This is the third of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But they may be also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we really are, and always have been. The series is not intended to provide hope, or solace, or a prediction, or least of all a pathway to change. Just a speculation about how the world, with a smaller number of us, or without us, might look long after those of us living through the fall have gone.
To suggest that we should not be worried or distressed if our species soon disappears from the planet is, to many, the ultimate heresy.
Most religions, as well as most philosophical doctrines like humanism, and many ideological cults like Elon Musk’s Longtermists, consider our species to be the crown of creation, the end-goal of evolution, and the principal reason why everything else was created. To their adherents, a World Without Us is unthinkable, inconceivable, a monstrous affront to everything they’ve been conditioned to believe. How could anything have purpose or meaning if there were no humans to grace it, and benefit from it?
And there have been books written about the thought experiment of what a world suddenly left without humans would look like (basically a toxic waste dump poisoned by all the garbage and chemicals we left behind, until nature finally disposed of them a quarter million years after our disappearance).
I’ve written a lot about how we came to this point, why and how our civilization is now inevitably and catastrophically collapsing, and why post-civ earth will inevitably contain far fewer humans than today’s absurd eight billion. But these days I’m more interested in thinking about what that distant future might be like, given that the collapse depicted in the chart above is likely to take centuries or millennia before life on earth attains any semblance of stability again. The collapse of our environment and our civilization is, after all, called the Long Emergency, and it’s very unlikely to be anything Mad Max or Armageddon-like (much I’m sure to the disappointment of believers in the Rapture or Hollywood endings).
The current accelerating collapse, and the circumstances under which it seems so far to be evolving under, are, of course, completely unpredictable. There’s a sizeable chance it will end in global nuclear annihilation, in which there will likely be few survivors of any species. There’s a reasonable chance it could lead to a “hothouse Earth” with a climate like that of Venus, inhospitable to most currently-known forms of life for many millions of years. Even in these cases we’re talking about a centuries-long or millennia-long ’emergency’ before the survivors, if any, will be known.
More likely scenarios are likely to take even longer to unfold, many millennia from now, perhaps even a million years or more before reaching a relatively stable state. Most of the ones I have read by scientists suggest that that future state will be radically less complex than the current web of life. One such scenario, the one that Loren Eiseley coined the lovely expression “After us, the dragons” to describe, would see flying species — the birds and insects able to rise above our poisoned earth and water — inheriting our position as the apex species on the planet. He wrote:
Shake the seeds out of their pods, I say, launch the milkweed down, and set the lizards scuttling. We are in a creative universe. Let us then create. After all, humans are the unlikely consequence or such forces. In the spring when a breath of wind sets the propellers of the maple tree whirring, I always say to myself hopefully, “After us the dragons.” It is not out of sadistic malice that I have carried cockleburs out of their orbit or blown puffball smoke into new worlds. One out of these seeds may grope forward into the future and writhe out of its current shape. It is similarly so on the windswept uplands of the human mind.
When Eiseley wrote “After us the dragons” I take this to mean that, as an anthropologist (as fellow anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould explained so well in Full House), he understood that the emergence of humans (and even animals with backbones) on the planet was an improbable accident, a one in many million unlikelihood, and that the emergent forms of previous evolutions of life on our planet and all the other planets that support it in the universe were/are undoubtedly strange, unimaginable, perhaps even unrecognizable to us as even being ‘life’. He would have been aware, too, of the evolution of birds from the dinosaurs, and their ability to survive when the dinosaurs perished. Are his “dragons” birds, strange flying reptiles? Or perhaps dragonflies, a member of the other genus, insects, that thrives on catastrophe and is so adaptable it is likely to outlive us and do well in the next phase of life on Earth? Or is he being metaphorical and referring to dragons as any strange, unimaginable, wonderful species that will rise after our fall?
Other speculations by scientists and science writers suggest that the post-civ apex species might well be the master scavengers, human or more-than-human, the creatures who can make the most of the mountains of largely non-biodegradable garbage our species has produced, in a future world with ruined soils, poisoned water, and much less biodiversity and complexity. This picture is complicated by the fact that most scavenger species (such as rodents and raptors) exist in large numbers adjacent to and dependent on our vast waste production, and hence might suffer population declines commensurate with our own species’.
A third speculation is that, after concluding that (as Ronald Wright put it in A Short History of Progress) “letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but, in the end, a bad idea”, nature might ‘learn’ that while complexity breeds diversity and hence resilience and competitive advantage, it doesn’t scale at all well. If so, future Earth might look more like primeval Earth, dominated by tiny unicellular and small multicellular species that can quickly adapt to the wildly-changing climate that the current collapse will surely bring about.
None of these scenarios bodes well for the prospects for post-civ humans. We are not inherently or physically a very adaptable species, and only the use of technologies that forced the environment to adapt to us, instead of the other way around, has kept our species from succumbing to previous close shaves with extinction. Given what we’ve done to the planet, few such technologies will remain accessible to post-civ humans.
As the chart above implies, in a few centuries or millennia we are unlikely to be more than bit players in specific narrow ecological niches, suffering from the ongoing massive climate instability and forced repeatedly to migrate. As that happens, as with most species maladapted to their environments, our numbers are likely to continue to diminish to insignificance, and, much later, to possible extinction. We won’t be missed, and that’s not because the rest of life will be glad to see the end of us. We won’t be missed because the creatures that survive our extinction won’t notice that we’ve gone.
So back to the underlying question of this post: Would this “not with a bang but a whimper” ending to the human experiment be a bad thing, a good thing, or does it even really matter?
For more than 20 years since I became a reluctant ‘collapsnik’, I was mostly of the opinion that our species’ extinction would be a good thing. I concluded this not with any sense of glee, anger, or righteousness, but on strictly, I thought, rational, evidentiary grounds: We have largely destroyed the planet and have demonstrated no capacity for understanding or rectifying what we have done, so perhaps it’s best for us to cede the planet to other species that might be able to do a better job, collectively, at stewarding it.
But now I’m more equivocal in my thinking on this. We did our best. We didn’t mean to destroy the planet on which all life on it depends, including ours. The jury is indefinitely out on whether, if we had it to do all over again, under inevitably somewhat different circumstances, we would have made such a mess of it as we have.
So now I’m kind of of the view that it doesn’t really matter much whether we become completely extinct or not, probably gradually over the millennia to come. We’re not going to be able to create nearly as much of a mess as our numbers crater and as access to the powerful technology that has allowed us to do so, quickly runs out. Our role in the post-civ world is likely to be less significant than that of other marginal players like sloths and dandelions.
If we do, though — if we really do become completely extinct as a species, does it matter? If the world (and the universe) goes on without us, in unimaginable and ever-changing forms over the eons to come, in the absence of our species, or other species that seem to share what makes us so different — consciousness, imagination, the capacity to extend our capacity through tools and technologies, or, through a more jaundiced eye, a deranged brain, a propensity to hate and to be intolerant of difference, and the capacity to suffer from things our brain totally makes up from nothing — has anything really been lost?
We can’t know. Still, it seems, we have no choice but to think about it, as we have been conditioned. And it now seems likely to me that, even if some unimaginably, unrecognizably different species of humans continue to exist many millennia from now, they won’t even think about it.
It won’t matter to them.
