The Vestigial Human

James Lovelock is the leading advocate of the "Gaia Hypothesis" — the view that the Earth is an organism (if I understand the notion at all) and behaves as one, with systems regulating the body.

Carry the metaphor further (of course, Lovelock does not just mean it as metaphor, but what the hell). . . . The human body has an appendix, a vestigial organ that does nothing; it's positioned too far along the digestive tract to be of any use. In other animals, it is still very important, but in humans it is useless. Still, it can become a site of infection — appendicitis. Infected and burst . . . peritonitis, infection of the abdominal cavity. Death may result.

Humans have become the vestigial organ of Gaia. And we have become infected, inflamed, risking the entire body.

What do we do with an inflamed appendix?

Doomsday Vault for Seeds

It's nice to have a safe repository for millions of seeds, but it won't amount to much if no humans are around to retrieve them, and at the rate Homo fatalis or Homo funestus (the species formerly known as Homo sapiens) is going, there won't be much left but seeds, and insects.

This from the BBC:

Almost 90,000 food crop seed samples have arrived at the "doomsday vault" in the Arctic Circle, as part of its first anniversary celebrations.

The four-tonne shipment takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain, aims to protect the world's food crop species against natural and human disasters.

The £5m ($7m) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.

"The vault was opened last year to ensure that, one day, all of humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely protected," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT).

"It's amazing how far we have come towards accomplishing that goal."

The arrival of the latest consignment of seed samples means that the vault, deep inside a mountain on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, is now storing a third of the planet's most important food crop varieties.

Among the anniversary arrivals are 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland's national gene banks.

It was a lack of diversity among Ireland's potato crops that was believed to have caused the deaths of more than one million people when blight wiped out the nation's potato harvests in the mid-1800s.

The vault, operated by a partnership between the GCDT and the Norwegian government, stores duplicates of seeds held in national collections.

It acts as a fail-safe backup if the original collections are lost or damaged.

"We are especially proud to see such a large number of countries working quickly to provide samples from their collections for safekeeping in the vault," said Norway's Agriculture Minister Lars Peder Brekk.

"It shows that there are situations in the world today capable of transcending politics and inspiring a strong unity of purpose among a diverse community of nations."

As well as the consignment of seeds, experts on climate change and food production have gathered in Longyearbyen for a three-day anniversary conference.

They will examine how climate change threatens global food production, and how crop diversity will improve food security for people in regions that are going to be worst affected.

Frank Loy, an environment adviser to President Obama, said: "When we see research indicating that global warming could diminish maize production by 30% in southern Africa in only 20 years' time, it shows that crop diversity is needed to adapt agriculture to climate change right now.

Advice to Space Aliens: Run Away, Run Away!

CNN reports "Galaxy may be full of 'Earths,' alien life" and every one potentially just as dumb and pathologically suicidal as Homo fatalis or Homo funestus (that's us, folks). Perhaps in the grand scheme of things (HA!), some kind of natural selection operates on a galactic scale, and from these hundreds or thousands of intelligent species, one that is actually capable of sustained rationality and harmonious survival will emerge. At this point, we can be reasonably sure it won't be us.

"As NASA prepares to hunt for Earth-like planets in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy, there's new buzz that "Star Trek's" vision of a universe full of life may not be that far-fetched.

An artist's impression shows a planet passing in front of its parent star. Such events are called transits.

Pointy-eared aliens traveling at light speed are staying firmly in science fiction, but scientists are offering fresh insights into the possible existence of inhabited worlds and intelligent civilizations in space.

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the new book "The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets."

He made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" -- planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter -- discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

"Now that's not saying that they're all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.

"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."

Putting a number on alien worlds

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

Duncan Forgan, a doctoral candidate at the university who led the study, said he was surprised by the hardiness of life on these other worlds.

"The computer model takes into account what we refer to as resetting or extinction events. The classic example is the asteroid impact that may have wiped out the dinosaurs," Forgan said.

"I half-expected these events to disallow the rise of intelligence, and yet civilizations seemed to flourish."

Forgan readily admits the results are an educated guess at best, since there are still many unanswered questions about how life formed on Earth and only limited information about the 330 "exoplanets" -- those circling sun-like stars outside the solar system -- discovered so far.

The first was confirmed in 1995 and the latest just this month when Europe's COROT space telescope spotted the smallest terrestrial exoplanet ever found. With a diameter less than twice the size of Earth, the planet orbits very close to its star and has temperatures up to 1,500° Celsius (more than 2,700° Fahrenheit), according to the European Space Agency. It may be rocky and covered in lava.

Hunt for habitable planets

NASA is hoping to find much more habitable worlds with the help of the upcoming Kepler mission. The spacecraft, set to be launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida next week, will search for Earth-size planets in our part of the galaxy.

Kepler contains a special telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years. It will look for small dips in a star's brightness, which can mean an orbiting planet is passing in front it -- an event called a transit.

"It's akin to measuring a flea as it creeps across the headlight of an automobile at night," said Kepler project manager James Fanson during a during a NASA news conference.

The focus of the mission is finding planets in a star's habitable zone, an orbit that would ensure temperatures in which life could exist. Video Watch a NASA scientist explain the search for habitable planets »

Boss, who serves on the Kepler Science Council, said scientists should know by 2013 -- the end of Kepler's mission -- whether life in the universe could be widespread.

Finding intelligent life is a very different matter. For all the speculation about the possibility of other civilizations in the universe, the question remains: If the rise of life on Earth isn't unique and aliens are common, why haven't they shown up or contacted us? The contradiction was famously summed up by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 in what became known as the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?"

The answer may be the vastness of time and space, scientists explained.

"Civilizations come and go," Boss said. "Chances are, if you do happen to find a planet which is going to have intelligent life, it's not going to be in [the same] phase of us. It may have formed a billion years ago, or maybe it's not going to form for another billion years."

Even if intelligent civilizations did exist at the same time, they probably would be be separated by tens of thousands of light years, Forgan said. If aliens have just switched on their transmitter to communicate, it could take us hundreds of centuries to receive their message, he added.

As for interstellar travel, the huge distances virtually rule out any extraterrestrial visitors.

To illustrate, Boss said the fastest rockets available to us right now are those being used in NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even going at that rate of speed, it would take 100,000 years to get from Earth to the closest star outside the solar system, he added.

"So when you think about that, maybe we shouldn't be worried about having interstellar air raids any time soon," Boss said.

Better Living . . . Through Science! (or How to Save the Earth Without Solving the Problem)

Scientists around the world, some begrungingly, recognize the problem of global warming. Granted, "intelligent design" scientists (1, 2) affiliated with Republicons and the Bush administration are still trying to prove that the Earth is just 6,000 years old. The vast majority of the scientific community, however, has moved from trying to convince the Palinites (aka, idiots or blockheads) to working on what to do.

Now, some might think that if you have a problem like, say, smoking that has bad consequences, one obvious course is to stop doing the thing that causes trouble . . . stop smoking. In the case of the global environment, stop pumping millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

But this is the age of The Modern Human or, as discussed some time ago, Homo funestus — Dead Man or Fatal Human. Why solve a problem when you can balance it out with a new problem?

Thus many scientists are now knocking heads to come up with geo-engineering schemes that might reduce the impact of global warming. Here are some of the brilliant ideas:

• Mirrors in space, to deflect sunlight away from the earth, previously tried in The Simpsons. Whether Fox or Matt Groening will seek patent protection remains to be seen.
• More pollution or global sunblock. Seed the atmosphere with still more particles to block light from reaching the Earth's surface. Previously tried in Jimmy Neutron, a 3D animation show for kids.
• Iron the ocean. Salt the ocean with iron filings to promote growth of plankton that absorb CO2. How this works I have no idea.

Once upon a time, science took great ideas from great science fiction, as in geosynchronous satellites from Arthur C. Clarke. Times have changed.

Nevertheless, scientists are brimming with novel novelties. Still, missing from this impressive list is a brilliant idea recently proposed by yours truly — Earth 2. This is far and away the the most absurd, most implausible and, most importantly, most expensive and therefore most best idea for Saving the Earth Without Actually Solving the Problem. I urge all to contact Congress, especially our most right-wing and dimmest Senators and Representatives, to promote this option.

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NOTES
1. Behe, Michael. 'Professor' of Biochemistry at Lehigh 'University' and Senior CSC Fellow at the 'Discovery' 'Institute'.
2. Discovery Institute.
3. Center for Science and Culture.
4. "Climate damage science studied" in The Guardian, Thursday, 30 October 2008.

Homo funestus — The End of Life on Earth

One quarter of all mammalian species on Earth face extinction. One quarter.

So it's an overstatement to say humans are destroying all life on Earth — so far. Still, the narcissistic Homo sapiens may be interested to learn that it is on the endangered list. The BBC has the story on endangered mammals.

My own view for some time has been that Homo sapiens would be better named Homo funestus or Homo fatalis.

We are a modern equivalent of the sabre tooth cat. Our massive brains are the product of competing and incompatible selective pressures. On one hand, a brain well-suited to problem solving, tool creation, etc., serves well to advance the survival of an organism — us — that is otherwise quite ill-adapted — weak, slow, poor vision, poor hearing, poor olfaction, easily hunted. . . .

But, as the history of the past two or three thousand years makes clear, this large brain has also enabled a war-like self-destructiveness. No other species so rapidly annihilates not just one habitat but all of them.

See also

• the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• CNN story
• New York Times
• Scientific American