Why do we care about the Earth? Global warming, nuclear fallout, plastic proliferation—it really doesn’t matter. Old planet Earth will be just fine. It’s ourselves we should be thinking about.
Take one of the most famously extinct creatures known to humankind. Sometime in the mid-17th century, human activity started decimating the dodo bird population. In response to the crisis, the dodo birds all met together to discuss their changing environment. Instead of eggs, they hatched plans. All was in vain, and gone from the Earth is the dodo.
There’s really not too much creatures on this planet can do when they oppose the dictums of almighty nature. The dodo birds were too slow to escape fast predators. The dinosaurs were too cool for their own good. The polar bears are just too white. What epithet will the cockroaches bestow upon extinct humans? “Humans were just too evil—they invented shoes!”
Could there be truth in the cockroaches’ analysis? Could our inventions be the cause of our downfall? Artificial polymers pollute the oceans. Coal plants pollute the air. Dump trucks pollute the land. Saws and axes destroy habitats. Guns kill animals.
Take even this last instance—meat-eating. Domesticated cattle and other livestock take up land, a lot of energy and produce the dreaded cow fart, which contributes significantly to greenhouse gases. Lord Stern of Brentford, the Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, predicts that meat consumption will become a shunned practice of the past as popular opinion becomes more conscious of the carbon footprint livestock domestication produces.
Like the dodo bird convention of 350 years ago, our meetings on environmental change may just be counterproductive. As the threat of greenhouse gases increases, so will international cooperation, leading to more international conferences requiring more security and travel costs. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December will include up to 20,000 delegates. That translates to a Tyrannosauric carbon footprint, and the dinosaurs didn’t fare too well in the species survival game either.
But could technology be the tool of salvation for humanity? Less environmentally impactful fuels, improved geothermal and solar energy harvesting mechanisms and new architectural techniques could stop global climate change in its tracks…. Maybe. Technology cannot do it alone—this plan would also require human initiative. That communal initiative is currently absent from the climate change discussion, but that does not rule out its eventual emergence.
Even if humans don’t change their ways, technology may make the changes for us. Perhaps an “I, Robot” or “Terminator 3” solution could be in Earth’s future, with the development of artificial technology so advanced that robots’ intellect surpasses our own. We become the zoo exhibits for machines.
But there are more immediate ways technology is taking the survival of the Earth into its own hands. Many scientists point to human overpopulation as a major contributing factor to the lack of sustainability of the current world order. This factor will have an increasingly large impact as industrialization builds in more countries throughout the world. Industrialization often brings greater national wealth, which could lead to greater individual wealth, which brings a subversive consequence: cell phones.
According to a soon-to-be-published study by the World Health Organization, cell phones cause brain cancer. Now that children in the more “developed” countries are using cell phones from the time they switch out of diapers, we may have an entire generation of 30-year-olds undergoing brain tumor treatment.
Someone will soon mass market a radiation-blocking cell phone shield. Cell phone users will probably just resort to cell phone headsets in the meantime. But nature will find a way to strike back and balance Earth, whether through the slip of technology or the flood of the Atlantic coastline.
Or maybe not.
The dodo bird may not really be dead. Dinosaurs may not be either. Scientists are developing ways to remake extinct creatures from their skeletal remains, and the dodo bird is at the center of the research. Perhaps the dodo convention really did produce results. Maybe this was the plan all along.
Unless we wake up from our dodo daydream, our fates will match those of the clumsy bird—the only way to preserve humanity will be by the happenstance that someone finds our bones.
Elad Gross is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Wednesday.
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