Seeing Further (45 page)

And then there is the rate at which ancient sunlight stored in fossil form is used to drive the engines of industry and civilisation. The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nugatory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge. The carbon dioxide liberated in the burning renders the atmosphere less transparent to the flow of outgoing heat; with the flow thwarted in this way, the temperature at the surface goes up. The resultant warming is, in terms of energy flows, about one hundred times larger than the amount of energy released by the fossil fuels.

This great short-circuiting of the geological carbon cycle, though, reveals one of the strengths of seeing the Earth in terms of its turning dynamics. In the purely human realm, cyclic theories of history tend to engender a feeling of hopelessness – the cycle will roll on, regardless. But, perhaps surprisingly, a view of the Earth that focuses on its relentless cycles and the flows of energy that drive them can be empowering. It is a view of the planet in which we are already involved, for good or ill, and to which we can make changes for better or for worse. These are cycles we can use. The Earth seen as a bauble in space is what it is – just a sight, not an experience. The only injunction that is possible faced with that gorgeous globe is ‘sustain’. Sustain the gaze; sustain the object. The Earth as an encompassing nest of cycles is a world which we are always already involved with, a Land-art world in which intervention is of the essence. This way of seeing makes things at once more frightening – this is the lived environment of wind in the face and water in the tap at risk, not some idealised representation – and more tractable.

Recognising the openness of the Earth system and the flows of energy that power it offers the clearest way of seeing the solution to the current global environmental crisis. If the manner in which humans currently reap their energy from fossil fuels ties the flow of energy to the material flow of the carbon cycle in a deeply damaging way, we must simply find other flows to tap. Energy is flowing through the winds, in the currents of the oceans, in the rivers, in the growing of the grass. It flows out of the ground and down from the sky. Geothermal plants can speed the flow of heat from the depths; kites in the stratosphere can harvest the endlessly circulating jet streams; mirrors in the deserts can drive turbines with sunshine. There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours. And if that capacity for work is harnessed, many other problems can be solved. The carbon cycle could be expanded, the biosphere’s capacity for drawing carbon dioxide from the air
increased and the greenhouse effect thus diminished. Other waste can be recycled, too, and material resources thus renewed; with a great enough flow of energy from beyond, any closed system can sustain itself with recycling.

The Earth of cycles can hardly be the icon that Apollo’s Earth has become; it is more a hum than a sight. But it is a valuable way of thinking of the Earth from inside, of seeing the human and the inhuman as close, interdependent, even indistinguishable. It is an experience that can be taught and shared, and even felt. Stretching from iron core to encompassing cosmos, it has the depth and scale to provide a sublime thrill of its own. True, it offers no gestalt vision to the objective eye. But it can be animated, if you have a mind to. When next you see a picture of the blue marble in space, imagine its clouds coming to life, their whorls beginning to turn like turbine blades. And as you see the scope of the planet’s circulation in your mind’s eye, let your other mental senses in on the act, too; feel the raw heat of the Sun on the back of your neck as it powers the vision in front of you. Embed the portrait in a vision of process. Turn it into part of something – of a solar system, of an act of the imagination, of a future.

With the right imagination, the world of cycles and the world of the astronomer’s gaze can be made to mesh. As mentioned before, the seemingly isolated Earth does in fact have an environment, discovered by astronomy in the abstract, realised as relevant only long after the fact. This environment is the source of the flows of energy that drive the workings of the Earth; it can also be coupled to those workings more directly. The revolutions of the Earth and sky are loosely linked. Orbital cycles carefully calculated by astronomers with no earthly agenda turn out to drive the ice ages. Objects in space affect, and even collide with, the planet from which we watch them. For a long time the possibility of such impacts was deemed of no practical importance, but now it is accepted that they have had great geological significance, and that they merit a certain continued vigilance. As a result of this, 2008 saw the first case of an object on a collision course with the Earth being discovered at an observatory, monitored at the appointed time as a fiery meteor in the sky, and later gathered up in fragments from the ground to which it fell. Asteroid 2008 TC3 was in most ways a small and inconsequential object, but it cut through an important disciplinary distinction. The world of cycles in which we live is not limited to the ball of rock on which we sit; objects elsewhere matter too, and to some extent this must change the way we think about the sky.

And then there is the question of looking further off. Pull back from the Earth just as far as the Moon, and the blue marble loses its features, continents become hard to see, clouds swamping all other detail. From Mars you would need binoculars to even see it had a disc, from Jupiter you would be hard put
to make it out with the naked eye. From six billion kilometres away, the greatest range at which the Earth has yet been photographed,
Voyager 1
’s powerful camera saw it as only the palest of blue dots. Yet space scientists now speak of seeing, and learning about, Earth-like planets around other stars.

No telescope currently conceivable could actually produce pictures of such planets as discs in space. But it is possible to look for their cycles, their rhythms. Already such planets are inferred from the way their orbits produce sympathetic wobbles in the movement of their parent’s stars, or the regular ways that they pass between those stars and earthly observers. When they become discernible in their own right, less astronomical signs of cycling will be looked for – hints of weather from changes in brightness caused by daily movements of cloud, traces of seasonality as colours shift over the year. Most vital of all, signs of the cycling biosphere will be sought out. As Lovelock pointed out in the late 1960s, biogeochemical cycling has pushed the Earth’s atmosphere far from chemical equilibrium. Such disequilibrium may yet, possibly even soon, be seen in the light of planets round other stars. Understanding the Earth’s endless recycling sets the stage for measuring the Earthliness of distant specks, and for reading life into a point of light that has no features that could ever be gazed upon.

The Earth is still a beautiful ball floating in space. The Apollo 17 camera did not lie. But by seeming to show everything, that portrait made it too easy to ignore the dynamism its stillness could not show. The Earth is not something put before us, or left behind us. It is around us and within us, turning on itself in every way it can as energy flows through it from the depths of the past and the fires of the Sun. It is not just a spaceship carrying a crew. It is a world, and now aware.

S
CIENCE REVEALS NEW WORLDS, BUT MAY ALSO BRING NEWS OF THE END OF THE WORLD.
T
HE IDEA HAS A CURIOUS APPEAL, FOR SCIENTISTS AND WRITERS ALIKE, AS
M
AGGIE
G
EE EXPLORES.

Human beings fear endings, but also crave them. The forbidden thrill of the death-wish stalks many imagined apocalypses, literary, Christian, scientific and filmic; disaster movies do good box office because, in the safety of the present, we can look at the unimaginably terrifying future, and experience the excitement without being annihilated. But our current perils are not just imaginary. Martin Rees’ book,
Our Final Century,
suggests that we really are living in dangerous times. In addition to the usual risks to life on Earth, like asteroid impacts, volcanic eruptions and epidemics, twenty-first-century
humans have to live with the incidental risks of new technologies – for example, ‘bioerror or bioterror’, rogue nanoreplicators, mishaps to nuclear power stations – and with the threat of rapidly rising global temperatures due to carbon emissions. So how do twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers and scientists address their sense of an ending?

Of course each generation is assailed by different collective fears and convictions, some validated by events, others not, some with a strong scientific basis, others religious or political. In his two brilliant studies
The Pursuit of the Millennium
and
Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come,
Norman Cohn traced the recurrence of ‘millenarian’ cults from the ancient world to the sixteenth century. More recently John Gray in
Black Mass
echoed Cohn’s observation that mid-twentieth-century movements like Communism and Nazism also counted on the coming death of the old order. A 1704 letter by Isaac Newton predicting, on skimpy biblical ‘evidence’, that the world would end in 2060, made news in the twenty-first century partly because it was put on show in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the February 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq when, as Stephen D. Snoblen has pointed out, apocalyptic fears were already rife. In the nineteenth century, British people’s fears of progress often focused on the building of the railways, seen as heralding social revolution, horrifying accidents, ‘pollution, destruction, disaster and danger’, as Ralph Harrington puts it in his article ‘The Neuroses of the Railway’; writers from Elizabeth Gaskell to Charles Dickens were excited by railway terrors; yet in the twenty-first century, we tend to see trains as a low-stress, less polluting alternative to planes and cars. Medical doomsday scenarios have proved equally hard to call: AIDS caused, and still causes, a terrible toll of deaths, but has not quite become the all-consuming plague that at one time seemed to threaten us, and nor, so far, have BSE or ‘Bird Flu’.

Some collective fears, though, have proved well founded. The 1930s in Europe were marked by fear of totalitarianism; in September 1939, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland. Other fears continue to stalk us. The cold war and the nuclear arms race brought the shadow of atomic Armageddon. The collapse of the Soviet Union moved it further away, but nuclear proliferation has continued and the famous clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is still, in 2009, set at five minutes to midnight. In the 1980s and 1990s, laymen got their first glimmer of the global warming that has grown into the pervasive dread of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the thing that most enduringly gives a shape to that vague terror of the end of the world that each generation carries with it from childhood. (‘Is it the end of the world?’ I asked my mother, aged seven, after the head teacher of our tiny village school told us, during the Suez Crisis, that ‘the next few days will decide whether or not the world will go to war’. ‘Is it the end of the world?’ my teenage daughter asked me, after the Twin Towers fell on 11 September 2001.)

We have just crossed the bar between two millennia and seen a swell of apocalyptic thinking, with the ‘Year 2K Bug’ cresting the wave. Nick
Davies’ book
Flat Earth News
points up the discrepancy between the chaos predicted to follow the digit-change in computers – ‘A date with disaster’,
Washington Post,
‘The day the world crashes’,
Newsweek
– and the actual events: a tide gauge failed in Portsmouth harbour, and a Swansea businessman thought his computer had blown up, only to discover that a mouse had spread droppings on his circuit board. Book titles of the 1990s and early 2000s predicted
The End of Faith, The End of Certainty
and
The End of History; The End of Food
(two books within two years, in 2006 by F. Pawlick, in 2008 by Paul Roberts),
The End of Oil and The End of Fashion,
followed by
The End of the Alphabet, The End of America
and
The End of Science,
and finally
The End of Days
and
The End of Time.