Mass Extinction: Earth's Cycle of Annihilation

Five mass extinction events have ravaged the species of Earth, and we just might be living in the sixth. How can humanity survive the threat of cosmic calamity and its own tireless work to unbalance the world? Robert and Christian discuss in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Hey, this is Christian Seger Christian.
Where do you stand on mass extinction? Well, I think
it's a good thing. Yeah, yeah, just sort of a
regular sort of cleaning out of the lent catcher of

(00:26):
the of civilis exactly Cosmos Earth changing its oil every
couple of million years. Okay, all right, Today we're gonna
talk about mass extinctions, and in particular we're going to
talk about it in relation to Anteine Knewitz, who used
to be the other in chief over at Iona and
she's now at Gizmodo, both under the Gawker banner, I believe, uh.

(00:50):
And she has this great book called Scatter Adapt and
Remember how humans will survive a mass extinction. And so
what we're gonna do today is we're gonna talk about
the five mass extinctions that have already happened on Earth.
We've already gone through five of them before human beings
were even walking around. The sixth one that we're pretty
much with no doubt living in right now, and then

(01:13):
what nuances and some of the other articles that we
researched for this episode. Recommendations are for surviving the sixth
mass mass extinction that's coming up on us right because
they can be survived based on the ones we've seen
so far. You have such creatures as say the earthworm,
that's a champion of surviving mass extinction events. Exactly. Yeah,
And uh, let's keep in mind that for a mass extinction,

(01:37):
what qualifies as one is that seventy of all species
go extinct in less than two million years, So that
leaves you know which earthworms would fall under. There's also
a really interesting creature that Annally talks about in her
book called the Listosaurus, and we'll get to there. Um.
But I should qualify this by saying that, uh, last

(02:00):
your fallen. For our How Stuff Works video channel, I
interviewed and Antale about this book, and you can go
and watch that episode on our HSW channel right now.
It's about twenty minutes long, and I get to talk
with her personally about the book and her ideas, and
she's much more eloquent and steeped in this material than
than we are. But this is a fun discussion I

(02:22):
think for us to kind of piggyback on and bring
some of our how stuff works knowledge to the table
as well. Indeed, if you want to watch that video,
I'll make sure that there is a link to it
in the landing page for this episode. It's stuff to
bow your Mind dot Com. So okay, we established what
a mass extinction is. Uh, what are the two basic
causes for mass extinction? Well, there's usually inanimate physical world events, right, volcanoes,

(02:47):
climate changes, outer space debris. We all think of this
massive massive asteroids striking the planet and killing all the dinosaurs, right,
that's basically the one that everybody kind of imagines. But
there's also long term to inches to biological life that
are affecting the ecosystems around us and killing off species. Uh,
and we are responsible for some of those. And then

(03:09):
in those five previous ones, which will go through shortly,
you know that there was a lot of versions of
an invasive species that were destroying habitats and and subsequently
the species that lived within them. Yeah. I mean, it's
always important to keep in mind that yes, humans and
and are and various other creatures live on Earth, but
we all we live in a very slim portion of

(03:30):
the atmosphere here on Earth, and you can break that
down even further, especially you know, depending on the particular species,
very small pockets of even that layer of atmosphere, depending
mon climate and an environment, So it becomes less of
a we are the creatures who live on this planet,
as we are the creatures who live in often very

(03:50):
small areas of this planet, and the in areas of
this planet that are susceptible to catastrophic change. And keep
in mind too, that these environmental changes we're talking about
take sometimes a billion years, like these are it's the
the the time that these go through. It's unfathomable. I

(04:12):
don't know about you, but from my human consciousness, I
have a hard time. Once we get to a million years,
I'm like, I don't know, it's it's all, you know,
great terrain after that. But these are huge amounts of time,
and that's why we're fairly confident that we can say
that we're living in one right now, because keep in mind,
they're two million years long, so, uh, it's happening at

(04:35):
an incredibly slow pace to our human lives. Yeah, it's
a lot easier to comprehend that space collision situation where
something snacks into the Earth and it brocks everything out,
or a you know, the volcano going that's erupting in
the background of that dinosaur illustration in our childhood paleontology books.
But we have to think about the long term changes
that steadily alter the environment and killed off the species

(05:00):
that have found their their niche within that environment. That's
that's a little harder to comprehend. Yeah, absolutely, So let's
look at our five examples here. The first one is
the order vichi and extinction event. Uh. And this occurred
somewhere between four hundred and nine million years ago and
four hundred forty five million years ago. And the ideas

(05:20):
that you know, the world before that was the Cambrian period.
It was basically multicellular life evolving over the course of
millions of years. But what happened was this catastrophe that
some think was caused by cosmic rays from outer space.
Now let's qualify this. This isn't like cosmic rays from
some science fiction novel or comic book or anything like that.

(05:42):
This is energetic sub atomic particles that let's say they
were blasting us today, right, they would damage our DNA
and probably cause cancer within us. But they more importantly,
they could also affect the atmosphere, and that's what the
theory is that happened here in the order Vichyan period
was that they affected the atmosphere. They basically turned coastal

(06:05):
habitats into deserts, and most of the life forms that
were out there, these multi cellular life forms were marine based.
They were living in water, so their entire habitat was destroyed.
And we see the ice age because the world is
covered in these you know cloud cover. Basically that makes
everything colder and it freezes. So we see a massive

(06:25):
not a complete reset, but it's kind of kind of
a massive reboot of life on Earth. Life is just
finally getting to the point where it's evolving, uh, to
you know, a couple of different cells, and and it
gets blasted with ice. Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to I
guess to think about these two in terms of like
economic comparisons. You know, there's an economic downturn and uh

(06:47):
and what happened suddenly you know a number of positions
have to disappear at a particular place of work, which
leads to different two roles changing, which leads sometimes to
bigger opportunities for those that remain. Yeah, absolutely, but it
but it changes the playing field. Yeah, and there's you know, again,
let's keep this in mind too, there's not a lot

(07:08):
of control that any of the players involved have over this.
So we get to the second one then, which is
the Late Devonian extinction, and this is four hundred and
fifteen million years to three hundred and fifty eight million
years ago, And the basic cause of this one was
what we were mentioning earlier, invasive species. So the world

(07:29):
at the time, it's often referred to as Annalee had
talked to me about in our interview as the age
of fishes and um, there's some plant life on land,
but for the most part, again we're talking about marine life.
Can you get this combination of earthquakes and volcanoes that
start pushing habitats into different areas of the world together,
and the habitats smashed together because of these natural disasters,

(07:53):
and you get these inland seas where predators start taking
over habitats that they didn't previously exist in. Right, So
massive invasive species take over and the killop seventy of
the species that are existing in these previous ecosystems. From
an economic standpoint, you can think of this as see
the merger of two companies, Suddenly there are redundancies that

(08:13):
have to have to be dealt with. These both of
these uh, these individuals have the same job. Which one
is going to eat the other one? Uh? Yeah, And
and let's stick with this metaphor. I like this, So, uh,
new species do not evolve for a long time after
this Devonian extinction period. So from this corporate perspective, there's

(08:36):
no new jobs being created, right, there's no new positions.
There's not a lot of creativity within the organization. That
leads us to the Permian period, which is two hundred
million to two hundred and fifty one million years ago,
and this is the big uh. They refer to it
as the Great Dying, which I particularly like that name.

(08:59):
It sounds like some Norwegian black metal band. Yeah. But
this is basically the mega volcano era, right, So the
world is all getting pushed together again. There's these land
masses that are basically forming what we call Pangaea, and
there's this massive climate change and mega volcanoes, and the
mega volcanoes are belching out these toxic gases that go

(09:22):
into the atmosphere again, you know, very similar to the
cosmic rays creating these this cloud cover the species on
the planet die off. It takes seventy five to qualify
as a mass extinction. Got twenty more percent here, No
wonder is called the Great Dyeing. Yeah, like this is
this is one of those examples where you can say
it came pretty close, almost wiped everything out. Yeah. So

(09:45):
the world afterwards is basically the the ocean becomes acidified.
We've got what we would think of today as pollution,
but it's you know, caused by mega volcanoes and and
this this is this horrible gas that's everywhere in the
air and h effects that are similar to what we
would call global warming today. But the five percent survival though,

(10:05):
that's kind of like the corporation has been reduced to
a mere startup right right after thee And this is
what the startup consists of. This is this is anally
really spelled this out for me, and I liked it.
She said that some scientists refer to this era as
slime world because the main creatures of the five percent

(10:27):
that survived, or what we would refer to as slimes. Uh.
So you've got these slimes that are moving around this
black sludge basically right, and then crocodiles. So this it's
not a friendly place. Is this barely breathable habitat full
of slime and crocodiles. Uh. And that goes on until
we've got the early Triassic period two hundred and fifty

(10:51):
million to two hundred and twenty million years ago, and
this is where we start seeing the early evolution of
dinosaurs again. Egg of volcanoes come into play. They start
blowing up, pushing continents around, and you know, habitats are destroyed. Okay,
So as these habitats get pushed together, food webs, you know,

(11:12):
the relationships between these different animals and and the and
the flora within their regions start unraveling essentially. And uh.
In Annally's book, she has a great example of the
one animal that survives this. This is this is the
survivor that we should look to as an example for
our own case of living through the sixth mass extinction.

(11:36):
It's called the listrous saurus and it's basically this is
the description from the book an ancestral or no, maybe
you added this one an ancestral shovel lizard. Added a lizard. Yeah,
I love that description. Shovel lizards. So basically it's faces
a shovel, right that survived. It kind of looked like
it was about the size of a pig, and it

(11:57):
was mammal like reptile aisle, Right, it had like strands
of hair and stuff like that. But I believe it
qualified as a reptile. And but here's how it survived.
Because of its shovel face. It was able to burrow
its way underground and survive all of these you know,
pushing around of land masses and the various you know

(12:18):
problems with breathing in the air and also the the
invasive species. And uh so what they do is they
basically go underground, and they had this special way of
breathing so that they could breathe really well underground with
low oxygen levels, even if there was dusty airborne contaminants.
So they adapted essentially to survive in this world. Uh.

(12:41):
And the other thing that was really fascinating about the
listener store is not a picky eater would basically eat
anything that came across. So, you know, as it's shoveling
around under the earth, I'm picturing, Uh, what are those
creatures from D and D that that like, uh tunnel
around there? Like called land sharks or something like that.
Oh yeah, I'm trying to now I'm thinking of all

(13:02):
the different under dark creatures. Number hulk lister source is
a good D and D monster. That we should add
that to somebody's campaigns someday. Yeah. I love the the
idea too, that it it survived because it was essentially
a generalist, because that also kind of that kind of
falls into the whole economic corporate structure as well, and
one that I often fall back on when I when I,

(13:23):
you know, start thinking about, you know, where I am
in a particular place, and I'm thinking, all right, I,
you know, make sure that I don't have all my
my tools in one basketing know, exactly a journalist because
jack of all trades, master of not Yeah. Yeah, that's
the list of source for you. It's the long term employee. Yeah,
who do you want to be when the when the

(13:43):
cuts come? Do you want to be the social media
specialist or the tumbler specialist? You know? Right? Yeah? Like that.
You know, sometimes it can behoove you to specialize, but
don't specialize so much that you're the you know, you're
essentially this one creature that has survived to live in
a very particular uh you know, tidle pool. And when
that title pool dries up your toast, you're the first

(14:05):
one to get the axe. In mass extinctions and incorporations,
life lessons from stuff to blow your mind. Uhl SOO,
then we get to the one. This is the one
that everybody knows about, right, that's the fifth one. This
is the one we all think of. It's the Cretaceous
period a hundred and forty five million to sixty five
million years ago. This is the meteorite impact striking basically destroying. Uh.

(14:31):
There's massive impact in what today is Baja California. Uh,
and it kills off the dinosaurs. Right. This is the
like Land before Time Jurassic Park, the one that's really
hammered it into our heads. And uh, there's an interesting
thing here though, that's going on. In Antalye's book, she
says that between scientists that study this particular era, there's

(14:53):
some contention that it, yes, there was definitely some kind
of impact in that area of the world, and yes
that probably contribute it did to, you know, an extinction
of of certain species. But they also think that there
were some more mega volcanoes going on more likely in India,
and that it's easy to think about again, like let's

(15:14):
get to this idea of it's really easy to think
about this huge asteroid striking Earth and just killing everybody
in one fell swoop, right, but it Yeah, those that
were in the general area of impact were killed instantly.
But that's not where we're seeing the extinction. That's not
where the sevent of species are dying off. It is
the world afterwards, because you get this again, slow process

(15:37):
of climate change makes it really hard for plants to grow,
subsequently makes it really hard for animals to find something
to eat, and then the carnivorous animals who are eating
the other animals subsequently don't have a lot to eat.
So again food food webs are unraveling. There's just not
a lot left. Yeah, I mean we're talking about for
the most part, with these volcano examples and the and

(16:00):
the impact examples, it's it's less about getting trapped in
the lava floor. We're getting hit by the thing that
collides with the earth as much as the material that's
dejected into the atmosphere. The sort of nuclear winter scenario
where where there's just less some light reaching the earth. Yeah,
it's interesting, Like, uh, I'm thinking about disaster movies right now, right,

(16:20):
and like we have this sort of obsession with them
in in in popular culture right now. Like I think
San Andreas comes out this weekend, which is the movie
that features the Rock rescuing his family from the Big
one in California. Uh and um yeah, yeah, you know,
when there's a big earthquake like that, of course lots

(16:40):
of people are going to die, but the after effects
are what's going to really affect the larger community, the
entire ecosystem of the planet. Yeah, especially when you start
stealing seeing these these the spiraling collapse as the webs
begin to unravel. Yeah. All right, we've taken you on
just a roller coaster ride through the five extinction events

(17:04):
that have occurred so far. Uh. And now we're going
to discuss the sixth great extinction event. Uh, one that
we may be living in right now that may not
you know, consists of some sort of cosmic calamity just
wiping things out, but rather the slow process that has
a lot, if not everything, to do with the human civilization. Yeah,

(17:27):
and that's the key, Like with those other ones, it's
very much about the slow you know, again, a mass
extinction requires two million years for the breakdown. Um. But
if we look at the sort of longitudinal uh, what
what is called the background extinction rate. So this is basically, uh,
all the time species are dying out right, not because

(17:50):
of mass extinctions. It's just part of the natural order
of things. You know, species die, new species come come forth. Uh,
and there's they're always going on. But the background extinction
rate has been higher. There's been a huge spike in
numbers since the Cretaceous period. So actually, if you go
and you look at at our how Stuff Works articles

(18:11):
on mass extinction, surviving mass extinction, things that are causing
the six mass extinction, there's some interesting stuff in there
as well. And our colleague Jonathan Strickland from tech Stuff
and Forward Thinking actually wrote one of those pieces, and
he cited a statistic that says that the background extinction
rate for speechies is somewhere between a hundred to a

(18:34):
thousand times greater than it should be. Uh. And he
cited Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson as being somebody who
estimated that we're looking at thirty thousand species going extinct
every year. Uh, And so you know, we're still under
the seventy five percent threshold range. But that's faster than normal.

(18:55):
Another another statistic here is that the background rate is happening.
They're on the average. It's point one extinctions per million
species per year. Okay, this is this is how people
have studied this. Look at it. It's actually quantified as
e over m s y extinctions per million species per

(19:15):
year UM. But the current rate is somewhere again, like
I said, between a hundred and a thousand, so we're
far over what you know, the average is there. So okay,
so we know that our background extinction rate is significantly
higher than it should be. Right. Uh, let's let's take
a look in the same way that we looked at

(19:36):
those other extinctions at the world before. You know what
we had, and you know what we're looking at now.
So you know, I'll remember it all takes a seventy
five species in two million years. Uh, and we're looking
at you know, there's like roughly you know, five major signs,
but there's all kinds of other external reasons that could

(19:56):
cause our mass extinctions. Right, And do you want to
talk a little bit about the age of man and
how you know we're coming into that. Yeah, I think
this is a vital piece of the puzzle here because, uh,
many people refer to this age that we're living in now,
this age, potentially of the sixth grade extinction event, is
the anthropasyne era, the the age of man, because humans

(20:19):
are now the dominant force of change on Earth or
not just augmenting our physical selves, but but we're also
augmenting the land around us from ancient aqueducts and cloud seating, um,
you know on up until you know the agricultural revolution. Uh,
even if you go back, you know, even before agriculture,

(20:39):
and you just look at us killing off the mammoths, right,
we're hunting the mammoths. And then when we kill off
the mammoths, it allows birch to grow unconsumed and erase
much of the grassland. Uh. And then and these and
the trees then change the color of the landscape, making
it much darker so that it absorbs more of the
sun's heat and this heats at the air. Um. And
so this process would have added to natural climate change,

(21:03):
making it harder for the mammoths to cope and helping
the birch tree spread further. Which I love this example
because it shows that even even primitive humans just doing
the most primitive thing possible, just spearing a bunch of mammoths.
Right in doing that, we we just dropped the balance
and we begin kind of paraforming the world into a

(21:23):
new form. It's the classic invasive species conundrum basics, because
we are the big invasive species we are, and not
only are we an invasive invasive species, but we are
also moving other life forms out of their natural habitats
and into other ones because we find them aesthetically pleasing. Yeah. So,
for instance, an example that is often used as the

(21:46):
kudzoo plant in Southern America where we live right now.
It was brought here and it's taking over chunks of
the entire United States since the late eight hundreds because
people brought it here. I thought that it was appealing,
and now it's everywhere, right Like, man, I can't like
walk down the street in Atlanta without seeing, you know,
a house or a wall overgrown with kad zoo. Uh

(22:08):
there's even yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah, I mean even some
of the tolerated things in our neck of the woods.
The English ivy. People love English ivy, but it's it's horriful.
What you know kills trees, that it's it's invasive. Here's
one of my favorite examples. I actually did an episode
about this for Brain Stuff. Uh raccoons. So um, this

(22:28):
is I'll try to make this brief, but this is
a perfect example of human beings causing an invasive species
problems a problem. So in Japan in the nineteen seventies,
there's this cartoon featured this cute cartoon raccoon Okay, and
Japanese importers said, wow, like people really love this cartoon.
Let's start importing raccoons from the United States. They're going

(22:51):
to make great pets. And of course they're not domesticated animals.
So these families would go out and buy raccoons and
then you know, they were fairal animals basically, and they
couldn't domesticate them. They didn't they couldn't live with them,
so the raccoons either escaped or they were let out.
Right now, Japan is facing this huge crisis of raccoon
proportions because they have raccoons all throughout the forests in Japan,

(23:17):
and there um in particular a problem because they're attacking
the historical landmarks in Japan like temples and such um
not attacking. It's not like these raccoons are like rising up.
It's not Planet of the Raccoons. But they're you know,
essentially as an invasive, invasive species moving in on this
territory and destroying this the habitat. They're destroying the buildings

(23:40):
that are around them, They're burrowing into them, making their
new homes there. And Japan has this huge problem where
they're just constantly trying to catch and unfortunately kill all
these raccoons because they just can't. The population is growing
so quickly just since the seventies that they can't deal
with it. It's the raccoons pushing it out. Yeah, I

(24:01):
mean when it comes to invasive species, and it brings
to mind the earlier examples we were talking about where
you had to have like masses of land converging and
drifting apart for these kind of invasive situations to take place.
Uh literally mountains were being moved to facilitate this. But

(24:22):
humans have so altered life on this earth that they
just do it by just moving around, by transporting materials
bye bye, you know, sometimes accidentally, such as the lionfish
being an example, Well that was kind of a combination
because on one hand you have people saying, oh, the
lionfish is beautiful, I want to keep it in an aquarium. Uh,
And then you also have people you just have international

(24:43):
shipping affecting it because even though it's a beautiful, delicate
looking creature, it's extremely hardy and it can survive, you know,
stuck away in the bulge of a ship. So on purpose,
by accident, we end up just mixing everything around, and
uh in a number of species, a lot of species
are going to be unable to flow with that change.
So this is a huge contributing factor to this this

(25:07):
current mass extinction that we're living in. It's you know,
it's happened before with invasive species moving in on other habitats,
but in this case it's you know, often because of
our intervention that we're moving these things around and and
knocking out the the ecosystem that's in place. Yeah. I mean,
just to a couple other facts, we just drive home
how much we have influenced the world. Um By at

(25:31):
least eight of Earth's land surface had been directly affected
by humans, and as of two thousand five, humans had
built so many dams the nearly six times as much
water was held in storage as flowed freely through rivers.
So okay, listeners out there probably thinking, Okay, these guys
are on the blame the human train. It's all our fault, right, Yeah,

(25:56):
you're right, I am at least, But well it's kind
of a compliment, right, I mean, because human humans here,
we are pilot successful at what we set out to
do exactly. But it's, uh, the thing we set out
to do was like by its very nature, um like
world shaping and world destroying, and when we get to it,
this may be what saves us as well. But there

(26:18):
are other factors that are going onto that aren't necessarily
caused by humans. And other is that our oceans are
changing again it's it's it's habitat loss, but it's not
on the land, right, So there's these massive changes that
are happening. So, for example, half the coral reefs on
Earth have been destroyed h and about a third of
mangrove forest as of those like underground underwater forests that

(26:41):
you know you see like a manateese swimming thread or
something like that. I don't know, Uh, those have been
destroyed as well, right there their home to land and
sea animals you're thinking of, I'm thinking of like otters.
I'm assuming I don't know off the top of my head.
I'm not a marine biologist, but some kind of air
breathing land animal that that works within this ecosystem together

(27:02):
with the marine life that's there. Right. Uh. And in addition, okay,
this is human beings. Over fishing has led to two
thirds of the world's marine fisheries being tapped to their limits.
So again we're missing with things a little bit. But
there's there's stuff going on at a long term rate
that we're not necessarily affecting either. Right. And another one

(27:24):
that I here is of course a loss of biodiversity,
which has everything to do with agriculture. Uh. We we have. Agriculture,
of course, is by its very nature an artificial you know,
manipulation of vegetation to say, hey, we really like that
a little potato crop that's grown over there. We really
like these red berries. They're pretty delicious. Let's have an

(27:45):
entire portion of land that grows nothing but that in
an artificially maintained scenario. And uh, And then you end
up depending on one particular strain of that species, and
that becomes the dominant um uh, you know, basically the
dominant life form on huge pieces of land. Yeah. Anally
uses as an example for for this. Uh. You know,

(28:08):
it seems like a long time ago, but the Irish
potato famine of eighteen forty five within the grand scheme
of two million years, it's not a whole lot of
time has past. But cheese is an example to show
how habitat loss and extinction or at least uh death
you know by famine uh, can be caused by two

(28:29):
things that are going on. You've got a lower population, right,
and then there's class divisions that are going on that
are sort of deciding who gets access to the food, right,
and then that subsequently leads to airborne fungus that spreads
disease and so on. So you know, we're really looking

(28:50):
at industrial farming nowadays as playing a huge role in this.
It's replacing this diverse population of plants that we have
with a single crop that were raising for you know,
the purposes of selling them the grocery store basically, which
means you're highly susceptible to one microbe one of these
coming along and just wiping that out. What if something

(29:10):
takes up corn? Yeah, because we increasingly depend on one
strain of corn. I mean, that's why there are efforts
to maintain these additional strains of corn in the protected
places so that we have that genetic diversity to fall
back on. Yeah. Yeah, that's scary just on its own, right,
But um, let's add a fourth one to the mix.

(29:30):
And this is again, this is not a human a
human error here. This is the one that we know
from the Cretaceous period, the asteroid impact. Right, this is
your arm again, this is your deep impact movie scenario. So, um,
we're actually do for one of these. NASA essentially says
that asteroids that are you know, that are big enough

(29:53):
to cause the Cretaceous period extinction event. They're supposed to
strike the Earth every million years. In our dou dates
come up, we haven't had one, and um, so we're
just kind of crossing our fingures waiting to get hit
by a big rock from outer space. The one of
the thing about this particular threat, this particular extinction events scenario,

(30:15):
is that we increasingly have the ability to to to
track these these near Earth objects. We increasingly have the
ability to launch the kind of countermeasures that could prevent
them once spotted. Uh, neither neither of those efforts are
are funded to the extent they should be, which is

(30:36):
crazy when you realize that that of all these things
like these this is in the movies, there's always a
hero of saving the world, doing something heroic to save
the world. Historically, like no living actual person has ever
saved the world. But this is a scenario where we could,
like like a particular effort, a particular organization could save
the world or a whole lot of people in it

(30:58):
from annihilation by a near Earth object. Yeah, but we're
not there yet. Yeah, no, we're not. I mean, that's
all episode for another time. But obviously, you know, the
NASA and other national space organizations aren't getting the funding
they need to sort of defend US, I guess at large.
But this is you know, something that analegue gets into later,

(31:20):
is that outer space is really going to be uh
the long term goal here for us development of travel
throughout space, paying attention to what's going on around the
planet Earth. That's going to be a huge factor in
making sure that the human species survives. Yeah, and also
in terms of just like moving up the Cardassian scale,
like we have to master the planet and in a

(31:43):
in a real and meaningful sense and not just oops,
we screwed everything else up on the planet. So there's
a fifth one here that I think is a pretty
big one, and you know, we'd be remiss if we
ignored it, which is the rising temperature caused by dun
dun dune global warming. Um. And we're not going to
get into the debates of its origin. You know, obviously

(32:04):
there's a lot of conflicting reports back and forth of
what scientists say or politicians say about this one way
or the other. But let's just stick with this one fact, okay.
So it all it takes is a shift of one
degree celsius, which is for us in America one point
degrees fahrenheit one point eight sorry, one point eight degrees fahrenheit.

(32:26):
That alone would lead to thirty percent of Earth's species
being wiped out forever. So uh, you know, depending on
where you stand on global warming, just know that, you know,
all it takes is that one little nudge on the
temperature scale and boom, it's just gone. Because again, like
so many creatures, essentially live in a metaphorical tidal pool,

(32:49):
and it doesn't take much to make that pool just vanish. Entirely.
So you've got a couple of examples that are like
the asteroid one outer space kind of cosmic events. Let's
let's let's think a little bigger. Let's think Jack Kirby here.
So what have we got? Well for starters, if a
sufficiently large nearby star or to burn out, the resulting

(33:10):
hyper nova could theoretically blast the Earth with enough gamma
radiation to destroy our ozone layer, and that would expose
us to deadly doses of solar radiation. So that's uh,
that's a potential factor there. So okay, so another reason
for us to be paying more attention to what's going
on matter space. Yeah, yeah, I mean this this would
be an example of one that would be less uh less,

(33:34):
less easily diverted. It's not a matter of incoming object.
Can we just sort of nudge it off course? But
obviously the more we know about it, the better position
we are to understand what's happening. Then maybe we would
be able to devise some means to shield the planet.
Another similar event, Uh, there's an orange dwarf dubbed Glease
seven ten, and it poses another threat. Astronomers predicted that

(33:58):
this rogue star may barrel into our corner of the
galaxy roughly one point five million years from now, So
we're looking out a little um shredding the Orc cloud
on the outskirts of our Solar system and pelting us
with comets formed from the impact. So it's not the
star itself, but it's the resulting commets that are going
to basically hit us like mortar fire basically, and indeed

(34:22):
the stress that we put on leaving the planet. And
that's in roughly seven point six billion years, the Sun
will burn through the last of its fuel and swell
into a red giant, and in this form, the Sun's
diameter will encompass Earth's current orbit and vaporize the planet awesome. Now,
before that occurs, however, scientists predicted the Sun's a slow

(34:42):
expansion will raise temperatures and boil the oceans dry, uh
essentially turning Earth into a desert world in a mere
five hundred million years, And some estimations are predicted that
the Earth, unbound by the Sun's decreased mass, will actually
then drift out into an out or orbit safe from
the expansion of the Sun. But again, yeah, what the

(35:04):
catastrophic effects there are are pretty staggering, like the ocean's
freezing solid. Uh and you know life on Earth consisting
of only you know, some creatures huddled around up a
hyperthermal vent. So we'll have have to have gotten off
the planet well before then, yeah, or or figure out
a way to move it, which is another sort of
far future possibility, like what can you do in terms

(35:27):
of moving us, moving the planet and rolling with these
long term cosmic catastrophes that are just a part of
the life cycle of a solar system. Okay, so let's
get into next. What we'll talk about is how we're
going to survive this thing, what strategies are in place,
and in particular, Knewances book really you know, focuses on
this and the title of her book is is um

(35:49):
useful here? Scatter? Adapt? And remember, those are the strategies
at hand. We've we've talked about the five extinction events
that have occurred, We've talked about the sixth that we're
involved in right now, the steady um transformation of the
planet into a less hospitable form, as well as some
of the you know, truly cosmic cataclysms that potentially await

(36:12):
us and in some cases definitely await us in the
far future. So all right, looking at all of this
death and destruction that's happened on Earth, that is happening
on Earth and that will happen on Earth really makes
me kind of back up. And you know, you hear
the term cosmic horror get thrown a lot, especially in

(36:33):
the wake of love Crafts contribution to literature. This is
cosmic horror. When you think about this on the scale
and the magnitude that it's happening at, it makes you
feel utterly insignificant. There's nothing we can do to stop it. Yeah,
I mean I actually when when we were researching this,
I kept thinking back to um uh to Lovecraft and

(36:54):
Clark Ashton Smith and in some of their stories like
talking about like well, first came the lizard men, and
then came the you know, this cosmic entity you know,
just talking about like life forms that were in habiting
uh some you know, fictional version of the Earth, and
in dealing with such like long periods of time that
the human life and human accomplishments were just so insignificant. Yeah,

(37:15):
and that you kind of feel the same way when
you start looking at these extinction events that have come
before and the extinction events to come. Absolutely it reminds
me of m have you ever heard of? This is
an English professor, uh, well known Marxist philosopher. I guess
you could call him Frederick Jamison, uh, and he has
this This isn't an exact quote, but this is one

(37:36):
of these things that they throw at you in graduate school,
is that the apocalypse is easier for us to imagine
something like this, right than living in a post capitalist society.
So it's easier for us to imagine this mass extinction
this world without us, these uh, huge scenarios where we're

(37:57):
completely insignificant than than his This is his Marxist argument obviously.
Then then in a world that's like a that's not
based on this sort of capitalist economy that we currently
live within, right, So like uh, I guess the counterpoint
to him would be like the Star Trek world where
everybody's got access to the replicators and they can just

(38:18):
make food and there's no problems. They're able to fly
away from their mass extinction events and perfectly survive them. Yeah,
I mean, I mean it kind of plays into our
our love affair with apocalypse, right, that we were often
drawn to these tales of some catascostic, some cataclysmic event,
setting the reboot button on on life as we know it. Um,

(38:42):
you know, if nothing else, you know, you have a
bad day of work and you're like, I wish an
asteroid would hit my employment. Yeah right, Well, turns out
all that cosmic horror isn't necessarily as bad as we
think it is. Okay, We're not as insignificant as it feels.
So from Antaline Knewitz his book, there are some recommendations

(39:03):
for how we might you know, look back and learn
from species like the Lister source that had survived extinctions
and learned from them like directly, like live underground. We
could we could like make shovel faces and attach them
to to our heads and just dig underground. I don't
know that that would help us with every type of
extinction event, especially when the Sun swallows the Earth and

(39:24):
a couple of millions. Well, you know, I think we should,
we should consider even the most mad science of Well, definitely,
we'll have the shovel Head Division get on it. At
the same time that we're in our ideal world, we
have taxes funding two things, NASA and shovel heads. You know,
I feel like this was a sadly unexplored to a

(39:46):
certain extent plot in the second season of American Horror Story.
You had the Mad Scientists character who I loved, uh,
and he was making these mutants James Cromwell to James
Cromwell character. His character's name eludes me, but yeah, like
a former Nazi doctor, and he wanted to make this
race of mutants that would survive comic becoming Atomic Apocalypse. Um,

(40:09):
so yeah, I think we should keep all options on
the table. Yeah, alright, well I'm writing down shovel head. Shovelheads,
just consider it everyone. But in the more more more immediately,
what knew its recommends is that we look at her first.
Phrasing for this is scattering. Essentially. The example for this
is ethnic diasporas right, So, a diaspora, the aspora is

(40:33):
a geographical dispersion of people separated from their homeland. Right.
And then one of the most often used examples of
this is the Jewish diaspora. Um that's told through the
holiday of Passover. Right. The story is passed on every generation.
It's the story of Moses and the ten plagues within
Egypt and how Jews fled from Egypt for forty years
wandering throughout the desert until they eventually found Israel. So

(40:56):
people are displaced, their force to go to different geographic
corners of the Earth. They're forced to, to a certain extent,
merge without a cultures while also retaining some level of
their own cultural And so her recommendation is that this
is something that we as a species human beings should
start coming to terms with and and thinking about as
a strategy. Right, it's scattering essentially, whether it is across

(41:21):
the globe or out into the stars somewhere. Uh. And
so even you know, her recommendation here is, you know,
look at Passover as an example that even if whatever
ethnic group or or species in this case has unwillingly
been torn apart by disastrous events or what have you, Um,
your children will remember where they came from hundreds of

(41:44):
years down the road. Okay, So, um, Passover has passed
down this this this tradition of memory essentially. Okay, So
even though you were a mutated shovel head creature that
we genetically modified to live on an extraterrestrial world, doesn't
mean you can't celebrate past them exactly. Yeah, They'll be
like a new holiday that the shovel heads can celebrate

(42:07):
and and remember you know what life was like on
Earth when we recorded ye old podcasts. Yeah, I think
I love this idea because a lot of it is
about just recognizing, like the change is part of life
on Earth in a central part. And you can't take
any particular phase and evolution or even in human culture
and say this is we want to stick right here.
We don't want to draw any more cards into our hand,

(42:28):
and we don't want to discard. We want to stick
with this hand. No, you have to keep playing the game. Essentially,
what she's saying is is exactly that, right, Like, we
can't just sit on our laurels and be satisfied with
the exact world that we live in now and think
that that's going to go on forever, because it's not
regardless of extinction level events or not. Uh, we have

(42:51):
to change in order to survive. It's just the ebb
and flow of nature and of humanity. And this is
why so many scientists most no doable. Stephen Hawkings argue
that the long term survival of human life depends on
our ability to expand beyond our planet, to expand beyond
our solar system. I mean, even if you're talking about
the just ultimate long gain, uh, expanding beyond the universe itself. Uh.

(43:17):
So in that sense, the answer is, hey, if you
really want to survive humans, you have to transcend humanity
and become some sort of uh, you know, multiverse walking
god species. And this gets into the you know, her
second argument essentially, which is the adaptation one. Right, we
need to adapt, We have to change. We have to
first of all, like uh, come to grips with that

(43:39):
idea in itself that we have to change in order
to survive. Um. And and this isn't just you know,
we're not just talking about like becoming gods here. We're
talking about like, uh, making just small changes in are
realizing what's not working. UM. Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael,
which is often you know, the book about the talking
gorilla that tells us what's wrong with human culture and

(44:02):
uh and how bad agriculture is. But it makes a
lot of strong compelling arguments. And one of the um
examples that's thrown out is that the human civilization as
we know it is like a guy in an old
timey uh airplane, you know, the kind of a push
off the side of a hill and the guys in there,
and he's peddling as hard as he can, and he's
like pulling levers to flap the wings and it's not flying.

(44:23):
It's plummeting, but he feels like it's flying. But but
but part of our responsibility is to realize, Hey, the
plane that we think is soaring and flying and ascending,
it's actually descending. And then realizing and then making the
realization we can we can do things to change this airplane.
We can make it a little less of a loadstone.

(44:43):
It may be a little more of a of an
actual vehicle. And you know, touching on this is of course,
you know, we'll get this is touching back into the
preachy sort of global warming aspect of this conversation, which
is that, you know, we really have to come to
terms with the fact that human beings are causing climate change,
that's the first thing. And how we're going to reduce

(45:07):
that basically, right, reduced greenhouse emissions. They have to be
reduced by fifty by twenty fifty, that's theoretically within our lifetimes,
has to happen for us to stave off that that
that one degree shift in temperature change that we're talking
about earlier. Um, and there's easy ways to do this.

(45:28):
I'm not gonna spend you know, the rest of our
time here rattling it all off, but you know, look
it up online. Combine trips in your car, you know,
car pooling, buy more efficient cars, adjust your thermostat in
the winter, bike to work, or cycle. All of these things, CANNA,
you know, essentially help with reducing greenhouse emissions. Uh. Basically

(45:50):
just just look at this one example here, So if
every American replaced one incandescent bulb with one of those
energy saving ones, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would
be the equivalent of taking eight hundred thousand cars off
the road. So that's you know a small thing. We
we talked about this love crafty and sense of insignificance,
but that's a relatively small thing that everybody can do

(46:12):
that's gonna you know, slightly stave off the coming apocalypse.
That's not going through life with a gas mask or
some sort of a weird alien tentacle creature or like
attached your spinal column or anything. That's that's very doable. Yeah,
and you know, new Its touches on this in her
book as well by talking about these, she went and

(46:32):
talked to a lot of really interesting, kind of future
oriented scientists at universities around the country. One in particular
was looking at how we could use photosynthesis as like
a method that we could replicate within our solar cells,
essentially by building artificial photosynthesis. Uh. It's called biomamesis, and
the practice is basically you're imitating biological life forms to

(46:55):
make artificial systems as efficient you know, biomamic right. Yeah,
So there's this idea that you know, if we can
switch over to some kind of uh energy system that
utilizes photosynthesis instead of you know, carbon emitting fuels such uh,
that that you know, would be in much better shape.
And they she even looked into the um. There's this

(47:15):
algae called ciano bacteria I believe, uh, And there's this
scientist I believe it's at the University of Washington that's
looking at mutated versions of this that release hydrogen instead
of oxygen, you know, like like like normal plant life does.
And it would allow for this clean fuel production because
you would have hydrogen being released, you'd be utilizing the

(47:36):
hydrogen for your energy, and the only byproduct that would
be releasing is water essentially. You know, so we're talking
about biofuels essentially here. Okay, so we touched upon this earlier,
that memory is really important to our survival, right, the
idea that yes, we can scatter as a species, whether
it's across the world or it's across the planets of
the universe, but there needs to be some kind of

(47:58):
built in memory system for the human species to learn
from its previous mistakes, learn from history essentially, right, Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's I can see it's sort of being
a two sided thing. Like one is just the pure
vanity of saying, hey, this is like we have a continued,
continued line here um, and we have the memories of
what came before. But then on the other hand, science

(48:18):
itself is about knowing, you know, what has come before,
having this accumulated knowledge and knowing what works and doesn't work,
and for humanity to survive. I mean, it's worth the
point now where science is essentially humanity, if not something greater. Yeah,
I mean this begs the question why do we want
to survive? Right? Like, why what is our urge to

(48:40):
make it through this sixth mass extinction? Why do we
need to do that? I would argue that you know,
so that our people endure for the long term, and
that you know, the legacy of our species is carried on.
All these memories are brought throughout time. This understanding of
the world, this understanding of ourselves, it's not lost. Yeah,

(49:02):
I mean, I think it comes down to two things.
I mean, on one hand, you have, like the basic
genetic mission in any organism is to pass its seed
on and see the continuing the continuation of that particular
genetic line, and so far so that becomes extrapolated in
this quest for the survival of the human race. But
then also it ties into the problem of immortality that

(49:23):
that on you not a very basic level. A lot
of what goes on in our culture is about us
struggling with the reality that we are, each individual. Each
person listening to this today, he's going to die, right, Absolutely.
The idea that we as individuals are going to die
is horrible to think of. The idea that we as
a species are all going to die is practically unthinkable. Yeah,

(49:47):
or is it? I don't know. I guess the thing is,
it's like, you can come to terms with your your
own personal mortality, but it it can make a bit
more sense if there is a larger cultural, even species
wide in mortality, because maybe, just maybe your memory could
survive in there. Maybe you'd be one of the few
lucky individuals like, uh, you know, you'll be You'll be

(50:08):
an Aristotle, You'll be uh, you'll be a confused to see,
you'll be somebody whose name actually resonates to a meaning,
meaningful degree throughout the long term. Yeah, you'll have a legacy. Yeah.
And so like, let's let's pull back from this for
a second and just look at like a I say small,
I'm gonna say a smaller example, but it's actually for
a much bigger animal than us. Okay, so whales, take

(50:31):
whales for example. Memory is important to all animals survival,
and whales are a perfect example of this, right they
teach one another the maps for their migration patterns throughout generations.
This is just a simple example of why memory is important.
It doesn't have to do necessarily with the vanity of
wanting to have a legacy right and be remembered forever.

(50:52):
Although I can certainly relate to that. I'm sure most
human beings have a certain amount of ego inside of
them that resonates with that, right, but uh, more importantly,
just this idea that like, this is the route to survival,
This is the way that we've done, This is the
way to go, and it will get you know, lead
to the continuation of our family and of our species. Yeah,

(51:14):
this is the way you use your shovel head to
dig exactly right. You can't just expect them to know
how to shovel their way under the earth with their face.
So alright, So Nuance has got these two recommendations that
she really advocates for at the end of her book,
and I think these these are kind of where she's
a saying something new, saying something that hasn't necessarily been

(51:37):
brought to the community before. The two things are this
that we as a species needs to invest more in
our cities. Uh and I'll explain more about that later.
That's the first one, and the second is what we've
been hinting at all along, which is we need to
explore beyond this planet because no doubt about it, sometime,

(51:57):
whether it's in the next hundred years, are the next
fifteen million years, there's going to be an event that's
going to wipe out life on Earth. Uh. So the
city part this is a really interesting thing. So check.
This is a great statistic that she pulled out in
the past decade. Okay, so we're just talking about, like,

(52:18):
from two thousand five to now, the number of people
on Earth that live in cities has surpassed those that
live outside of them. I didn't I didn't expect that
when I read that in her book. I thought I
would have thought that there were more people living in
rural communities, but I guess not. Uh, And it's it's
expected to rise. United States. Uh sorry, the United Nations

(52:40):
Population Division estimates that sixty seven percent of humanity is
going to live in urban areas by So you know,
that's why she's advocating, we really need to figure out
a way to make our cities sustainable, right, So that
means the cities need to be able to sustain damage
such as from Earth quick. They need to be able

(53:01):
to feed everyone in that that city. You need the
city to actually uh be less susceptible to the ravages
of disease, which, of course cities have you know, since
really the emergence of major metropolitan areas have served as
as of incubators, incubators for diseases such as as syphilis.

(53:21):
And then there's what we were talking about earlier, which
is that they have to offer sustainable energy to their citizens. Right.
So this idea that we were talking about earlier about
biofuels and you know, utilizing photosynthesis, whatever it is, whatever
method that we end up using for for clean energy
that's sustainable and that we can keep using it for
a long period of time. Cities have to figure out

(53:43):
a way to make that happen. Right, Um, they can't
exist without agriculture. Uh, and they're also you know, so
we can't just you know, abandoned rural areas. We need
them as well. So yeah, we need the food that
comes from them, you feed the city. So there needs
to be you know, cooperation between these communities. And then

(54:04):
this is an interesting aspect that I hadn't thought about,
but she points out that cities in and of themselves
are monuments, their constructs of human memory. So, you know,
our cities, depending on who's in power at the time
that they're built, whether it's you know, the churches or
nationalistic organizations or or corporations. You see in the architecture

(54:27):
throughout a city. What was the dominant force at the
time that it was built right, whether it's extravagant churches
or the beautiful large buildings that are built to sustain
the government, or the skyscrapers that we work in here
in Atlanta, you know, working for big companies. You know it.
You know when you look at the vanity that goes

(54:47):
into a city, when you look at the disease incubation,
when you look at the the energy drain and and
the amount of energy it takes to feed individuals in it.
I mean, it really makes it seem like the city,
the modern city is kind of a tumor of human culture,
Like it's the the human culture as tumor um. It
brings to mind. I believe it was in Grant Morrison's

(55:09):
The Invisibles, where there's at one point one of the
characters has a vision of planets. They are just nothing
but like empty cities. Yeah, like where the the idea
of city has just completely ravaged an ecosystem. Yeah, that's
a classic Morrison thing that he revisits over and over again,
the the the idea of humans as disease as cancer

(55:29):
and then subsequently using that as a way to some
somehow survive. Right, So like harnessing that somehow. Um. I
think he had this story once. I don't. I don't
know if it was ever published, but where there was
a person who had had a tumor, I believe it
was in their lung and they had learned they turned
it into a familiar, like a magical familiar, and so

(55:52):
the their their tumor was was helping them instead of
hurting them. It's interesting metaphorical ideas, but that's essentially that
you know, you get getting back to the reality of
notes as premise here, Like that's the argument, how do
you keep this this idea of city and this idea
of human civilization entirely? How does it become less of
a disease and more of a sustainable like hybrid existence exactly? Yeah,

(56:16):
And then you know the last one is essentially you know,
what we've been talking about all along here is that
we need a long term plan to get off planet Earth.
That's it, plain and simple. We've got to build, we've
got to explore. We should probably be investing more in
uh simply just observing space around us, even if it's

(56:37):
not uh, you know, in terms of figuring out a
way to propel ourselves outside this galaxy or not like
you were saying earlier, you know, just in terms of
the asteroid impact thing. We need to be on top
of our game. Yeah, especially as we increasingly play this
long game of survival. I mean just in terms of
the odds because we've been around such a short time

(56:58):
and we've seen the five I have extinction events that
have preceded us. So in order to keep those odds
going to remain in the sort of you know, cosmic
Vegas game of survival, we've got to we've got to
to learn to bend the rules to our favor. Yeah.
Uh so, I mean I don't have a whole lot
more to add to that other than that, you know,
I think that if you want to know more about

(57:20):
both her recommendations for making cities better and for coming
up with long term solutions for space travel, I would
highly recommend reading her book. Again, it's a scatter adapt
and remember how humans will Survive a mass extinction, And
that's by Anneleine new It's you can order it on Amazon,
probably buy it in your local bookstore. I've been reading

(57:40):
it off of my kindle. Cool. All right, Well, there
you have it, um A quicker run through the five
extinction events that came before and uh, you know, preview
of the ongoing extinction event and possible events to come
and how we can survive it. Uh. In the meantime,
if you want to check out those resources that we've
discussed that video, some of those how stuff works articles,

(58:02):
be sure to check out stuff to blow your mind
dot com. There you will find a landing page for
this episode. With those outgoing links, you also find a
host of other podcast episodes flog post videos and links
out to social media accounts, and if you would like
to add to the conversation, let us know what do
you think about mass extinctions? Think we're right or wrong
about what is potentially causing the current one that we're in,

(58:22):
or have other solutions for us getting out of this one.
Let us know at blow the Mind at how stuff
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