Like it or not, humans have become the dominant agent of change on the planet, and as we proceed further into the Anthropocene period, we have a responsibility to accept responsibility and find a way to gracefully integrate our presence. But what if we are not the only ones who have experienced this phenomenon? What if the process of inadvertent planetary change is universal? What if the climate challenges we face are a natural part of planetary evolution?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Christophe Jospe sitting here with Ross Kenyon and producer Paul. We’re still in New York City recording this episode in a very beautiful apartment right on the Upper West Side. Ross, how about you take it away?
Ross Kenyon: This has been a long time coming because our advisor, David Addison, is the biggest David Grinspoon fan. Honestly, we love David, but he goes a little overboard sometimes. So things that he loves, he will nag you about it until you have internalized it and are ready to engage in long discussions. And so Earth in Human Hands, David Grinspoon’s book, the first that we all read, we did and it definitely Definitely turned me on to a new way of thinking about climate change. Because the way we typically think about climate change and the way it’s framed has a sort of hippie, earthbound, sometimes it has a little bit of a primitivist feel to it.
But in reading this book...
Unknown speaker: Stratigraphy is a big $5 word. We’ve already entered it. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We’re trying to figure out how to live up to the expectations of the Anthropocene and how we can rise to the challenge and make sure we’re able to explore space together forever. So reading Earth in human hands offered from the perspective of planetary science really changed. It changed the way that I thought about climate change in a refreshing way. And it made it exciting again. It made it a space age thing rather than looking backwards into humanity’s deep past. And that’s what really got me excited about his work. His other book, too, that I’ve read, I’ve read two of them, is Chasing New Horizons, which is a history of the New Horizons Pluto mission, which we’ll probably get into that, too.
But Earth in Human Hands is well worth your time.
Unknown speaker: Longest soliloquy we’ve ever introduced to the show with...
Ross Kenyon: So, but yes, David Grinspoon is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, is an astrobiologist. I gave you probably so much to speak about there. I guess we should start with your story or you’re also welcome to react to any of the things that I just said. There’s so much content.
David Grinspoon: Well, thank you for your words about my book. I mean, the kindest thing I think that an author of a nonfiction book can hear is somebody saying it made me think of things in a new way. You know, so I appreciate that feedback. Oh, maybe it was worth all those lonely hours of writing and depriving myself of a life. So, yeah, that’s always nice to hear.
Unknown speaker: My pleasure.
David Grinspoon: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: So how did you get started? What sort of drove you to write that book and where did you get to where you are now, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast?
David Grinspoon: Well, so not to go into my whole life history, but I’ve been a space geek my entire life. Like a lot of space scientists of my generation, I was inspired by, you know, I saw the Apollo moon landings when I was a little kid and that was just pretty freaky and awesome. And then the earliest missions to the other planets were happening when I was a, you know, a kid and a teenager and it was really exciting. And so I was just sort of drawn into wanting to participate at that and being a science fiction geek, I was drawn into wanting to participate In space exploration and I did manage to carve a career out of planetary science and then astrobiology was kind of the new thing in planetary science when my career was starting off.
The realization that looking for life elsewhere is something we can take seriously and that the more we learn about the history of life on Earth and about other environments in the universe it’s pretty reasonable to think that we ought to be able to find extraterrestrial life.
Ross Kenyon: And that new discipline too is a combination of geology, biology, chemistry, physics in a way that those departments never previously worked together in an integrated way with astronomy.
David Grinspoon: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s very multidisciplinary. You know, to do astrobiology, it requires earth science, it requires astronomy, it also requires biology, you know, because it’s, we use the history of earth and the limits of life on earth to try to understand the potential for life elsewhere. So you really have to study earth in a deep way as well as studying the rest of the universe to do astrobiology. But, you know, so then the other part of that is, you know, when I was younger, I was also, like when I was in college, I was part of a disarmament group and was interested in environmental activism and worries about the future of our, was there going to be a future of our civilization because of threats like nuclear war and then, you know, the possibility of climate change was actually the, you know, important mentor of mine scientifically for planetary science was Carl Sagan.
He was also the first person I heard talking about climate change and nuclear winter. So my education sort of primed me to realize the connection between these issues of how planets work and issues of what our civilization is doing to our planet and the country. Connection between all of those really is my approach to the Anthropocene. The specific opportunity I had, I guess, that sort of led me here was in 2013, I became the first chair of astrobiology at the Library of Congress, which is a cool new position that was established where people go there for a year to work on projects that are at the intersection of astrobiology and wider humanistic or societal concerns.
And my proposal was That got me selected to be chair of astrobiology was to study the Anthropocene from an astrobiology point of view. In other words, if we think of the human era on Earth, not just as this tricky time that we’re facing, which it obviously is, but stepping back and look at it as a chapter in Earth history. And look at it through the lens of deep time and all the other changes that Earth has gone through, the different transitions it’s gone through, and even that other planets have gone through.
What does this transition that Earth is going through now look like in light of that deep time and deep space picture? And that was specifically the study that, you know, that year at the Library of Congress thinking of that question, which led me ultimately to write Earth in Human Hands. And I guess is the reason why we’re all here talking to each other.
Ross Kenyon: When people think of spending on science in this way, I think there’s a tendency to think this is purely extraneous and elective and this is not necessary. Obviously, you read Pale Blue Dot. Carl’s wrestling the whole time with, is this worth it? Should I actually be devoting and trying to steer resources this way? But clearly, there’s a reflexive learning process that affects life on Earth too. We’ve learned a huge amount by studying other planets about how our zone works, right?
David Grinspoon: Absolutely. I mean, sometimes space scientists get annoyed by the question, well, you know, why should we be spending all this money up there when we’ve got problems down here? I don’t think we should be annoyed by that. I think it’s a reasonable question. We should have an answer for it because we are using public, largely taxpayer dollars to go study the rest of the universe. So why is it important? But the fact is there’s a very good answer to that question. We’ve learned a lot of priceless information about our own planet and how it works.
Knowledge that we could have only gained by leaving the planet, looking back from space and by studying other examples of planetary evolution. And in fact, some of the gravest environmental threats that we’ve been introducing to this planet have really, they all have really interesting analogs on other planets. I mean, Venus is the most extreme case of acid rain and the greenhouse effect and even the ozone layer, the problem with the ozone layer. We partly discovered because we were studying some chemical reactions in the atmosphere of Venus that were similar to the chemical reactions that we’re accidentally inducing to destroy the ozone layer here.
And even the study of nuclear winter came out. What if this happened on Earth? Is there anything that could make this happen on Earth? Well, what about a nuclear war? And that came right out of those studies of Mars led to the realizations of nuclear winter, which changed history. It helped to end the Cold War. Unfortunately, it didn’t end the existence of nuclear weapons on Earth. We’re still wrestling with that. That realization of nuclear winter as a consequence of nuclear war changed how we think about it made us finally realize I think these are not weapons in any ordinary sense because, you know, you can’t fire them somewhere else without hurting yourself and the global consequences of nuclear winter.
War became known to us through studying Mars. So there are a lot of examples. And even just in a more general sense, we cannot understand the workings of one planet without understanding all planets in a comparative sense. So there’s a very pragmatic survival need to study the rest of the universe if we’re going to do a good job of this role that we seem to have assumed whether we like it or not of sort of running this planet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I sent you one of the cheekiest emails I’ve ever sent to someone I wanted to be on the podcast. And it reminded me, spoiler, but if you haven’t seen this yet, then your time has come. At the end of Saving Private Ryan, where Tom Hanks is dying and he tells Matt Damon, who He didn’t do anything to earn it himself necessarily to be saved out of all the men who died to save him, but he says to earn it. And that’s how I think about the Anthropocene, right? We found ourselves in a position of being able to change the entire planet and we have only started to Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: No choice but to figure out how to land the thing. Which is, it’s basically it. Here we are at Nori, we’re saying, oh crap, like we want to pull the CO2 back out of the atmosphere and live at safe levels. We’re not exactly sure how to do it, but we damn well better figure it out. And there are new ways to just estimate and quantify carbon removal. So let’s all figure it out and do the things that humans are really good at, which is coordinating, collectively figuring out how to do things, work on really complex problems.
So, also in your book, you bring up this concept of Gaia, and then you quote Lynn Margolis, Gaia is a tough bitch. Uh-oh, sorry, got to put expletives in the podcast now. But then part of that is we should be thankful for catastrophe and mass extinction. And so, unpack that for us. Why should we be thankful for catastrophe? Is it going to teach us how to fly this 747? Yeah.
David Grinspoon: Yeah, I mean, first of all, back to your previous point, that perspective, I think, is really important. People say, well, who are we to think that we’re, you know, we deserve to run a planet? Well, we don’t deserve to. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we find ourselves. It’s too late. Here is sort of immaterial. Do we deserve it? Well, I mean, I wouldn’t have necessarily appointed us because we don’t know what we’re doing, but we have to do the best we can because the consequences of not trying, of course, are worse.
Now, this point about being thankful for mass extinctions and planetary catastrophes, it’s a really weird one. But the fact is, if you look at the history of life, it’s full of extinction, mass extinction, catastrophic changes. We wouldn’t be here. And not just us, the other species that we love and share this planet with would not be here. You can say, oh, well, I hate humans. Well, fine. Do you like elephants and, you know, otters and, you know, eucalyptus trees, whatever. They wouldn’t be here either. You know, the Earth’s slate got wiped clean.
And then what’s here is what grew up in the aftermath. And this has happened several times. So there’s a strange way in which if you love the biosphere, Now, the weird thing is then, well, but what about the catastrophes we could see coming? Like, so should we say, okay, so mass extinction is great. Let’s not worry about it in the future because it’s worked out fine in the past. No, that’s a cop out because there’s something different about the fact that we have agency. That’s what we’re talking about. And if we have agency, And we can see it coming, then that changes our moral obligation.
We have to attempt to prevent mass extinction if we can see it coming. So just the fact that we have that knowledge, and we have the knowledge of the mass extinction that we have. We could threaten ourselves by all the species that we might take out with us if we don’t sort of get smart here in the ways we’re talking about. But then there’s also future mass extinctions. Another impact could hit Earth. There could be another ice age. But these are not just things that These are things that will happen if we wait long enough.
Well, how do we feel about that? If we can see these things coming and we have some possibility of being able to prevent them, both of which are true, then aren’t we obligated to figure out how to prevent them in the future? So, So I think we are, but then that really does put us in this sort of godlike role, which is kind of daunting. So that knowledge that we have of how we are changing the earth and how the earth will change in dangerous ways if we just don’t do anything, all of that really gives us a sense, should give us a sense of responsibility.
If we can see it coming, then it’s not okay to just let it happen.
Ross Kenyon: How do we do that? How do we grow into this role that we now have to... One of the canards I don’t like hearing is that Earth has gone through many climate cycles and there’s no evidence that humans are causing it, which, like you said, it’s immaterial. Even if it was just Mount Pinatubo is all over the place changing the climate, we still have to figure it out how to stay within a livable range for the species that evolved for these conditions or adapted for it.
David Grinspoon: No, that’s true. I mean, first of all, it is true that Earth has gone through many climate cycles in the past. Sure, yeah. It’s not true that there’s no evidence that humans are causing it. Obviously, we are and there is. But what you just said is interesting. Even if we weren’t causing it, but we saw it changing, then wouldn’t we be obligated to do something about it anyways if that change was going to be harmful? For our own good, yeah. In that sense, it’s immaterial. Like, okay, supposing we weren’t causing climate change, but climate change was happening, then how does that help us?
You know, we still have to deal with it, right? Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and how do we, we should define the Anthropocene since we’ve name dropped it a few times, but what is that and what does that say about humanity’s role on this planet at this age?
David Grinspoon: Well, so the Anthropocene is defined as this new geological era or epoch. It’s proposed as an epoch and these are different, you know, these terms are different sort of levels of time differentiation in the geological column. And we’ve been in the Holocene and we’re now supposedly entering the Anthropocene Epoch. And that is defined as the time when a new geological force has become a dominant agent of change on the earth. And that new geological force is us. The combined actions of humanity have now become a... Geological force that is equal to or greater than the other great forces of tectonism and volcanism and so forth that have traditionally changed the planet.
And that fact is really indisputable. I mean, if you just look at the numbers, the amount of dirt that we move So these are not minor changes. It’s pretty much indisputable that we have entered So then, you know, the arguments become over, well, when exactly did it start? And, you know, that’s, it’s sort of interesting, but it doesn’t, you know, people have different opinions about that.
Ross Kenyon: Is it agriculture? Is it oil? Is it?
David Grinspoon: Yeah, is it the atomic bomb? I mean, there’s an interesting set of proposals, but none of them really change the fact that we are in this time now and we have to deal with what that means and the responsibility that comes of being earth changers. And some people really don’t like the idea of the Anthropocene, of course, because it seems self-aggrandizing or arrogant. Who are we to name a geological age after ourselves?
Ross Kenyon: It is a little But it might also be accurate, right?
David Grinspoon: Well, I think it’s accurate. Not only that, you could look at it as accepting responsibility. That if we don’t look honestly at what’s happening, then we don’t have any chance of turning it around and getting to the point where we’re sort of on top of it. Rather than kind of following along and going, oh gosh, look at all these things we’re doing. We don’t like this. Can we get to the point where we’re going, yeah, we’re changing the planet and we actually know what we’re doing. I mean, that has to be the goal because, okay, so one possible other goal would be let’s stop changing the planet.
You know, let’s step back. But that’s not really realistic in a world with, you know, 7 billion approaching 10 billion people. The only way that would be realistic is if you wanted to propose to radically depopulate the earth, radically decrease the human population.
Ross Kenyon: Some people do want that.
David Grinspoon: Some people do want that. And that’s one goal. Possible future. And you could even advocate for that and be self-consistent and say, I don’t like the Anthropocene. I want us to stop being this world-changing species. So I want us to go back to a population of just a million people or whatever. I mean, that would be consistent. It doesn’t seem particularly realistic to me. And so if we’re within the range of possibilities that seems realistic, if you’re not advocating a mass die-off of human beings, then... You cannot really imagine a future in which humans are not affecting the planet in some great way, but there’s a huge range of what that could mean, including there are possible futures in which we’ve learned to work with the planet rather than work against it.
So we are affecting the planet, but... Doing so with a knowledge of how the planet works, a knowledge of the biogeochemical cycles, a knowledge of the climate cycles in which we have learned to sort of more gracefully integrate our presence on this planet. And that’s the kind of future I think actually in the long run is realistic to seek. It’s not like we’re going to get there easily. And, you know, when I talk about that, people tend to think, oh, you’re optimistic, you’re utopian. Well, actually... I don’t think there’s any way around the fact that the 21st century is going to be a rough ride.
So in that sense, I’m not like wildly optimistic. But the thing that I like to do also is imagine or just state that, you know what, there’s going to be a 22nd and a 23rd century. And we have to have some vision of where we’re going and not just a vision of what we want to avoid. That’s not enough. We know what we want to avoid or we have some ideas and that’s important, but it’s not enough. We also have to be seeking to get somewhere. And that’s what I think, you know, the deep time perspective that I advocate in Earth and Human Hands sort of leads We’re not going to avoid it, but can we steer through it?
And then if we do, what’s on the other side? There is another side. And I think that, you know, it’s easier to steer through a massive wave coming at you if you have some idea where you’re trying to get to when you get through the wave, you know?
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. And then how does this relate to great filter events? And do you imagine that there are civilizations in the universe who have gotten to this point where they’ve digitized things, they’re leveraging the basic physics of the universe through computers to solve complex problems? Weaponized AI, nuclear weapons. Something happened.
Christophe Jospe: And maybe start with defining what is a great filter.
David Grinspoon: Yeah. Yeah. So the great filter is an idea that it’s one possible solution to what some people call the great silence or sometimes it’s called the Fermi paradox after the physicist introduced. Enrico Fermi, who proposed in the 1940s that this was a problem, which is that if there are other technological civilizations in the universe, and they’re moving in the direction that technological civilizations seem to move in... Based on our limited experience of using technology in some more wide way and using lots of energy and being curious and exploring the universe, then we should see them.
Then the signs of their presence should be fairly obvious. And since they’re not, since we look around the universe, we listen with radio, we look for artifacts, and there’s no credible evidence yet of other civilizations, one possible conclusion is, oh, They’re not there. And then what does that mean? How do we interpret that fact if that’s true? And one possible interpretation is this is where the idea of the great filter comes in. Maybe there’s some reason why... Civilizations sort of trying to do what we’re trying to do, which is get out of this, you know, what Carl Sagan called technological adolescence and reach some mature state where they have powerful technology but don’t wipe themselves out.
Maybe that’s a hard thing to do and most civilizations don’t make it. Maybe they just don’t. And then that would be the great filter, the idea that there’s some impossible step that prevents those long-lived, powerful civilizations from existing. It’s a very sobering thought. Now, I have to say, I don’t completely accept that there is a great silence. In my view, we haven’t really looked or listened very far enough to conclude there are no civilizations out there. And in fact, and this is a whole other topic, but one can critique the efforts we’ve made so far and say, well, we’re making some assumptions about what their technology would look like, and we really haven’t looked in this way and that way.
Ross Kenyon: And where they really use radio technology.
David Grinspoon: Right. For instance, maybe radio itself is some primitive technology. That would be like, we think radio is great because that’s where our technology has come to. That’s what we can imagine. But maybe that would be like them using, you know, smoke signals or beating on drums or using tin cans and a string because they know of some other way to communicate that’s so much better that we haven’t discovered yet. So that’s one possibility. So I don’t think there’s necessarily compelling evidence of a great filter, but I do think it’s a great thought experiment.
There could be, and even if there isn’t, It is a way of sort of thinking about our challenges in this grand cosmic sense on this large stage, the stage of the universe. And one thing that comes out of the perspective that I explore in Earth and Human Hands of Looking at this time, our time on Earth, as not just a problem we’re having, but as a stage in planetary evolution, the question naturally arises, so is this a stage that other planets might have reached and might be confronting or have confronted?
And you imagine then there’s lots of planets with life evolving and complex life evolving, reaching some stage of technological development and struggling with some of the same things we’re struggling with. It’s an interesting thought experiment because it forces you to ask, well, what’s possibly universal about this as opposed to just the particulars of our weird biological and cultural evolution? And in my view, and this is something I talk about at more length in the book, I think it’s probably very likely that a young technological civilization will always have this phase of inadvertently changing the planet.
And then coming to realize that they’re changing the planet. And I say that because technology starts off as this sort of local thing and the earth seems infinite when you’re a young species. It’s functionally infinite before your numbers are that large and when you’re just living in certain areas and most of the planet is uninhabited by you. And so it is functionally infinite and it seems infinite. And at first... When you’re a young species developing technology, it’s hard to imagine that you would change the world. The world is just this imperturbable thing.
And I think that quality of a stage of inadvertent planetary changing coming first would be universal for those reasons.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds like a teenager too or an adolescent.
David Grinspoon: Exactly. There’s an adolescent phase. And I think that phase would be universal. And then what I think happens after that, and it’s certainly what’s happening now, and this is how I sort of frame the challenge of the Anthropocene. Is that realization of global effects happens. We’re in that stage now. Now, does everybody realize it? No. Is it globally uniform, that realization? No. Have we fully incorporated that knowledge into how we’re acting? No. Obviously. All those are no’s, but yet you could regard it as we’re sort of at the infancy of that.
We’re beginning to have this sense of realization of our global role. And then the next step is to integrate that into our behavior. And that’s, you know, if you think Think of like what maturity is even on an individual level. That’s sort of a basic definition of maturity. People talk about situational awareness where first you may not really realize the effects you’re having on your environment. So you’re a kid and you’re sort of knocking things over and you know, you just learn to walk. And then you get to a point where you realize the effects you’re having on your environment and you fold that into the way you behave.
And in that sort of cognitive level of situational awareness, you could argue that humanity is at that stage now. And I think that it’s useful. To frame and imagine our struggles to do the kind of work you guys are trying to do, which is like reverse climate change as part of that overall realization that like, oh, okay, this is who we are. This is what we’re doing on this planet. Now, how do we behave according to that knowledge? And going back to the Great Filter just for a second, it does help, I think, to think of that as a stage that might naturally change.
As a sequence that might naturally happen to young technological civilizations, that immature use of technology followed by the necessity for maturity. And the last thing I’ll say on this point is that in a way, that also gives me some extra sympathy for the human race. One thing that often arises out of these conversations about climate change is people are so down on humans and they say, oh, humanity sucks and the world would be so... So much better without people and it’s easy to just talk about how awful we are, right?
But if you look at it, again, this analogy of like, well, a little kid that doesn’t know what they’re doing and then they’re trying to figure it out and furthermore, you know, there isn’t really anybody around to teach. We’re just trying to do it ourselves. I mean, that’s where the benevolent aliens would come in, you know, please show us the way. But then they can engender a little bit more sympathy for our situation. It’s like, oh, this is hard. Nobody’s ever actually tried to do it before. And at least, you know, we’re starting to face reality.
Christophe Jospe: One of the things that sort of in your last comments and that you bring up in the book is you put this 10,000 year timescale. And I think that’s a wonderful framing because no, we’re not going to live as a species or race for another 100, 200, 500 years. No, 10,000 years. And that’s an appropriate timescale. And I think the thought experiment of saying, how do we have one collective voice as a planet, actually forces for us to look at Earth and say, how do we actually create an Earth by design?
I don’t know if there’s a question. I think I just wanted you to unpack a little bit of the search. And so you’re part of SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And I think that conversation that’s beginning there, I’m really curious to see how you think that can inform all of the other decisions that have to happen here on Earth. Yeah.
David Grinspoon: Yeah, well, so 10,000 years is an interesting unit of time because it’s roughly the time scale that we’ve existed as a, you know, some kind of a global civilization now. But you can go back and say, well, there were human civilizations, 20,000, 30,000. Yeah, there were. But as far as recorded history and a certain phase of, you know, agriculture and starting to build towns and cities, and it’s also the time scale roughly since the last glacial epoch. So we’ve existed in this roughly 10,000 year time of relatively stable climate that we are now messing with.
So it’s sort of a convenient chunk of time to think of how long we’ve been in a way building what we’ve been building and now we’re sort of wrestling with the consequences. And it also gives us a time scale to think, okay, what about 10,000 years in the future? You know, and sort of step back and think on that time scale for a second. And it does, in my mind, naturally lead to thoughts of SETI because the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, people that have been thinking about that really since the early 1960s, when you do the math of SETI, one thing you quickly conclude is that it’s all about longevity of civilizations.
If we ask the question, if you want to calculate, how likely is it that there’s another civilization somewhere in the galaxy not so far away that we might not be able to make contact with them at some point? And you plug in all the numbers, the big unknown. All hinges on the question of, well, how long do civilizations last? And if they only last for a few hundred years because they all blow themselves up in a nuclear war or whatever every time, then the answer is it’s a lonely cosmos. There’s not going to be anyone.
There may be other They’re civilizations, but they’ll be so far away statistically that we’re never going to detect them or make contact. On the other hand, if civilizations can last for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then it turns out they should be all over the galaxy and it shouldn’t So this question of longevity of civilizations has always been part of the conversation when we get to SETI. And then in thinking about ourselves, you realize... That in order to be one of those civilizations that sort of shows up on the galactic stage that other civilizations can detect, then we would have to transform ourselves into a civilization that can last for thousands of years.
I don’t think we’re there yet. I mean, we could be, but I think, you know, we don’t really think of ourselves on that time scale. And there are all these threats to our existence that we’re all aware of. I mean, Martin Rees wrote this book, Our Final Century, where he gave us a 50-50 chance of getting out of the 21st century alive, given all these different threats that you rattled off of. We can imagine ourselves maybe getting through this bottleneck and getting to the point where we have that societal maturity to handle this technological prowess.
If we get to that point, And so, SETI, to me, when you think it through in that way, takes on this sort of hopeful journey. Right. And that’s where we get back into this great filter concept. We’re looking for survivors of something that we’re confronting now. And even in the absence of finding that, to me, it’s useful to think on those terms, to imagine what that would look like. And yes, to think about speaking with one voice. If we think about interstellar discourse, it’s hard to imagine one corporation or one individual or one nation But we have a Space Force, so we can do that as Americans, right?
Unknown speaker: Let’s do it. Oh, my God. Sorry, I had to.
David Grinspoon: Space Force. Yeah, well, see, now you’re bringing it right back to the present. It’s like, oh, my God, can we really imagine this? I don’t know. I mean, that’s one of the funny things we’re confronted with is we’re going through this moment right now of a real kind of global space. Splintering and stepping back from globalism and stepping back from confronting the future. And nobody knows if that’s a glitch, a blip. Is this the last gasp of some voices that are resisting the future? Or is this actually a turn in some dark direction that’s going to prevent that?
Honestly, no one knows. But, you know, yeah, you want to deflate my grand schemes of SETI and the universe just mentioned Space Force and I’ll go, ooh.
Ross Kenyon: What does it look like if we pull a rabbit out of our collective hat here? How do we treat each other? So Nori works at least partially because we are designing for selfishness and we want to make sure that people who are motivated only by greed can We have the altruistic people. They’re going to do it no matter what. How do you scale with those other people? But some of those rival risk dynamics, especially at the geopolitical level internationally, don’t always produce the same thing. Yeah. What do we make of that?
David Grinspoon: No, these are great questions. And I like that you guys are thinking about how to do it in the context of greed. Not that greed is the only motivator, but the fact is, I think in the long run, there is money to be made in solving the climate problem. And that’s great. That’s good news. You know, as we progress into the future and the influence of our activities on the global Habitability of our planet for ourselves becomes more and more obvious. Then I think there is an alignment of self-interest with global interest on all different kinds of scales.
You know, to give one example, like the Chinese government, I don’t think of as the most benevolent force on the planet.
Ross Kenyon: Good luck getting a visa now.
David Grinspoon: Let alone in the galaxy. And it’s true that if the Chinese burned all their coal... Then we’re all screwed no matter what we do. But the Chinese are not going to burn all their coal because you can no longer breathe in Beijing. And air pollution is getting so bad that they’re realizing desperately that they cannot depend on coal and that they have to – I think the Chinese are going to ultimately be huge innovators in this space of alternate – Energy and even carbon removal because they’re such a vast chunk of the world that their problems are more and more global problems.
And that’s going to happen all over the world. And even on a much more small sort of micro scale, there are a lot of ways in which individual needs align more and more with global needs as we sort of progress into the Anthropocene. Survive by burning wood and peat to make cooking fires. And that’s environmentally really destructive because you’re getting rid of forests and you’re also putting all these particulates and it’s nasty stuff. But the fact is, if they have access To solar energy from some more distributed grid that is being created for other reasons, then they won’t have to destroy their own environment.
And the planet will be healthier, they’ll be healthier. So there are lots of ways in which, Individual aspirations and needs and goals and even the aspirations of big companies and big countries align more and more with the global needs as we progress into the Anthropocene and as our sort of problems that we’re inducing become more and more obvious. And I think that can only continue. And then when you look at it that way, then you can start talking about enlightened self-interest. You know, nobody wants to... Destroy, you know, soil their own crib.
And that’s essentially what we’re all doing if we don’t address these problems. So even in the absence of some utopian global government, I think we ultimately will have sort of global governance on these issues as people realize that more and more we are kind of all in the same boat.
Ross Kenyon: I hope that is the tendency that we lead to. And there are many things that do line up in a way that feels natural in that way. We don’t have to go out of your way to get to it. Like for instance, we’re starting with regenerative agriculture as our first methodology. And there’s a bunch of co-benefits that go along with this thing. And land use change has resulted in so much emissions that you could just start reversing that. And there’s plenty of reasons to do so for its own sake in addition to monetizing it.
I think that’s probably true. And hopefully people will start waking up to the fact that you guys can fight and jockey for power on certain things, but maybe the climate isn’t one of them. Maybe we can come to terms on that. Do you have anything else on your list you’d like to cover?
Christophe Jospe: I just want to say on the air, flippy floppy triatomic molecules is how I want to refer as greenhouse gases. It’s the best. I love it. It was beautiful. Yeah. And so I’m just kind of wildly optimistic that even if we don’t get this exactly right, we move very quickly in figuring out how to be more human. So maybe, David, if you could just kind of round us out with some inspiration to our listeners or something, if I can wave a magic wand of how, I mean, you’ve just sort of looked on a very long timescale, how you see the future, but in the immediate future, in the next decade, which probably is too short for how you think about it, or maybe the next 50 years.
David Grinspoon: Yeah, well, you know, I think, you know, a lot of trends are going in the right direction. We can, you know, get up in the morning and be grumpy because they’re not going in that direction quickly enough. But, you know, solar power is getting cheaper much more quickly than people thought. People are coming up with all these interesting ideas and solutions about, you know, different forms of agriculture and biochar and all, you know, there’s an incredible amount of resourcefulness all pushing in the same direction. And there’s this growing We’re having realization worldwide that fossil fuels are just not going to be the way we power our future.
So it’s clearly not happening quickly enough. It’s not going to happen quickly enough. There’s going to be damage and that’s unfortunate. You know, human beings always learn by some combination of foresight. And tragedy, doing things the wrong way and then learning. But we do have the power of foresight. And so those of us that are thinking about this and talking about this and listening to this and wanting to do more, I mean, that to me is our goal. There are these two. We can do things the easy way or the hard way.
And being humans, we’re going to split it down the middle somehow. But it’s not going to be the worst case scenario because a lot of trends are going in the right direction. Our goal is to... Is to take those trends that are already happening and try to move them along and minimize the damage. And, you know, we are going to get through this. A hundred years from now, we’ll be post-fossil fuel. Our population will have leveled off and probably declined somewhat. And we’ll look back on this time and we’ll think, God, well, that was pretty stupid.
You know, we did that for too long. Kind of the way we look at whaling now, right? We used whale oil to power our civilization and we don’t anymore. We did it for too long and we decimated a lot of whale species. But they’re still whales, you know, and a lot of them are coming back. And yeah, we did that too long, but we got over it. That’s what fossil fuels are going to be like. They’ll be damaged, but we’ll be moving beyond it. And, you know, 100 years from now, we’re going to be mostly repairing that damage.
And we’ll look back on this and think, you know, that was pretty dumb, but at least we got through it.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we try to be very optimistic and solutions oriented. And in that same spirit, I would highly recommend anyone listening to check out Earth in Human Hands, especially if you come from the environmental side, but have never watched Carl Sagan necessarily, or never got into... Yeah. Yeah. I think that Earth in Human Hands has a lot of that content in there in a surprising way, which you don’t always necessarily expect from science, but you definitely expect from Carl Sagan. Listening to him is like, I don’t know, Paul, how would you describe it?
Paul’s also a big fan.
Paul Gambill: It’s just like honey on you. Yeah, it’s pure. It’s... It makes me like believe in humanity. It’s pure intellectual and spiritual bliss for someone who thinks about things in kind of grand future cycles.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and I catch a lot of that from you too if we’re not overly flattering.
David Grinspoon: No, I mean, I’m glad to hear you use the word spiritual. Because some scientists will shy away from that and then we can go, what do we even mean by that? But to me, I think a decent definition is that which makes us feel connected to larger things than ourselves, whether that be the cosmos or human society. Or future human generations that we won’t live to see. To me, those are spiritual connections. That which makes me feel embedded in larger things that I care about. And on that, in that sense of the spiritual, I do think that it’s an important component of this.
This is also about redefining ourselves as a species and seeing ourselves in a new way. And that is a spiritual challenge. And guess what? I think that change is happening. Despite all the bad news on any given day, we are becoming more globally aware. We’ve got, you know, our planet is surrounded by satellites that are every day are sending back images and we’re connected to people all around the planet and we’re connected to our past and our future digitally in ways we never were before and it’s important. It’s important to remember that tipping points exist not just in physical systems but in social systems too.
The changes in human consciousness, there are non-linearities in the system. And that’s really what we’re talking about ultimately here is changing the way we see We see ourselves in fully integrating the fact that we are a global species into our activities. And that requires, really, a spiritual change. And I’m encouraged by that because of the fact that, yes, there are tipping points in nonlinearities and sudden changes in consciousness. And you see that looking at our past. It used to be okay with everyone that there were slaves. And it used to be okay with everyone that the vast majority of humanity lived in poverty.
Not that we’re perfect on either of those scores, but that, you know, we’ve made massive progress in some of these and the role of women, you know, I mean, we’ve made massive progress on some of these social changes that we almost take for granted now. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about, a change in the way we see ourselves in relation to each other, to the planet and to future generations. And I actually think that change is occurring and can happen in a nonlinear way that might really surprise us.
And that thought gives me hope.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think we’re going to top that as a nice little cap on there. Thank you for being with us, David.
David Grinspoon: Thanks, guys. It’s been really fun. Thank you.
