In 1956, Clair Cameron Patterson, an American geochemist, born in Mitchellville, Iowa, made public for the very first time the exact age of the Earth: 4.55 billion years. This was a major update of the Sunday 23 October 4004 BC, the beginning of the universe calculated by James Ussher, an Anglo-Irish prelate in the 1650s, and widely accepted in the Western world until the 19th century. At the time of his publication Patterson was 44, 8 orders of magnitude younger than Earth. Possibly this comparison, individual vs planet, sounds inappropriate and the human species as a whole might appear more relevant. In fact, because the beginning of the Homo sapiens lineage dates back 500.000 years, that is 0,0005 billion years, the situation is much better (4 orders of magnitude better) but the difference remains staggering. The picture is even more crude if one takes into account that Earth itself took about 10 billions years after the Big Bang before starting to form. What appears clear is that humans are very recent guests on what we call the natural world. In fact, for most of the 4.55 billion years of our planet, nobody was around. That means a simple thing: the normality of this planet is to be not inhabited by humans. Commenting on this, the Nobel Prize for Physics Richard P. Feynman expressed his disconcert
First, there was the earth without anything alive on it. For billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its waves and the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate it. Can you conceive, can you appreciate or fit into your ideas what can be the meaning of a world without a living thing on it? We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it. And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive (from the The Meaning of It All).
The way to elaborate this data is not straightforward. The appearance of humans is then a transient phenomena and the most probable future will be their disappearance? This is what happened to the “others” who came before us? Yes, indeed. A lot of organisms appeared on Earth and thereafter disappeared. To be precise, more than 99 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct and the extinction of humans would be all but something exceptional. The rate of extinction among the species is far from constant but extinction is the rule. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. We today are familiar with the explanation of this plot: climate changes. Earth’s life is a movie where atmosphere composition, land/sea boundaries, life species are never the same. The Earth, feeded by the sunlight, is a planetary reactor in its full swing. From this perspective, the present environmental concerns could appear under a different light, not the end of the world but an anticipation of something going to happen in any case and nothing different compared with past events.
In fact, every event, and climate changes too, comes under a different light and takes a different form depending on the point of view you choose and the time scale you adopt.
And then? There is no reason to raise the point of the consequences of present climate changes? Everything happening is ordinary stuff as Earth evolution is a random path among different states to each other equivalent?
Possibly this is the picture but we are not happy with this. We feel, but it is just a feeling, that there is something more. In fact, from the very raw material which formed Earth at the very beginning to the present variety of life forms, we pretend to recognise that time evolution takes the form of an arrow toward complexity. From the water formation to the earliest life, from the oxygen appearance to photosynthesis, from the earliest multicellular examples to the cambrian explosion, time evolution shows a kind of ladder toward life and a complex one. If this is the right way to read what happened in the past, no surprise that humans were never around before as they are the result of a long process. Has this process reached a peculiar point? This time is different and the anthropocene marks a discontinuity? Humans are here to stay? Maybe the same thought came to the dinosaurs and a more unbiased point of view would hardly share this picture.
First of all, if humans are here to stay, does that mean they want to stop any further climate change? That sounds inappropriate. Would anybody, at any time in the past, have been able to stop climate changes, we would not be here. We exist because the climate on Earth has been always changing. We took advantage of several climate changes and certainly one of the most beneficial for us was the dramatic catastrophe of the meteorite impact, 65 million years ago, which led to the extinction of dinosaurs and to the development of mammals.
We are concerned about climate change but not because of the Earth but about us. The selfish gene or selfish species or whatever it is, is in action. Of course we want to survive. But this is our point of view, not an absolute one. We do not know if dinosaurs were aware of their existence but definitely they would have spared them the meteorite catastrophe for the reason they were willing to survive too. But from the point of view of the species that came after, humans first, fortunately they were unable to stop the course of events at that time. Still, one can argue: the disappearance of dinosaurs was a beneficial outcome because that allowed life to evolve and generate a much better, complex and nice species like humans. But, yet, this is our point of view which is quite different from the life representatives which will come after us and which we can expect to be much more equipped, complex and nice than us. We believe we are at the present the best hardware conceivable to host abstract thought and consciousness but we cannot exclude that different hardware solutions can better fit the race for survival and to host consciousness. Our existence would be a cork on the way of the birth of these new species. In fact, we cannot exclude that we will be asked to go extinct for the sake of life and a more sophisticated form of consciousness. In this case, in the same manner we, as individuals, accept to die because evolution is needed, we, as human species, can be asked to disappear in order to allow other species to come. Do we want to save the planet or do we want to save ourselves?
As for the present climate changes, from the Earth point of view, there is little or no difference between natural, meteorite driven or antropic caused climate change. Earth will simply evolve and life will be asked to adapt, humans or not. Still, we are legitimate in trying to survive. We don’t know if we are here to stay but we will try it. We candidate ourselves to be the best in championing this endeavour of making sense of the universe and all the stuff around. As life struggles to survive, we humans are legitimate in fighting to be, once again, the best option for nature to continue to exist.
On the other hand, we are in tune with the rest of the whole universe which shows a blind willingness to exist. And here the biggest question: why? It’s the universe itself aware of its own existence? Is the Universe conscious? We don’t know. And the question “Why something rather than nothing?” shows here the most mysterious face.
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