The Anthropocene Reviewed(6)

The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, and then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead, let’s imagine Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1, and today being December 31 at 11:59 PM. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 PM.*

Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all the way over, and it will be okay—at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun.

But we’ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else.

I know the world will survive us—and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.

There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.

It’s easy to forget how wondrous humans are, how strange and lovely. Through photography and art, each of us has seen things we’ll never see—the surface of Mars, the bioluminescent fish of the deep ocean, a seventeenth-century girl with a pearl earring. Through empathy, we’ve felt things we might never have otherwise felt. Through the rich world of imagination, we’ve seen apocalypses large and small.

We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We’re the only species that knows it has a temporal range.



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Complex organisms tend to have shorter temporal ranges than simple ones, and humanity faces tremendous challenges. We need to find a way to survive ourselves—to go on in a world where we are powerful enough to warm the entire planet but not powerful enough to stop warming it. We may even have to survive our own obsolescence as technology learns to do more of what we do better than we can do it. But we are better positioned to solve our biggest problems than we were one hundred or one thousand years ago. Humans have more collective brainpower than we’ve ever had, and more resources, and more knowledge collected by our ancestors.

We are also shockingly, stupidly persistent. Early humans probably used many strategies for hunting and fishing, but a common one was persistence hunting. In a persistence hunt, the predator relies on tracking prowess and sheer perseverance. We would follow prey for hours, and each time it would run away from us, we’d follow, and it would run away again, and we’d follow, and it would run away again, until finally the quarry became too exhausted to continue. That’s how for tens of thousands of years we’ve been eating creatures faster and stronger than us.

We. Just. Keep. Going. We spread across seven continents, including one that is entirely too cold for us. We sailed across oceans toward land we couldn’t see and couldn’t have known we would find. One of my favorite words is dogged. I love dogged pursuits, and dogged efforts, and dogged determination. Don’t get me wrong—dogs are indeed very dogged. But they ought to call it humaned. Humaned determination.

For most of my life, I’ve believed we’re in the fourth quarter of human history, and perhaps even the last days of it. But lately, I’ve come to believe that such despair only worsens our already slim chance at long-term survival. We must fight like there is something to fight for, like we are something worth fighting for, because we are. And so I choose to believe that we are not approaching the apocalypse, that the end is not coming, and that we will find a way to survive the coming changes.

“Change,” Octavia Butler wrote, “is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe.” And who am I to say we are done changing? Who am I to say that Butler was wrong when she wrote “The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars”? These days, I choose to believe that our persistence and our adaptability will allow us to keep changing with the universe for a very, very long time.

So far, at a paltry 250,000 years, it’s hard to give humanity’s temporal range more than one star. But while I initially found my brother’s words distressing, these days I find myself repeating them, and believing them. He was right. He always is. The species will survive this, and much more to come.