like, significantly decrease human complexity and the overall, like size and scope of the species, which I don't think we want to do because I think we get to, you know, there's a lot of advantages to the complexity. Right. Like that's a big part of the reason why we're able to fathom the stars and why we're able to understand deep time and while why we're able to do all the cool stuff that we do.
Speaker A
For sure, for sure. And speaking of deep time, we humans though, have never experienced a level of sustained biodiversity loss like this before. But things like the megafauna extinction of the late Pleistocene are kind of familiar. And you know, this all comes from the idea of overkill, the overkill hypothesis that basically argues that we over hunted all these big mammals to extinction around the world at the late Pleistocene. Rhinos, woolly mammoth, well, that there I was being trying to say woolly rhinos, but there were woolly mammoths and regular mammoths, cave bears, cave lions, ground sloths, glyptodons. I mean there's a bunch of, of amazing, charismatic megafauna from the Pleistocene that's no longer here. And there's this thought that this overkill hypothesis, this megafauna extinction drove, is what drove so many people to independently switch to farming right around the end of the Pleistocene. So you killed all of your big megafauna and now you got to do something else. Oh, let's plant some seeds, let's cultivate some plants and go from there.
Speaker B
Fascinating.
Speaker A
Yeah, so that might be one of the reasons we benefited from possibly killing all of the megafauna. But it's tricky to link that extinction of any given megafauna species to a specific change like us to overkill. Because during this time there was also a lot of climate fluctuations. You had the glaciers melting and things like that. So this balance of who goes extinct and who Lives, there's a lot more going on at the same time and humans might have been more the problem for some species and climate might have been more, more the problem for other, other species. But interesting. While our involvement in, in response to this ancient biodiversity loss is still kind of debated, it certainly was a big change in those people's environment over a brief time. So we made it through that one. So hopefully we can make it through this one.
Speaker B
I love this deep time way of thinking where like, it's like we can find examples of having made it through. Not, not something I didn't identical, but something that's somewhat similar and, and maybe we can find some hope there.
Speaker A
For sure, for sure. So biodiversity loss, not as great as climate change, not as great as infectious diseases, but still, still optimistic. We can do this. We can save the ugly animals. We can do it. I have faith in this pollution. The grossest one on the list I think is pollution. We're flooding the world with all sorts of damaging pollutants from plastic to air pollutants to CH chemical runoff from farming. I mean there's just so many and some of these we know the effects of and others it's too soon to tell, but, you know, early enough to worry about. Plastic pollution is probably my thing that I just can't stand the most. And it'll probably be seen as a marker of the Anthropocene. I mean microplastics are in all of us now. There's plastics everywhere. And for me as a, well, I was classically trained as a geologist, I'm now mostly a paleontologist. But the plastic is creating sedimentary rocks now. Even so we have plastic stone that's forming and it's been found on seven different continents. So are you, how do you feel, how are you feeling about pollution? Good? Bad?
Speaker B
Meh, not good. I mean, I don't feel good about any of these, man. I feel worried about all of them. I think with pollution it's especially difficult because we're going to continue to produce things. We're going to continue, we need produce things in order to survive in complex social orders. And so I worry about our ability to produce like quote unquote clean things because I don't know that like anything that humans make is like, is clean or that we can fully understand the implications of what we're making in the ways that we're transforming chemicals and substances to suit our uses. And so on that level, I don't think that we can. I don't think it's realistic to live in A world without pollution or even to understand what a world without pollution with humans might look like. And so that's why I kind of ranked it as a little bit more pessimistic. But at the same time I don't see it as necessarily as an existential threat on the level of climate change or a pandemic. And so I'm not optimistic at all about our ability to control it. But I, I'm less worried about it as, and maybe I'm wrong, but like I'm less worried about it existentially than I am about some of the others.
Speaker A
Yeah, for sure. Just one quick example, I recently, just this past weekend drove to Drumheller, Canada. And Canada has outlawed plastic bags since like the early 2000s, like mid-2000s. They, they, you can't get a plastic bag anywhere. And when you're driving on these rural country roads, there's no plastic caught in the barbed wire fence. But as soon as you go back into Montana and cross the border again, you're in these rural places there, it doesn't look like there's any humans around anywhere, but there's plastic bags right. Caught along the highway all the way down. And I'm, I just think like, oh, this is a great example of like we could fix this.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, that's a, it's, that, that's solvable with regulation. It's solvable, it's solvable. It's more solvable maybe than, than, than, or, or more straightforward. But again we're always going to produce stuff. And so even if we're not producing plastic bags, maybe we're producing paper bags that might have implications that I don't fully understand. So I'm, I, I, I remain worried. I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna hold on.
Speaker A
To my worry and for pollution at least we really don't have a deep time perspective.
Speaker B
That's interesting.
Speaker A
Yeah, that's true because we've never dealt with pollution on this scale before. I mean we've always kind of been creating stuff that's like a trait of humanness but, but not like we do now. So yeah, kind of interesting just to think about it, that this is, these are truly untested waters. We've, we've never had to deal with this sort of thing, but we are seeing signs that species are starting to evolve in response to our pollution. So we have the microbes now that can eat plastic, which let's, let's get more of those. Yes. Can we breed them yet? Can we farm micro eating plastic bacteria? Like why Is this not a thing? I feel like this is a million dollar idea here. And then also in parts of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, frogs that used to be bright green are now jet black. And they've evolved rapidly to cope with all of that extra radiation that we polluted the region with. So again, like you said earlier, life is going to be fun. Fine. It gonna be fine.
Speaker B
Life finds a way.
Speaker A
Life finds a way. There's no way we could exterminate all the bacteria on this planet anyways, so it's gonna be fine. But are we gonna be able to deal with it?
Speaker B
Yeah, I'm more worried about us than I am about life.
Speaker A
And let's see, the last thing I want to talk to, about, talk to you about today is nuclear war.
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A
The number of nuclear weapons in the world has come down a lot since their peak in the Cold War. But there are still over ten thousands of them. And that's more than enough to turn our planet into a hellscape. A nuclear war could kill hundreds of millions of people overnight and likely billions more from famine due to the collapse of food systems that would likely follow both as a result of the general societal collapses as well as the actual atmospheric changes. You know, the nuclear winter that we get. But we've had like nukes for 70 years and we haven't had a full scale war yet. So maybe it'll be okay if we just keep going. I mean, mutually assured destruction is a thing, so hopefully that, that keeps us from launching everything at the same time.
Speaker B
I don't know though. I mean I, I think as, I think as, you know, technologies become, as technologies spread and like nuclear proliferation has, as you say, like the number of nuclear weapons is down, but the number of, of nation states that have access to nuclear weapons is, it only goes up, it can't really go down. Like, I mean, I guess it can go down, but it hasn't gone down. And, and 70 years is both a long time and not a long time. Right? Like that means that we're 10% of the way to 700 years into the nuclear era and 1% of the way to 700,000 years into the nuclear era. And you know, you were saying earlier that we've got to be in the first half of human history, so we need to be thinking about 300,000, 500,000 million, 2 million, 5 million years. Yeah, that's, that really worries me. And, and I think we have to build some kind of system where we agree that something that, that can cause that level of Destruction that just, that we just find a way a. You know, as a species we've always sought more. And that's part of being a species, right? Like that's, we're, that that's not unique to us. Most species, every species is like that. Every species wants to be more, wants to, wants to survive, wants to go on. But ironically, the best way for us to go on is to find our way to less in many ways. Right. When it comes to consumption, when it comes to access to nuclear weapons, we have to make a decision that to have more, we need to have less. And that's a really counterintuitive, difficult decision for sure.
Speaker A
I agree.
Speaker B
So nuclear war really worries me and you know, like, it doesn't worry me the way that it worried my parents when they would have to, you know, do like drills in school and hide under their desks and everything and learn about all the horrors of nuclear winter. But I almost think that like we should be learning about the horrors of nuclear winter still because it remains a massive, massive, massive threat. Like it would be a beyond a catastrophe. It would be unimaginable. As you say. Like it's not even the people who would die from the initial act of violence. It's also all the people who would die from the collapse of the social order.
Speaker A
Oh yeah, yeah. The ones that turn to dust instantly are like the lucky ones kind of in some ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because do you have, do you have a plan, a survival plan? I do, I have one. I thought.
Speaker B
Oh, do you? No, no, no, I, I my always to be the first person to go in the zombie apocalypse, like run, run head first into the zombies. I have no interest in being one of the last humans.
Speaker A
I want to see how far I can go.
Speaker B
God bless you. You do that, you do that, you.
Speaker A
Make it to 100 and the zombie apocalypse. I will make it to 100 in the zombie apocalypse, yeah. Oh, it's pretty crazy because I mean, again with our deep time view, we don't necessarily have a nuclear war equivalent. The closest we can get to is probably the asteroid that hit the planet 66 million years ago at the KPG and that had an equivalent power of 10 billion WW2 era atomic bombs.
Speaker B
Wow.
Speaker A
Like, I mean it was wow in a sight from really almost anywhere that you could see it. I mean it would have been. Been. Well, if you were close enough to see it, you would be dead.
Speaker B
But I'm really glad I didn't see it. That's all I can say. And I hope I never See, I know. Hope I never see the like of it.
Speaker A
I would love to never see a mushroom cloud. Yes, agreed. But it did. It was powerful enough. That much was enough to cause a mass extinction. I mean it wiped out the majority of species including non avian dinosaurs and all sorts of stuff. Caused an impact winter that we're still not quite sure how long it lasted, but it completely changed, changed plants. But our ancestors, those small shrew like mammals, did survive and it was probably because they were small enough to take shelter or in holes or burrow. They might have had a generalist diet that allowed them to eke out a living until ecosystems recovered. So at least rats are going to do great.
Speaker B
Yeah. And again we come back to life will be okay. Life won't be great, but life will. Life will survive. If it can survive 10 billion nuclear bombs landing in the same place at the same time. It'll, it'll figure it out. But I don't want life to be okay. I want us to be okay. I'm quite fond of us.
Speaker A
Yeah. I mean we're gonna have to become good diggers and not be fussy eaters for sure. I think it's gonna be one of the things. There's gonna be no picky eaters in the apocalypse. Apocalypse. You guys.
Speaker B
Oh my gosh.
Speaker A
You get what you get. Oh my gosh. Well, so now that we've talked about 5 of the existential risks facing humans, I'm curious how optimistic you are on a scale of one to five stars. One being really pessimistic and five being really optimistic about humans dealing with these threats. So let's talk start with climate change.
Speaker B
I think we have, I give our ability to survive climate change four stars. But surviving it is not the same thing as getting through it with everything intact. And that I don't, I'm not optimistic about, but I think we can survive it.
Speaker A
Cool. Cool. Biodiversity loss.
Speaker B
I think that we will survive biodiversity loss also. Four stars.
Speaker A
Four stars. Cool. Pollution.
Speaker B
I think we will survive pollution. I would give that. I mean maybe I should have given all these three and a half stars, but I'm going to give them all four stars. Four stars.
Speaker A
Okay. Okay. Infectious disease.
Speaker B
I think infectious disease might be what takes us out in the end, but it could be so many other things too. But I think we're going to survive for a long time. I don't think infectious disease is going to kill us anytime soon. So I'm going to stick with four stars. Mars.
Speaker A
Good. Wow, this is really optimistic. I'm loving this and the last one, nuclear war.
Speaker B
So now that I've, now that we've had this conversation, I realize that I'm really worried about nuclear war. But I don't think it's going to be the end of our species even if it happens. I think that like, I think our species will survive it. I kind of think that our species will not go out with a bang, but with a whimper as, as T.S. eliot put put it. I think that we're going to have a long slow decline over hundreds of thousands of years rather than an event based decline. So I'm going to give our ability to survive nuclear war. I mean again, I hope it never happens. That would be the best way to survive it. Let's keep our fingers crossed there. But I'm going to, I'm going to go down to three and a half stars because I am pretty worried about it.
Speaker A
Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty worried about that one too. Mainly it's just humans getting spread out too far and can't, getting like, I mean genes are important and we got to keep fresh genes coming. So I think that's where that, that, that whimper comes. We just get too isolated, too far apart and we can't.
Speaker B
And I could see something like nuclear war making that happen, like making the groups of humans smaller and further apart in ways that are, that end up being catastrophic in the long run. I can also see that happening with, with a really bad pandemic. I can see it happening if we, if we really don't respond to climate change and we end up with, you know, know, five or six degrees of climate change, then I could see that being a real potential human ender. I think there's a lot of things that could end the species. But I also think, I, I really, I really do think that we're so new to this, right? Like if you think, if you think about how new we are to this level of complexity, of connection. We didn't know that we were in one world 600 years ago. We didn't know that the Americas and Afro Eurasia both contain contained humans. Or the vast majority of people didn't know that anyway, 200 years ago we didn't know anything about how to treat anything inside the body, right? Except for very few things. We could prevent malaria using tools that indigenous people had developed. We could treat some forms of pain. But the vast majority of things, you know, medicine wasn't any better than any other kind of like faith based healing or whatever kind of healing we wanted to use. We're so new to this. That makes me both pessimistic and optimistic because it makes me pessimistic in the sense that, like, for some of these things, we do have deep time precedents to look at, but for a lot, like you said, we don't. And that means that we're in somewhat uncharted territory. But I would submit that being in uncharted territory for humans is generally good, good news because the species has been through some hard, hard times. And so that's what makes me hopeful for sure.
Speaker A
What's one thing that humans need to nail down to help us like the silver bullet to get us through all of these, you think?
Speaker B
I think we need to understand that we are one human story and that the, that that factionalism is very likely on, on one level or another going to be our downfall and that we are one species that share one world and this is the will ever get to be and very likely the only world we'll ever get to be it in.
Speaker A
Yeah, very well put. And if you got one witch, one wish, which one of these concerns would you just get rid of? Would you just like wave a magic wand, be like, boom, done?
Speaker B
Well, I think I would. I mean, I think I would get rid of infectious disease just because it also causes so much present tense suffering. It's a, it's hard because I might get rid of climate change, I might get rid of nuclear weapons, I might. Biodiversity loss. Loss is a huge problem. You know, getting rid of pollution would solve a lot of, a lot of other problems. But, you know, 93% of people die of disease, and most of those people no longer die of infectious disease, but a lot of them do. And infectious disease especially is especially deadly among the most vulnerable, the most marginalized, the people who have access to the fewest resources, who are most structurally oppressed. And so I would have to look hard at that. But I don't know. Now I'm thinking climate change. Now I'm thinking if you can snap your fingers and get rid of climate change, that's a pretty big win for humanity and maybe we're going to solve infectious disease stuff on our own. Now I'm, now I'm thinking nuclear war. Because you get rid of that with a snap of the fingers, you've really eliminated a big risk. Yeah, I don't know. There's. You could make a case in multiple directions.
Speaker A
Oh, for sure. Sure, for sure. Well, I've really appreciated this conversation because I did come into this a little pessimistic. I am not going to Lie. I was like, we're toast, we're roast. There's nothing for us left anymore. We just should hang up our hat and call it a day. But you've brought me back to the light. I think we can do it. I really do.
Speaker B
I'm glad that my somewhat pessimistic optimism has been inspirational.
Speaker A
Well, I don't. Yeah, I'm. I think just having a sprinkle of optimism helps.
Speaker B
That's all we need. I mean, that's, that's the human story in a lot of ways, like hope in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. And somehow that's allowed us to go on for 300,000 years. Our persistence, our resilience, our ability to adapt. And that's what we're going to need in the Anthropocene for sure.
Speaker A
Well, thanks so much for coming on to today.
Speaker B
Thank you.
Speaker A
It may seem tough at times to imagine our path through the Anthropocene. The obstacles we've created for ourselves are numerous and daunting. But we humans like a challenge. And this particular challenge is one of epic proportions. The Anthropocene is perhaps our greatest test so far. And thousands of years from now, the bottom of the Crawford Lake may very well record the story of how we fared. It's a challenge that is self created, but also one that we potentially have precisely the adaptations to face head on. We have all the tools at our disposal to pass this test, if we can simply muster the willpower and wisdom to try. After all, our ancestors have made it through every obstacle that Earth has thrown at the them so far. As we've seen on our previous adventures, from the great dying at the end of the Permian to the impact winter of the K pg. And while the state of things right now may seem bleak, if there's one thing we've learned on our adventures, it's that the planet always recovers, no matter how bad things get. The question for us is simply whether we'll recover with it, or if after 4 billion years, years and counting, our lineage's journey through deep time will end in the Anthropocene. Thanks for joining us on this journey into deep time. And in the meantime, you can find us telling more stories from our planet's past over@YouTube.comeons this episode was written by Farhan Mitha, fact checked by me, Ken, Callie Moore, and hosted by me and John Green. It was edited by Chris Ankiko and our sound design and mix was by Callie Dishman. The show is produced by Sarah Suta Our script editor is Dr. Paige Madison and our editorial director is Dr. Darcy Shapiro. Our executive producers are Seth Radley and Hank Green. The executive in charge for PBS is Maribel Lopez and John Campbell is PBS's assistant director of programming. Surviving Deep Time is a production of Complexly for PBS Digital Studios, and we are distributed by prx. Until next time, you can always visit us over@YouTube.comeons for more stories from deep time from PRX.