I was fortunate enough to listen to talk recently by the head of the World Resources Institute. He spoke very eloquently about climate change - the evidence, the perils, counter-acting policies. To be clear, I am not a climate change denier. I fully think that human-sourced actions have affected the planet's ecosystem; I have seen (some of) the evidence but I think that even without the evidence, it would be seriously difficult to believe that human-sourced actions have not impacted the Earth's environment in any way.
Where I was perhaps unconvinced by the World Resources Institute person (and by environmentalists, in general) is the notion that we must do steps A, B, C and we require global collective action D, E, F to "save the planet." To be completely pedantic, let's get something straight. We aren't "saving the planet." We are trying to extend the survival of the human race, which is essentially the evolutionary goal of all species. We just happen to be, on Earth at least, the most capable species in accomplishing that task (though, in fairness, we also happen to be the most capable species in obliterating one another). The planet is what it is; it will go on as it does till it is finally wiped out by the Sun going supernova.
Where I think the logic of environmentalists seems very short-sighted to me - despite the notion of their actions being meant to serve some long-term sustainable goal - is that that logic fails to consider that what they are really doing is extending the planet's capacity to be a home for humanity. Their entire logic falls apart if humanity can relocate to some other planet. And, somewhere down the line - hopefully in my lifetime - I do think that that is the way forward for humanity. We've only lived 2 million years as a species. The fricking dinosaurs lived for 165 million years. In the next 163 million years, it seems completely unconceivable to me that we would still be on Earth. If we are, then I think one of two things must be true. First, we have entirely failed as a species to generate interstellar travel. Second, we have found a way to let the planet renew itself and to replenish itself.
I think the second is really unlikely. Let's consider two cases - static and dynamic. In the static case, let's suppose the Earth has some level of resources A that can accommodate exactly N number of people. With global population growing exponentially - which it has - at some point, even if we assume no depletion of resources, that level of resources A will no longer be able to accommodate that N number of people in a given time frame. In the dynamic case, we do know that resources are depleting. At the same time, we do know that there is some scope of replenishment - oil, after all, comes from fossils - but the key is that the rate of replenishment must be larger than the rate of depletion for resources to be sustainable. Moreover, since population growth, which is exponential, hastens the rate of depletion, it is difficult to imagine how the rate of replenishment can ever be larger than the rate of depletion.
Moreover, this also does not take into account the fact that, across the world, people are getting richer. As more people move into middle-income levels, particularly the world's current poor, they will consume more. As they consume more, more resources will be used beyond just the resources required to sustain some subsistence level of existence. I am not convinced that all the measures recommended by the environmentalists will ever ensure that the depletion rate of resources becomes lower than the rate of replenishment.
On a side note, there is one form of policy which will go a long way in helping so sort out this problem. That policy is population control. We need two things - first, we need to kind of figure out, given the level of resources we have, what is the population size. Second, we need to seriously reduce population growth. These policies, though technically correct, are not politically supportable, for obvious reasons. More importantly, they are not, in my mind, morally permissible. People should be able to have as many children as they want (even if it does not make sense to do so) and we certainly should not, erm, "massage" the population numbers to get the optimal number.
So, given that population control - which is really, to my mind, the primary driver behind all of this - is out of the question, and that resources will eventually deplete, we're kind of left with one option if we are to survive as a species long after our resources deplete. We have to move. There are already "plans" for this - see Mars One (not sure how legitimate this is, of course). One could argue that the Earth is "special" in the sense that humanity's existence on it is unique and cannot be sustained elsewhere. While it is entirely possible that that is true, I just find it seriously unlikely. From what we know, there are trillions of stars in the universe. This implies that the probability of Earth being the only planet capable of hosting humanity is one in a trillion. I would not take those odds.
There's a great Arthur Clarke quote that I like, "Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." If we are indeed alone in the Universe which I think is supremely unlikely, then we are kind of screwed. We can last until our resources run out OR we find some cheap source of near-infinitely renewable energy. If we are not, then, to me, human settlement on other planets is inevitable (though this just delays the inevitable since everything ends and entropy is irreversible; for a great read on this, see Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question."). And even then, travelling to those other planets without some way to warp space and time to move faster than light (if it is at all possible) will take ages upon ages. We might not be able to survive that trip (see Christoper Pike's "The Tachyon Web" for an illustration of this) and even if we do arrive at some targeted destination (let's assume we got the measurement right and prepared enough supplies to get there), it may turn out that the planet is not hospitable to human life. And, as early pioneers across the globe know, settling down in a new location is not always a guarantee that life will be great (disease environment, hostile natives, brutal weather conditions etc).
On Earth, if it makes no sense for us to be at a certain place anymore, what do we do? We move. We could try to conserve that place and sustain it, but ultimately, either the population in that place falls to a level that becomes self-sustaining (because everyone migrates out) - it may even be a ghost town (Interesting thought - we know there are ghost towns around the world and ghost cities, even; what if there are ghost nations? Or rather, nations that should be ghost nations that aren't because people cannot migrate easily across borders?). But the point is, we either move or we hope population goes down. In the case of the survival of humanity, we will therefore have to move or a sizable chunk of the population has to move. But where will they go? I certainly am opposed to any form of genocide; they will have to move somewhere else. That somewhere else is in the stars. I truly believe that it is inevitable. Environmentalists just extend the lifespan of the earth to house humanity; they do not make that lifespan infinite. When it ends, we will have to move somewhere else and should technology fail to gives us that capacity to move by then, let's at least hope that we can match even a sizable proportion of the 165 million years in which dinosaurs existed.
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