4 Earths
For two decades, there has been growing discourse about the name of the rock strata that will be associated with homo sapiens in the future geological record. The present age we live in bears witness to a great tension between humans and nature. Hidden within this conflict is the ominous contradiction between humanity’s dependence on natural resources and their neglect and misuse of the Earth’s goods. Even the idea of Earth being something deserving of fair treatment and respect is a hot item for debate. Going forward we are left to wonder if the lens of artificiality may provide insight to the futures of homo sapiens’ relationship to nature. Geologist’s reckoning has labelled the last approximately 11,650 years as the Holocene epoch. Following what has commonly been referred to as the last ice age, this period has been noted as a time of warmth and glacial retreat. During this period, a burgeoning proliferation of species, notably that of humans, has occurred. Rise of civilisations and technological advance have largely been at the mercy of nature’s will, but more recently, a more contemporary debate has questioned how even footed was the fight between humanity and nature. Has humanity’s impact on the globe changed the tide of Earth’s geological progression and is this impact reaching the point of irreversibility? Will the artificial be the final straw in this struggle?
The Anthropocene neologism was popularized after the year 2000 to describe what will follow the Holocene geological era. Human impact on the planet is being deposited in ocean sediments and is recorded in deep ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The evidence of our industry and chemistry will be there for eons of future geologists to uncover, including radioisotopes from nuclear bomb testing, trace metals from early smelting in the Bronze Age, and layers of plastic. The evidence of human use of fossil fuels will be revealed in future rocks. Nature, and her legacy of human detritus, will remain indefinitely intertwined.
The Anthropocene will likely contain a record of our increasingly artificial world, our artificial turf, satellites, breasts, hips, and now artificial intelligence. That is particularly true because even our reality is open to question. Are we living in our solipsistic dreams, in the Matrix, or a nightmare? In modern society we can feel the dissonance between what we think is real, and alternative, or artificial facts and truths that compete with our beliefs. We face a serious crisis when the boundaries between the real and the artificial are deliberately confused and obfuscated. Nevertheless, that trend continues.
The Anthropocene emerged as a concept about the same time as postnormal analysis. That is no surprise given that postnormal analysis argued that the acceleration of change, the speed, scope, scale, and simultaneity of changes within technological, social, political, demographic, economic, global, and environmental systems are increasing because of our complex, technological, communications, transportation, and information systems. Not only does the speed of change tend to increase, but also its sweep and scope grow larger, scale grows to planetary and global levels, and all of these things are happening at once. These dynamics of change lead to system level changes that are characterized by greater complexity, chaos, and contradictions. These drivers and characteristics collectively describe the postnormal times in which we live.
Social and political systems that seemed normal or stable no longer behave the way they used to. The American president routinely ignores political norms, and other leaders around the world have followed suit. During the Covid-19 pandemic, transportation, supply chains, and educational systems were disrupted. Not all systems are postnormal, but increased complexity and the speed of change pose threats to system normalcy. Some systems can go almost postnormal overnight, Black Swan events, what were once considered to be unlikely, occur. The economic consequences of Covid-19 are a case in point. Postnormal analysis argues for types of postnormal behaviour, such as this Covid-19 postnormal burst. Resistance to post normal drivers creates lag, and concomitant pressure and influence from other systems creates postnormal creep.
Central to postnormal analysis is the idea that there are deep structures that try to convince us that homeostasis is normal. The built environment, for example, conforms to nature. Cities grow up around harbours and the confluence of rivers, but give lie to the wildness of nature. Interstate highways cross over fault lines, but when they collapse, for example the Loma Prieta earthquake that cause the collapse of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, the normalcy field also collapses. These deep structures are called the Manufactured Normalcy Field (MNF) and there is debate about whether these fields are physical, psychological, or even metaphysical. Nevertheless, the postnormal disruption is occurring within the MNF and the drivers and characteristics alter or disrupt the normalcy we believe we experience. For example, a MNF is created by a relatively small, aerodynamic aluminium tube, or commercial airliner, that travels in the stratosphere at 600 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet above the planet surface. That is not normal, but our culture, our travel patterns and behaviour, our short but rapid evolution as a species now considers that unremarkable. In postnormal times, it is not simply that what was normal is changing, but the very nature of change itself is changing. The phenomenon of postnormal times is not something that has occurred in a vacuum, but indeed is the continuation of a historical circumstance that has been creeping about for some time now.
The scope and speed of change have been the focus of futurist thought for half a century, or more, particularly within the realm of our technological prowess. Futurist Walter Anderson argued that because our species has now learned to control evolution, it has become our ethical and moral responsibility to take firm, but reluctant control over the progress of the biosphere. It is now our job, in his view, To Govern Evolution. He forecast the emergence of a biopolitics that recognizes our responsibility, having gained such power over genetic and species evolution. He acknowledged the growing discourse on the rights of living things. His work follows the argument of the late John Platt, physicist and futurist, who posited that we face an acceleration of evolution in a 1981 Futurist article. He showed that across a range of aspects of evolution—encapsulation, energy use, defence, communication, and other dynamics—how our species is poised for one of the greatest transformations in four billion years of planetary evolution.
In the subsequent three decades, the acceleration of the change drivers of evolution have increased in speed, scope, scale, and simultaneity. Moreover, our technological sophistication and development of space technologies has expanded the scope and sphere of human reach. There has been continuous human habitation on orbit above Earth for almost two decades, and within a few more decades, humans are likely to begin inhabiting the planet Mars. We are a migratory species, and as anthropologist Ben Finney and others have argued, our diaspora into the solar system and beyond is likely part of our story as a species.
What does this bode for the Earth, a living organism, a cybernetic, self-regulating system? To what degree does a system need to be artificial, mediated by homo sapiens in order to survive over the very long-term future? To begin with, how did we get to see the earth as artificial?
It is no coincidence that the transformation of mother Earth into machine coincides with the Renaissance and industrial revolution. Early cities developed by filling in swamps and channelling rivers and streams, and creating harbours and dams. We began the transformation of Earth to machine by building canals to improve the efficiency of human transportation of goods. This metaphor for human transformation was likely behind the interpretations of nineteenth century astronomer Schaparelli’s Martian canals and likely reason for the eager acceptance of such a possibility. The early industrial phase of human development is very evident in the place where I live, near the Erie Canal in Western New York. The development of the steam engine and railroads further transformed the planet to the extent that it is now crisscrossed with steel rails, and now asphalt and macadam roads. Elon Musk would like to build transcontinental tunnels if we will let him.
The innovation and development of transportation technologies are a good case in point of the growing speed, scale, and scope of change. We have gone from foot travel to the use of the wheel and draft animals, to railroads and steamships, airplanes, supersonic jets, rockets, rail guns, and have launched interstellar spacecraft. We have conquered the planet with the use of maps, and now with GPS and remote sensing earth satellites. The number of low Earth orbit satellites is likely to increase by one hundred orders of magnitude in the next few years thanks to the burgeoning private space launch industry.
We have become very effective at moving water around the planet, and storing it artificially. The development of the US Southwest is largely due to water diversion from the Colorado River and other sources. The California Central Valley and Yuma, Arizona have been transformed into agricultural breadbaskets thanks to large-scale diversion of water and irrigation. Other bodies such as Mono Lake and the Ural Sea have been nearly drained by human diversion of water to cities and agriculture. The relationship between human beings and the Earth has moved from something relatively mutual, akin to a mother’s loving relationship to a child towards the child becoming a parasite upon the mother.
We appear to be at a civilizational turning point, where the tensions between nature and human activity are likely to have serious consequences. And yet, there are those who see technology and the artificial as simply another expression of nature. As humans, we are part of nature, so who is to say that artificial is bad. Bad for whom? Our current paradigm places humans on top, but what if that is not the future we will inherit?
Complexity, chaos, and contradiction grow from the increasingly blurred distinctions and boundaries between natural and artificial, between human and machine. We may pine for simpler or more stable times, but since the beginning of modern civilizations, we have longed for the Golden Age, the paradise before modern times. We are now faced with a plethora of choices spanning the spectrum of organic/historic ways and a synthetic, cyborg futures. The pathways to paradise and oblivion are not necessarily clear.
The tension between the philosophies of critical posthumanism and transhumanism is one example of the dichotomy between natural and artificial. Critical posthumanism argues for co-evolution with other species, and the planet, and machines, but not in the interests of humanity. Posthumanists such as Donna Haraway have argued for a blurring of boundaries between homo sapiens and our animal kin, as well as seeing cyborgs as an expression of the power of being the Other. Transhumanists, on the other hand, see a bright future of machine and artificial realities—an oncoming Singularity with transformational change—with the potential of longevity and immortality, uploading of one’s personality and memories, and human-machine synthesis or symbiosis. If either philosophy drives a paradigm shift or worldview change, the potential impacts upon other species and planetary system will be massive.
To help us better understand the impact of the artificial on humanity and Earth we should extend our lens of analysis into the future (say 2200 AD) and explore the potential realities before us. The four alternative futures presented here attempt to capture the spectrum of possible artificial Earths, that is, planetary futures that include some form of homo sapiens. They are presented in order of least artificial to one of the most artificial futures of Earth imaginable. Following each scenario is a brief analysis of the trends and events we are witnessing today that will set us on a trajectory towards something resembling one of these potential Earths.
Scenario 1: Dark Mountain (Earth: 1% artificial)
Dark Mountain imagines a reduction of human population to three million people, the estimated number of humans on the planet before the rise of permanent settlements and regional civilizations. Humans returned to a Paleolithic lifestyle. Settlements are temporary and move often, agriculture is limited to horticulture and gathering. Cultural norms restrict and suppress innovation, creativity, and development of technology, particularly metallurgy and energy use. Dark Mountain societies are subsistence economies, largely organized similarly to primitive communism, with limited personal ownership of material goods. The values of the society are largely organized around collective myths that celebrate the animal, ecological, and human co-evolution and interdependence.
This scenario in mind, we must ask, what trends are leading us towards this nomadic future society?
The overall trajectory of progress and machines is increasingly uncertain and hardly universally accepted. Since the early Industrial Revolution, workers have thrown tools and clogs in the cogs of industry and the word sabotage has roots in rage against the machine. An ongoing back-to-nature movement persists. The green meme has had various manifestations as futures scenarios or images over time. The concept of Earth as a living system, for example, has been around for centuries, in modern history, the environmental movement has ranged from the early conservation movement, public interest conservation advocacy, Greenpeace, Earth First!, to eco-radicals, and now anti-globalists and degrowth activists. Mainstream and conservation environmentalism may have been more accommodating of the machine. That might be illustrated today by the "mixed-use" of national forests and US Bureau of Land Management lands with dirt bikers, hikers, snowmobilers, and skiers mixing in the backcountry.
Dark Mountain takes green values to an extreme and is likely to be unfamiliar territory -- a hard-to-imagine place for most folks used to electricity, indoor plumbing, and regular meals. However, it pictures a civilization that rejects most of the assumptions of postindustrial civilization. It is extreme, but concentrates the trends toward an authoritarian (non-innovative) society.
The roots and branches of the scenario come from a wide range of literature, scholarly writing, social movements, and social action. The mass migration of humans from rural areas and villages to cities is a continuing trend. On the other hand, it appears humans are alienated from nature and look for connections with nature, such as pet ownership, parks and green spaces, and vacations outside of the city. However, urban living affects some people aversely resulting in what has been described as nature deficit disorder. Doctors are ordering nature experiences as a treatment for stress and depression.
Social movements over the last half-century have also contributed to this meme, from Earth Day and the emergence of the modern environmental movement with mainstream and radical green fringes, to the emergence of Green parties in Europe, Earth warrior groups such as the Sea Shepherd Society, the Rainforest Action Network have now been joined by Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future, the Sunrise Movement, and the Extinction Rebellion. Anti-growth and anti-progress movements also need to be taken into consideration: Occupy Wall Street and antifa (anti-fascist) activists in the US are examples of social movements dissatisfied with the Continued Growth paradigm.
Dark Mountain is a possible, if low probability alternative future. On the other hand, the social structures and organizations served the species well for 200,000 years or longer, so they cannot be ruled out. The one existing meme or theory is a reasonable candidate, the return to hunter-gather societies. While improbable, and extreme, it does align with the skills and cultures of indigenous people who are currently being overwhelmed if not exterminated. Dark Mountain is a variant of the Four Futures’ Disciplined Society alternative future and is suggested by the dark ecology movement and Dark Mountain manifesto. The aim is to return to migratory hunter-gatherer societies and leave industrial society behind. It would make eco-radical groups, like EarthFirst!, look tame. Reducing Earth's population deliberately by three orders of magnitude is improbable, but nuclear war, genetic warfare or pandemics could lay the groundwork.
Dark Mountain pictures the success of antinatalism movements of the mid-21st century, most notably the Human Extinction movement and softer forms of birth control and population reduction. The broad social movement aligned with trends in growing numbers of human deaths over time (particularly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution), falling fertility rates, rise in suicides and opiate addiction, and depression. What was a fringe philosophy found fertile ground in a world increasingly characterized by suffering and mental illness.
Various religious traditions note the clear connection between birth and death, suffering and life, and the bondage to the material world that imprisons our divine nature or spiritual being. Notably, Norwegian metaphysician Peter Vessel Zapffe argued that consciousness is over – evolved in our species and we are burdened by the knowledge, unlike any other species, that we are destined to die. The Argentine philosopher Julio Cabrera explored the ontological challenges of birth that makes us manufactured and used, the ultimate manufactured normalcy field. We begin the process of dying within seconds of being born, we are afflicted by physical pain, mental willpower or its lack, and the creation of positive values (normalcy fields) that must constantly be engaged lest we fall back into depression. Other key issues, according to South African philosopher, David Benatar, is that the balance of good and bad things is tilted towards the presence of pain and suffering and our experience of it in the world. The empirical evidence of death and destruction over the last thousand years is staggering. Deaths over the last millennia number in the billions: natural disasters, starvation and malnutrition, plague and epidemics, disease and accidents, mass killings, political killing, genocide, genital mutilation, and suicide. The growing collective awareness of this resulted in a series of individual and collective actions that dramatically reduced human populations over just a few centuries.
From a postnormal analysis standpoint, the first alternative future is a return to the "normal" that characterized human existence for most of the million years before the dawn of agriculture some 12,000 years ago. Dark ecology argues that it is not industrialization that is destructive, but settled agriculture “civilizations” that are the source of human misery. A long period of hydraulic civilizations constituted a kind of new normal until the industrial revolution. Arguably there have been punctuated periods of normalcy, but postnormal change has gone through its agricultural, medieval, industrial now high technology postnormality. Dark Mountain reduces the artificial to the impacts of human migrations, tool use, and horticulture. Fire use becomes the largest source of human alteration of the environment.
Scenario 2: Collapse (Earth: 5% artificial)
Collapse is one of the most popular images in literature and movies. Teen fiction has produced a number of dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures, such as Hunger Games and… Wikipedia lists nearly two-dozen potential existential threats to humanity and the program on existential threats addresses a wide range of cosmic, terrestrial, and anthropomorphic threats. This alternative future follows the logic of a disruption of Earth's thermodynamic equilibrium over the last million years or so. The position of Earth's continents, tectonics, and the orbital cycles identifies by the mathematician Milutin Milankoć have produced recurring cycles of glaciation. If anthropomorphic changes disrupt the Milanković cycle, Earth’s temperature could rise to a higher thermodynamic steady-state. That might look like the Carboniferous phase some 50 million years ago when Earth's average temperature was 20° higher than today. This is the runaway greenhouse scenario that is the basis for exploring the impacts of 6° C or more increase in Earth's temperature, and the results pictured in JG Ballard's Drowned World (1962).
This future could unfold quickly, but more likely may take centuries. As climate change journalist David Wallace-Wells argued, we are already facing cascades of catastrophe and this future in which everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, human systems unravel quickly in the face of growing natural systems failures. In this scenario, the forecasts of ocean and permafrost methane release were vastly underestimated, and glacial melting in high altitudes, Greenland, and Antarctica accelerated. Coasts are flooded, there are mass migrations inland as well as across the oceans. The tropics become inhospitable to human habitation, and human populations are forced towards the poles.
There are massive failures in food production, warfare over dwindling water, migration, and failures of human bureaucratic systems. Eventually, only Antarctica is habitable, with some subterranean cities, domes in high mountain areas. At its conclusion the warming process does not totally exterminate humans, but 5% of the planet is artificial.
So, what can we see today that is setting us on a course for Collapse?
Civilizational collapse has been recurring image of the future. Dutch futurist Frederick Polak noted the number of civilizations and societies that had negative or apocalyptic eschatology, whose images of end times were dark and violent. The history of those societies suggests that those dark images are likely to have been self-fulfilling prophecies. The current convergence of six or seven cultural civilizations into a global civilization may provide us with positive as well as apocalyptic tendencies. In any case, apocalyptic images have been product of speculative and science fiction, fantasy, a twentieth century characterized by two world wars, genocide, and mass killing at greater scales than any time in history. The Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, strategist and futurist Herman Kahn "thinking the unthinkable," and now a long list of potential existential threats face us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Khan’s nuclear war scenarios were dramatic and thought-provoking, but Italian writer Roberto Vacca’s concern about a coming dark age put Collapse on the futures map. He imagined modern society as so complicated (built on a “house of cards”) that gridlock one afternoon sets off a cascade of catastrophe that becomes the beginning of the end of civilization.
His speculative fiction parallels the very real research of American anthropologist Joseph Tainter who analysed the collapse of complex societies and found that a large number collapsed due to climate change or resource exhaustion, but many if not most collapsed due to complexity. At some point, marginal efficiencies used to manage growth failed to work. Growth seems to have limits. This may have implications for postnormal policy. Efficiencies in bureaucratic processes may have improved over time thanks to technological innovation, Taylorism, and process improvement, but may be near its carrying capacity. Artificial intelligence and algorithms presumably are part of the answer in the continued growth mode, but the externalities of industrial growth are now coming back to bite us.
Extinction threats and extinction studies are a growth industry. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN raised the alarm about the need to reduce carbon emissions by 2030 in order to avoid catastrophe by 2050. Global heating at the poles is creating further uncertainty given the impacts on Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that are already in motion. Even if we are able to avoid a 3° C increase over the baseline in global average temperature, sea levels are likely to rise hundreds of feet in the next one hundred to two hundred years.
Existential threats are not limited to human activity either. We live on an active planet with a biosphere and oceans that have previously experienced up to seven mass extinction events. Some may be due to impacts of asteroids or comets, or more likely biological and chemical catastrophes in Earth's oceans. We still know very little about our planet's history, but would do well to consider that life is sometimes fragile and messy business.
The collapse scenario is a logical extension of Murphy's Law to the accelerating dynamics of change and system characteristics in post-normal times: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. That was the premise of Vacca’s dismal future and perhaps our luck as a species has run out. Nevertheless, there will likely always still be some artificial facet of nature, as long as humans or our near relatives are still around.
Scenario 3: Hybrid Gaia (Earth: 50% artificial)
Hybrid Gaia is a highly artificial world, but driven by a totally different worldview than today. It is driven by critical posthumanism, where human-centred ethics and mythology are replaced by respect and cooperation with other species rather than dominance and exploitation. The model is a blend of Haraway’s Chthulucene and Lovelock's Novocene, a cybernetic union of biology, machines, artificial intelligence, and creativity that remake the world, both organic and inorganic, in a dance, a symphony of co-evolution on a small planet in a violent cosmos.
This scenario assumes a rebound from coastal flooding and inundation due to the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and a rapid shift to a green economy, beginning with initiatives launched by governments at the turn of the millennium, but resisted well into the middle of the twenty-first century. A global consensus emerged principally around universal healthcare and disease prevention in the wake of pandemics and environmental refugee migrations into the twenty-second century. Artificial intelligence, automation, and the transition away from global to regional supply chains and circular economy enabled the radical shift in the political economy to an abundance economy and wealth levelling strategies. Incomes over one million dollars were taxed at 100% globally by 2150.
Cities are either greened up with vertical farming or built from scratch as energy-efficient arcologies. The idea began by Italian architect Roberto Soleri was to create dense structures at human scales to minimize the distance travelled between work, home, and entertainment and services, to sequester industrial activities belowground, and reclaim space given to automobiles.
The worst of climate catastrophes have been surmounted and mitigated, and despite the deaths of hundreds of millions from warfare and climate related starvation, the global population stabilizes around 8 billion. The principles of Gaia 2.0 are internalized in governance, consumption, and economics, with vast reduction in the use of fossil fuel – based pesticides and fertilizers. Drones are used to more efficiently pollinate, and apply fertilizers and nutrients to individual plants. Industrial agriculture is replaced by cooperatives and most people are involved in some level of community gardening and food preparation.
Space exploration is replaced by Earth and Ocean exploration, by spiritual and self-actualization pursuits. Space development is limited to near Earth orbit remote-sensing and telecommunications, but culture has begun to focus inward rather than outward. The economics of scarcity inherent in capitalism is replaced by abundance economics supported by robotics, automation, and a leisure society that enables people to engage in community development, gardening, arts and crafts, and democratic participation in decision-making and governance. One model is the planetary society featured in the James Hogan’s (1982) Voyage to Yesteryear where the colony planet economy is based on individual competence and service rather than growth and industry.
The worldview has shifted from acquisition, consumption, and materialism to coexistence with nature. Moreover, it embraces the reality of human destruction and domination of other species, and attempts to both atonement for and celebration of species and ecosystems lost to human development. At the same time it allows for the exploration of genetic futures in seeing human exploration of genetic possibility, but informed by other moral values. Freeman Dyson famously argued that we should embrace genetic play the same way we developed computers by playing with the technologies as well as the games on them. This is similar to Haraway’s five generations of clones with butterfly genes whose life mandate is to stand with and help sustain the monarch butterfly. Genetic play and manipulation are seen as ways to become liberated of anachronistic mental models about what it means to be human. Efforts are effective in re-establishing extinct species, particularly the megafauna (mastodons, sabre toothed tigers) that existed during early human existence, and entire communities of Neanderthal and Denisovan and other archaic human species, as well as hybrids. Education and child-rearing radically altered. Children raised in cohort groups with multiple, non-biological parents.
What is happening today to revive Gaia theory and deliver us to the Hybrid Gaia Earth?
Framing useful scenarios depends on a number of factors, including plausibility, coherence, and comparable elements across alternative future scenarios. Alternative futures are arguably most helpful when they collapse contradictory or conflicting driving forces, because they clarify some of the reinforcing characteristics of drivers. Of course, the future is not likely to eliminate contradictions — one of the lessons of post-normal policy – but it is sometimes valuable to take things to their extreme conclusions. That is clearly the case with the scenarios presented in this analysis.
Looking for the driving forces, emerging issues, and trends leading to a post-human paradigm and civilization one microcosm of that future may be the annual Burning Man Festival now in its 36th year, held in a desert playa in the northern Nevada wilderness. The festival is named after the iconic wooden structure sacrifice to flames every year. As many as 70,000 people now attend, and Black Rock City is built each year from scratch and then removed from the desert, leaving “no trace.”
There is an emergent culture and value system in the Burning Man phenomenon, some visible, explicit, and other aspects hidden or more deeply embedded. The stated rules from the official website are:
- radical inclusion
- gifting
- de-commodification
- radical self-reliance
- radical self-expression
- communal effort
- civic responsibility
- leaving no trace
- participation
- immediacy
Beyond the rules, there are other obvious and not so obvious assumptions about the temporary, mobile pop-up culture that characterizes the built environment of Black rock city. There are some clear contradictions between the libertarian and communitarian tenancies of participant organizations and individuals. My sense is that these rules represent two divergent aspects of post-humanism, what Nayal has described as critical post-humanism, on one hand, and trans-humanism on the other. These rules, however, may to some degree informed both evolving alternative futures represented in this paper. Burning Man rules represent post-normal values in contrast to liberal industrial capitalism, in spite of the fact that increasingly Silicon Valley and Hollywood elites are becoming entangled in the phenomenon.
It does seem that the values embedded in the Burning Man rules are representative of a shift in worldview that could be manifested in political redesign away from neoliberal representative democracy. Burning man and other intentional communities are trying to create the space to innovate, and certainly colonies on Mars and space settlements will have enough distance from current cultural structures to experiment and innovate in political design and social structures.
There appear to me to be at least two major streams in the broad green movement, a moderate organic green movement closer to the mainstream, and a radical natural green movement. The former envisions a blend of modern technology and particularly renewable energy and abandonment of fossil fuel use. The latter holds that the problems of modern society began during settled agriculture, and advocate for a vastly smaller human population that would adopt hunter-gatherer practices more consistent with society before settled civilization.
While transformational, the Hybrid Gaia alternative future is perhaps one of the more likely futures, either due to the threat of Collapse or as a result of cascading climate catastrophes over the coming century or two. Unlike the conservation movement and much of the liberal environmental movement today, deep ecology would be a driving force in the philosophy and worldview — the idea that all parts of nature have intrinsic value, even rocks, and that humans are not special or any more valuable than other aspects of nature. This philosophy has clearly influenced or has been adopted by radical feminism and other parts of progressive social movements. This future also has roots in the Gaia theory that the earth is a living organism, a complex, cybernetic system that has regulated the atmospheric composition, temperature, and habitability for life on the planet.
Gaia is relevant to the discourse on the tension between natural and artificial, because human generated by products and activities are beginning to have a significant impact on the landscape, on the oceans, and atmosphere. Humans cannot deviate very far from large-scale geomorphic processes, or we will threaten the regulatory structures that maintain conditions for life on the planet. Therefore, our introduction of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, species extinction, and altering of ocean chemistry are transforming the planet in unexpected ways. The evidence suggests that our interference with feedback processes may potentially raise average global temperatures far in excess of nominal forecasts by the IPCC, academies of science, and climate agencies across the planet.
Scenario 4: Dyson's Children (Earth: 99% artificial)
The late physicist Freeman Dyson, for a thought experiment, imagined a technological civilization advanced sufficiently to capture all of the energy produced by its sun. Physical structures that approach this ideal have been described in science fiction as Dyson spheres. Dyson's structure was first described in Olaf Stapleton Star Maker (1937) by and has become a popular concept in science fiction (see Larry Niven's Ringworld).
Dyson's Children is the alternative future where all of the dreams of techno-optimists and post humanists come true. If the previous scenario was inward looking, the pro-artificial vision is outward looking and transformational with respect to technology. It is the product of not one, but many Singularities, from advances in machine – mind interfaces, genetics, artificial intelligence, space development, and many other technological dimensions see quantum leaps in control over nature. Human science achieves godlike control over medicine through molecular and nanite robot prevention, repair, and disease defence. Cancer is effectively cured, and longevity increases dramatically, with the likelihood that genetic flushing technology can extend lifespan.
Low Earth Orbit habitations, a growing lunar settlement, and asteroid mining barely dented the growing population pressures and horrors of sea level rise, but the mass movement to Mars (remember the old saw "Mars or Musk!") and then Venus by 2200 was still not enough to reduce social blowback. One current scheme is to download one billion minds onto quantum computers to send them on colony ships to be decanted into cloned bodies on the nearest earth-like planets in 100 solar systems.
The surface of the earth is effectively artificial, with geoengineering projects that regulate the Earth's temperature (space reflectors, deep ocean circulation pumps). Much of the Earth's surface is effectively managed by 2200. Extreme climate change and species destruction required of her more human intervention to avoid total environmental disaster. Remaining wilderness areas are more like large parks and zoos. Nearly all arable land is devoted to post-industrial agriculture or megacities, Earth’s population is twenty-five billion with one billion on Mars and space settlements. Forests are planted, maintained, and harvested by drones. Most sources of human protein are now produced in factories, grown from cultures, and are indistinguishable from the fish, poultry, or beef produced two centuries earlier. Almost all food is genetically modified in some way (GMOs are OK!)
Tesla-GE by mid-twenty-first century dominated the space and automobile sectors and established the first solar power satellites in Earth orbit that began producing energy, particularly for the developing world. That marked the beginning of the end for fossil fuels as an energy source, and the perfection of fusion and a Singularity in the manipulation of magnetic fields had almost immediate impacts on transportation and energy transmission. Coupled with those advances and quantum computing, general artificial intelligence became increasingly important in managing the complex and sometimes contradictory systems supporting human life on the planet. Fortunately, there was a concerted effort to limit the development of what was once called "super machine intelligence.” It was decided that sentient machines posed too great an existential threat to human consciousness.
Work on consciousness and human potential was also an essential part of the developments of the twenty-second century, while attempts to use cryonics to save bodies or brains for future reanimation uniformly failed, uploading consciousness, or at least one’s memory and personality has become possible, even easy. Of course, the social and legal implications of having two copies of oneself have remained challenging, and especially now that cloning not only body parts but entire adult bodies are also possible.
The diaspora to outer space is accelerating, with the colonization of Mars and Luna, with a domed settlement on Venus devoted to terraforming our sister planet. The asteroid belt and Jovian systems have growing numbers of miners and explorers. Rumours continue to circulate that alien artefacts and technology have been discovered on more than one of the larger asteroids. That coincides with a number of private ventures that have already launched or will soon send colony ships to nearby habitable earth-like planets. Some are generation ships, and others have plans for sending most of the colonists in cryo-sleep/hibernation. Humanity seems intent on taking its species to the stars. Already, genetic alteration has been occurring on Mars and Luna to better adapt humans to non-trust real gravity.
What justification do we have for the total artificialisation of the Earth and our becoming Dyson’s Children?
Transhumanism is the flavour of posthumanism that potentially evolves from or is transformed from the present Continued Growth future, with ample illustrations in Hollywood movies and corporate advertising. It sees technology as a means to improve humans, to expand our abilities, reduce our vulnerabilities, and go beyond the limitations of human minds and bodies. This image of the future is popular in mass media and particularly in Silicon Valley. Advocates for this future are those who are extending the limits of longevity, seek to be able to use cryogenics to someday rejuvenate brains that have succumbed to injury or disease, upload human minds or personalities to computers, create artificial humans or androids, clone humans, and otherwise enhance human bodies with direct brain – computer interfaces, and augment humans with other types of technology.
These visions of alternative futures are supported by the advances in technology, particularly genetics, molecular biology, robotics and automation, computers, telecommunications, and space development. Collectively, they support arguments for a coming Singularity, a supposedly transformational scientific event or period when a quantum leap in human or scientific capabilities is reached. It might be the development of an entirely new biological species, the emergence of super intelligent machines, or some unforeseen development that will have significant implications for the continuation of Homo sapiens as we are currently configured. As noted previously, these trends are consistent with the observation that evolution is accelerating (Platt), and with the emergence of postnormal times. Barring climate catastrophe, this leads to plausible alternative futures scenarios of a high technology transformation. The potentiality of these potential Earths and the artificial nature of civilisation is becoming less a plausibility and more a probability nearing the order of fate or destiny.
Artificial civilizations were categorized in 1964 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev who created a scale of advanced technological civilizations:
- Type I civilization, a planetary civilization, that can use all of the energy available on its planet
- Type II civilization, a stellar civilization, that can use all of the energy of its sun
- Type III civilization, a galactic civilization, that can control the energy of an entire galaxy.
The Kardashev scale has also been the subject of science fiction and astronomy, particularly the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) programs. Along the same lines, astronomer Carl Sagan argued for a scale related to the information available to the civilization, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin argued for a scale measuring the spread of civilization across space, rather than its control of energy, and mathematician John Barrow reversed the scale downward, basing his scale on our ability to manipulate increasingly smaller scales and dimensions. The striking notion is that humans are manipulating nature at ever larger and ever smaller scales, extending the boundaries of natural and artificial reach into our reality.
The scales going in both directions are reminiscent of the Powers of Ten exercises and videos that tend to reinforce the anthropic principle, that we are ideally positioned for technological and consciousness evolution given our material and evolutionary "sweet spot." We have been extremely successful as a species, in a relatively short time, geologically speaking. On one hand, our evolutionary biology niche expanded thanks to our tools. More recently, according to the historian Yuval Harari, myth-making gave our species more reasons to use tools accelerating the use, sophistication, and complexity of our tools over the last dozen millennia. Our technological sophistication is lagged considerably in our political, social, and economic systems. We appear to hang on to Newtonian myths and metaphors that glorify the machine. We appear not to have passed into the postindustrial worldview suggested in Alvin Toffler's Third Wave: we are still embedded in industreality. Politics, particularly in the USA, is still wedded to checks and balances, separation of powers, and industrial mass education. We have not caught up with the digital, electronic, and photonic technologies increasingly dominating our lives.
In spite of the evidence that other models of knowing and reality exist, relativity, quantum interpretations of reality, and organic biological paradigms that question the machine metaphors continue to be marginalized. However, there are emerging shifts on the periphery, for example, neural networks and quantum computing that may be points of departure from our lingering industrial and Newtonian models of reality. As it has throughout history, reality changes and the new reality that we will see in the not too distant future is becoming increasingly irreconcilable by our present models. The mechanistic and organic are not simply being superseded, but morphed into something that is equal parts hopeful as a continuation of human progress and nightmare in facing the potential end of the human race. Either way, it appears the notion of artificial is becoming more and more natural by the day.
Our planet and its surface environment are as artificial as ever. Will it always be so? The Earth is being remade, in a sense, but the jury is out on whether the creative destruction of Mother Earth will be beneficial only to humans, to most of Earth’s species, or only the hardiest insects and microorganisms that will exist long after we go extinct. Will we end up closer to nature, whether we want to or not? These are among some of the great conundrums of postnormal times. Will our futures lean to a posthuman or transhuman existence? Hopefully, we will come to our collective senses and our collective wisdom to envision and actualize preferred futures, not those driven by corporate greed, ideological certainty, or worse, cultural and political whims. I want my grandchildren to inherit futures that we set in motion over the next decade or two that give them hope and opportunity to make their own decisions about the complexion of artificial and natural in their own lives. I worry that an increasingly artificial planet will leave them impoverished rather than liberated and transformed. But I hope that we will not make it too easy for the future geologists to label this epoch.
Citations
To read more on governing evolution see Walter Truest Anderson (1987) To Govern Evolution, Boston, Harcourt; and John Platt, “The Acceleration of Evolution,” The Futurist 15 (February 1981): 14-25. For more on colonising space, see Ben Finney’s book chapters, (1985) "Lunar Base: Learning to live in space" (pp. 731–756) in Wendell Mendell, ed., Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century. Houston: Lunar and Planetary Institute, and (1988) "Will space change humanity?" (pp. 155–172) in J. Schneider and M. Leger-Orine, eds., Frontiers and Space Conquest: The Philosopher's Touchstone. Bingham: Kluwer Academic Press. Concerning the posthumanism and transhumanism debate, see Donna Haraway (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books; Raymond Kurzweil (2006) The Singularity is Near, London, Duckworth; and Mark O’Connell (2017) To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, London, Granta. To learn more about Postnormal Times, see Ziauddin Sardar (ed.) (2019) The Postnormal Times Reader, Hendon, The International Institute for Islamic Thought. For more on Nature Deficit Disorder, see the work of Richard Louv, especially The Last Child in the Woods (2008). To learn more about the justification of the Dark Mountain scenario visit https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ ; and David Benatar, ‘Why it is Better Never to Come Into Existence’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1997, volume 34, number 3, pp. 345–355. To further investigate the Collapse scenario further see Frederik Polak (1973) The Image of the Future, Amsterdam, Elsevier Sdentific Publishing Company; Herman Khan (2017) On Thermonuclear War, Abingdon, Routledge; Roberto Vacca (1974) The Coming Dark Age, London, HarperCollins; and Jospeh Tainter (1990) The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. To explore the rationale behind Hybrid Gaia, see Donna Haraway (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, Durham, Duke University Press; and James Lovelock (2019) Novocene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, London, Penguin. To find out more on Dyson’s Children see Freeman Dyson, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” Science 131:3414, 03 June 1960. For more on climate change see Mark Lynas (2008), Six degrees. Our future on a hotter planet. Washington D.C., National Geographic Society and David Wallace-Wells (2019); The Uninhabitable Earth. New York, Tim Duggan Books; and Alvin Toffler (1984) The Third Wave, New York, Bantam Books.