We are nothing
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| Aurora Borealis, by Frederic Edwin Church |
How long do you suppose the cosmos will preserve traces of our existence? By now, we've all heard some version of a thought that goes somewhat like this: for most of us, at some moment within the years following our deaths, someone will think of us for the last time, and then all recollection that we ever existed will vanish. It's something we accept as part of the deal, unless you're someone like Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Jesus or the Buddha. But when we take into account geological time, the memory of even these remarkable individuals has existed for a very short time. In cosmological time, it gets even worse. They are as well known to the universe as a homeless man we might have once seen as a kid.
We might think that, collectively, even if human kind disappeared now, our constructions will remain for an incredibly long time. After all, we see ruins of ancient civilizations everywhere. However, that's not so. We live in a geologically active planet. Most of the Earth's exposed surface is from less than 2.5 million years ago. The crust recycles itself almost completely every 500 million years. Scientists are incredibly lucky to find older formations to analyze dead rock, let alone traces of fossils. And speaking of fossils, fossilization is very rare since it occurs only under specific conditions. It is estimated that less than 0.1% of all species were able to leave a mark on the fossil record.
Not only that, but not every biome is suitable for fossilization. For instance, dense forests of the past left almost nothing. Meanwhile, over 99% of all fossils scientists found were of marine species. And while they fossilized hundreds of millions of years ago at the bottom of ancient oceans, many are found on some of our highest mountains, precisely because the surface of our planet is in constant motion. We might not notice it due to our short life spans, but given 2 to 5 million years, most of the surface is completely changed. Think of the T-Rex. It is estimated that they existed on our planet for 1.2 to 3.6 million years, and that around 2.5 billion individual T-Rexes lived during this period. But fewer than 100 individual T-Rex fossils have been found.
Our species, the homo sapiens, is way more successful. It is estimated that around 100 billion homo sapiens have existed in the last 200,000 years. Yet, the older the remains are, the rarer they are, not only because they are well hidden, but because even the bones disappeared, grinded into dust by both the organic and inorganic processes that occur on the surface of the Earth. Even our modern constructions won't last. Urban areas cover only about 3% of the Earth's surface, and if we went extinct tomorrow, after a couple of million years, the geological processes would wipe most, if not all traces that we ever existed.
In 2018, astrophysicists Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt published a paper which questioned: if there was a long lost civilization that once lived on a planet millions of years prior, how could we discover it since in all likelihood all visible traces of its existence would be long gone? Applying the question to our own planet, they analyzed a certain period, 55 million years ago, that left a mark on geological records indicating that temperatures rose abnormally due to the release of greenhouse gases—a process not dissimilar to our own temperature increase due to industrial activity. They point to the fact that there were already enough fossil fuels buried under the surface to power an industrial civilization for at least 300 million years, and this short period happened “only” 55 million years ago.
Frank and Gavin themselves discard the possibility that a non-human industrial civilization existed at the time. They attribute the anomalous rise in temperature to something else. It could have been volcanic activity, or a sudden release of oceanic methane, or even some unknown natural phenomenon that triggered the massive burn of buried fossil fuels. The problem is: we can never know what really happened. There could very well have been another intelligent species that left that mark, but without further evidence, we can't know for sure. Maybe a future intelligent species can find out there were intelligent creatures on Earth if we leave enough plastic on the surface that geological records will show a layer of this synthetic material, together with rising temperatures. Maybe. But lets say we died out during medieval times. Then no traces of us would exist in 5 to 10 million years.
If an intelligent species existed millions of years ago on this or any other planet, but they lived in a more eco-friendly manner, no traces of their presence would be found, ever. But the same will occur with us, even if we leave tons of plastic around, even if we trigger mass extinctions. Maybe these catastrophic events will remain for tens of millions of years in the geological record, but even that stuff eventually fades. Given enough time, nothing lasts. Worse yet, our Sun will eventually expand due to its lifecycle. And while the Sun won't die out for some 5 billion years, its expansion will cook the Earth's surface in around a billion years. Even before that, the brightness will have increase so much our oceans will have boiled.
Techno-utopians of all kinds, from pro-capitalism billionaire grifters to socialistic trekkies, believe we can maybe avert destruction by colonizing space. First we colonize our solar system, then the galaxy, and maybe other galaxies, if we climb high enough on the Kardashev scale of energy consumption and manipulation. That of course, will likely require the aid of faster-than-light technology. But any FTL technology inherently produces causality paradoxes, regardless of it being based on a “space-time warp” type of technology, like an Alcubierre drive, or some other method. However, assuming that causality paradoxes aren't a problem—which they are, but let's pretend they aren't—, 94% of the currently observable universe is beyond our reach due to its expansion, even if travel FTL. If there are any astronomers around in a few billion years in the Milky Way, all they will see are the stars in our own galaxy and a few galaxies which make up our local group. The rest of the sky will be total darkness.
And at some point, all of the stars in our local group and in the Milky Way will die out, too. No energy will be available to perform work. Entropy will have won. So, in the grand scheme of things, it's a folly to want to continue forever. Or to think we matter other than to a few people. From the homeless man you once saw on the street to Jesus Christ, we're nothing in the grand scheme of things. Only a few people on this God-forsaken planet will know we ever existed. And those people will also be forgotten. Eventually, everyone will die, humanity will go extinct like the vast majority of organisms have. A little further down the road, all Earthly life will cease to exist. The entire biosphere will be wiped out even before this rock is consumed by our dying star. Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Jesus and the Buddha will have been long forgotten by then. Our sadness and our joys, the struggle of insects trying to survive in the brutality of nature—all of it is just a sad prelude to oblivion.
by Fernando Olszewski
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