The Ark

For all the benefits of our international culture of consumerism, it hasn’t fostered the collective self-restraint we need to save ourselves. And no democratic party with serious ambitions of gaining office can offer its citizens the belt-tightening measures required for us to meet even tame UN environmental targets.

According to the International Energy Agency based in Paris, global coal consumption in 2022 eclipsed the previous record set in 2013. Towards the end of 2022, JP Morgan, the first big US bank to pledge to reduce oil and gas financing, cited the energy crisis for its failure to meet its self-imposed targets. Just before the start of the year, in Whitehaven, UK, coal mining resumed in a pit that had been closed 30 years ago. The pretext this time was UK Government concern about the harmful impact of the unforeseen Russian/Ukraine war on the cost of energy supplies to steel manufacturers.

It’ll be a tough task to keep straight-faced while trying to convince the two billion strong population of newly industrialising China and India, to slurp the UN anti-growth medicine that we’re gagging on. Responsible leaders should be preparing us for the high probability that as a species, we will eventually make the planet too inhospitable for us to continue in the way we’ve become used to.

And given this prognosis, they should start taking measures to ensure that the best of human achievements have a chance to live – at least in the minds of our successors.

The fragility of human civilisation

The materials on which we record our feelings, our thought, our music, and our movement are shockingly perishable without our attentions. As it stands, our successors on Earth will never hear a Prince guitar solo or enjoy Nabokov’s prose. The medium of film is so fragile that we struggle to restore movies from the 1940s. The paintings of the ages will crumble if the humidity of our galleries rise above 70% or below 40%. Whatever our view of what counts for classic literature, we access them easily only thanks to the printing industry and digital infrastructure. Even now, the original versions are tended by dedicated archivists without whose attentions they would be lost to us. Even steel corrodes at high humidity. And impressive as they now seem to our eyes - without maintenance, technological artefacts such as cars, skyscrapers and laptops will decompose beyond recognition within a few millennia. Without our attentions it would take less than half a century, for nature, in the form of trees and weeds to reclaim our cities. In their their 2018 paper, the Silurian Hypothesis, Frank and Schmidt set out in scary detail just how little of what would indicate space travel and our international connectedness will endure for more than a few centuries.

The question becomes, given the fragility of so much of what we take pride in as a species, what steps can we take to sustain aspects of it, so they live on in the minds of our successors?

An Ark of the Human Experience

The granite faces carved into Mount Rushmore are estimated to endure for about 2.5 million years. But what if we could curate not just more enduring but more edifying structures than just representations of the heads of past North American rulers? Because another probable outcome of environmental catastrophe on Earth is that pockets of humanity might continue to survive. And as they branch out and connect with each other, what if we can leave them warnings - as the Easter Islanders left us, of the dangers of trying to run a suicidal economy once again? What if the Ark of the Human Experience can become more than just a species vanity project but also a project with an altruistic purpose?

This construction and curation would involve significant investment in technologies that can help preserve aspects of the best of us. It’s a challenging task. And it’s already late.