Climate change will doom humanity, and another planet can’t save us

“Man’s nature is attuned to an infinite, indestructible world. Earth has ceased to be such a world, and therein lies the great crisis of our time.” A fossil fuel plant here, a new data centre there. Despite extensive warnings from scientists, humanity shows no sign of slowing its resource usage, which looks set to boil our planet. 

This article explores a thesis I’ve been developing for years, but with concerns for our planet only growing greater, it seems timely to revisit it. I’ve long grappled with the essentiality of our planet to our very existence, and such existentialism has been a key part of The Boar Climate since its inception; one of the section’s first opinion articles details the death of indigenous lifestyles amid our contemporary environmental ignorance. While this all seems a bit philosophical, we’ve all considered, at some point or another (often while indulging in science fiction), the ‘life on another planet’ question, as our planet slowly becomes nought but cinders. To this question, there are myriad dimensions, whether technological, ecological, or spiritual, but what has always caught my interest is the idea that we, as a species, can’t survive on another planet. I don’t mean we couldn’t live under a different sky, but merely that Earth is so essential to our existence that we, humble Homo sapiens, can’t survive a climate-change-induced extraterrestrial imperative, at least on a cultural level.  

While that might be quite a far-fetched idea at first glance, to look forward, we must first turn back. Addressing what makes us Homo sapiens is a heavily contested question from all angles, but we can opt to look at what separates us from other pre-humans. Although it is a common misconception, modern humans are not descendants of Neanderthals, who were an entirely different species. Aside from a handful of acute biological differences, Neanderthals possessed an isolationist culture, a large part of why they failed to effectively adapt and thrive in their environment. Differingly, human culture is constructed primarily for our survival, in that it is a cross-generational set of social norms that define how we exist day-to-day, from our group-oriented disposition to our obsession with various forms of hierarchical organisation. These cultural habits have become so separate from the concept of survival in the modern world that it’s somewhat jarring to even grasp this, but when you look at societies that are more in touch with our ancestral ways, the light of the matter becomes overwhelmingly apparent.  

The Maldives has a rich oral folklore, used to warn of the sea, while encouraging fruitful fishing practices (see Romero-Frías’ The Maldive Islanders). The people of Tuvalu construct their social hierarchy and family identities based on who can grow the most food in their pulaka pit (pulaka being a staple root crop), given their perpetual state of food insecurity. These examples highlight how, despite our culture seeming distant from the flora and fauna that surround us, it is only because we have achieved such technical sophistication that it can transcend these roots like branches of a tree. But upon those roots, we still depend.  

So, we aren’t Neanderthals, and therefore are Homo sapiens, in large part because of our culture (though of course genealogy played a large role too), and that culture is the product of our environment (I’d recommend Heinrich’s ‘How Culture Made Us Uniquely Human’ for anyone interested). If what separates us from pre-humans is our culture, and the landscapes and animals of Earth have been intrinsic to that culture, then it is up in the air whether Mars-abiding humans would remain Homo sapiens as we are. If, facing the effective death of Earth, we transitioned all Homo sapiens onto Mars, there would undoubtedly be a cultural gap, particularly for the first natural-born Martians. While their way of life would not change so drastically that they would become biologically altered aliens, over time, it is undeniable that the experiences of life on Mars would greatly differ from those of Homo sapiens still on Earth. In turn, what we recognise as cultural humanity, whatever that means at the time we face this crisis, will become crudely blurred. This gap would only expand over time, and while they will never evolve to resemble extraterrestrial life, one could certainly posit that there would be two forms of humans in our galaxy on a cultural level.  

Assuming The Boar doesn’t get much circulation on the International Space Station, every reader of this article is currently on Earth, and without her, it is impossible to deny that we would be who we are. If there were a whole set of humans who shared little to no cultural similarities with you, there would, of course, be ambiguities, the result of entirely different lived experiences and only shared ancestors and genealogies. We already share these with people who live in other nations, and yet we constantly see wars between people who live across vague political barriers or continents apart. Now imagine the conflict between those who live worlds apart. The dividing lines would be numerous and deep, and when you start considering what would differentiate us rather than what would unite us, the case for our own cultural speciation becomes far more compelling. The optimist would claim humanity would get a fresh start, unburdened by our past mistakes, and yet the more convincing realist would suggest we’re only setting up the same wheels of resource exhaustion in motion again. We “can never predict what may happen when humans disturb a habitat they do not understand”, and that goes for us and the environment we find ourselves within. 

While resource wars and our AI obsession only seem to ramp up further and further, some have begun to question the technological and ethical implications of our habitation of another world. These questions constitute a form of reluctant acceptance of where we’re headed as a species, but they miss the point of what would really happen to humanity on the red planet, or any other. By treating Earth as just one home in a universe full of them, we disregard consequences as grave as the end of our cultural recognisability, and what it means to be human at all.