Cosmic Contemplation of a Planetary Catastrophe

I am really interested in how having a relationship with the night sky, whether that is just from looking out at the stars, or by having in depth knowledge of astronomy can change our perception of the cosmic significance of the climate crisis.

I asked a selection of international astronomers or people who work with the night skies the question below. This project is ongoing and more replies will be added to this page as I receive them.

How does your knowledge of astronomy, the age of the Earth, the age of the universe and the rarity of life (as far as we know so far) frame your understanding of the climate crisis? Do you think about the significance of the climate crisis from a cosmic perspective?

Professor Roberto Trotta
Roberto Trotta is professor of Astrostatistics at Imperial College London, currently on leave of  absence to the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste,  Italy, where he is heading a new research group in Theoretical and  Scientific Data Science. He is also a visiting professor of cosmology at Gresham College, London. His research focuses on cosmology, machine learning and data science.  An award-winning author and science communicator, he is the recipient of the Annie Maunder Medal 2020 of the Royal Astronomical Society for his public engagement work.

The future of life on Earth 

This is an excerpt from Prof. Roberto Trotta’s lecture that will take place at Gresham College London at 1pm on May 9th, 2022. Tickets (both in person and streaming) are free and can be booked at this link.

In searching for the most imminent and present danger to life on Earth, threats from space – as dramatized in many a Hollywood movie – often come to mind: asteroid strikes, supernova explosions, rogue comets, solar flares, and even the stability of empty space itself lurk in the darkness out there. But the real risk to life on our planet doesn’t stem from Newtonian orbits, nor from stellar evolution physics, nor from exotic quantum field theory calculations of Higgs vacuum stability. It is sufficient for each of us to look into a mirror: the gravest danger to the future of life on our planet it’s not out there; it’s in here. It’s us.  

Mastering our own technology and ensuring that the almost god-like powers it confers serve all humankind, and all life on our planet, is never been our strong suite, it appears: 

What the inventive genius of mankind as bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life care -free and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances… As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year old child.

These words, written by Albert Einstein ahead of the 1932 disarmament conference, are even more poignant today than they were 90 years ago – words Einstein surely pondered later in life, after the devastation brought about in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the nuclear weapons he played a crucial role in creating – something he regretted his whole life. 

In the meantime, humans have swarmed the Earth – there are close to 8 billion of us, and thanks to science and technology we lengthened our lifespan, wiped out diseases, reduced infant mortality and, for a minority of us, created a world where our almost every material whim can be satisfied at will – in a 2-hours, same-day delivery window. But the price we will pay is enormous: 40% of our world’s land is now degraded, according to a recent UN report: deforestation continues unabated, destroying irreplaceable ancient forests, while intensive farming creates salinisation, soil exhaustion, erosion. The havoc that the naked ape is wrecking on the planet is striking from space: our beautiful, blue planet is scarred in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. On land, we have tilted the balance of large animals to suit our needs: farmed animals outweigh wild mammals and birds by a staggering 10 to 1. The oceans, which once seemed an inexhaustible resource, are over-exploited. After the forest and the oceans, we are now encroaching into the last remaining natural resource: space. The uncontrolled proliferation of low-Earth orbit satellites, linked in megaconstellations aiming to provide high-speed internet connection all over the globe, is creating an overcrowding that multiplies the risk of a chain reaction of collisions, which would fill low-Earth orbit with debris and potentially prevent future access to space.

In the face of the human-induced existential threat to life on Earth, some are arguing that it is time for us to flee to the stars – to build a modern-era Noah’s Ark, not out of wood on a mountaintop, but out of steel and riding on top of a rocket, to ensure survival of the human race against the metaphorical and actual flood that is coming. The idea is not new, and had been championed by the planetary scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan already, who saw it as an “insurance policy” against the not-unreasonable risk that we end up wiping ourselves out – a danger that has perhaps never been more sharply defined than today, with a tragic war raging in Europe once again. He wrote: “If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.”  

Efforts to colonize the solar system to escape dangers on Earth are both practically and ethically misguided. Insofar as Sagan’s argument goes, I would counter that when your car starts skidding during an overtake manoeuvre on the highway, it is not the right time to call a life insurance broker – it’s the time to focus all of your efforts on regaining control of the vehicle and stave off the worst for all its passengers. Ethically, it deflects attention from the real issues by offering a false hope of salvation. 

Our survey of the condition of life on Earth, and of the dangers that threaten it in the 21st century, leads to a simple conclusion. The future of life on our planet will be determined not by astrophysical phenomena in the next hundreds of thousands or millions of years, but by human decisions we will take in the coming few months and years: can we avoid nuclear incineration and a catastrophic ecological collapse? 

While you have been following this lecture, the Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has silently traversed another 60,000 km of almost empty darkness in the outskirts of our solar system. Among the sounds, pictures and greetings on the Golden Record aboard Voyager, is a message by the then US president, Jimmy Carter. Written in 1977, Carter’s words ring with greater urgency today: 

“Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Whether or not we believe that we will one day join a “community of galactic civilizations”, it is our urgent task today to halt the mindless march of the megamachine; to repurpose its planetary power so it may serve the needs of all life on Earth; to fortify our hope and our determination not merely to survive our time, but to create a new time, free of the dangers we are inflicting upon our planet, and upon ourselves. 

Should anybody come looking for Earth in a distant future, will they find a desolate planet, a cosmic tombstone marking the failed promise of the naked ape? Or will they marvel from the orbit of Jupiter at our beautiful blue dot, sparkling delicate and majestic against the darkness of space? Our actions today will determine not whether we can be “good ancestors” (as Jonas Salk once intimated), but whether we may become ancestors at all. We cannot afford to fail.

www.robertotrotta.com @R_Trotta

Beatriz Garcia
PhD in Astronomy, Member of Pierre Auger Observator and QUBIC Collaborations

Astronomers are always “accused” of seeing everything from a cosmological point of view and that this vision of nature is a defect of formation. However, it is difficult when one knows the Universe even in a partial way to stop interpreting everything within that framework. Lately what worries me the most is the lack of knowledge of the people, what we could call scientific culture, regarding issues related to its origin, its evolution, its future... in the sea of false news, some of them catastrophic: “Tomorrow an asteroid can impact the Earth...everything can end and no one is responsible”...”don't worry about what you do...the Earth will disappear even if you take care of it”, some of them simple and related with quick salvation: “There is an exoplanet that is the same as the Earth...let's pack the suitcase!” , behind all that there is a contempt for the universe itself.

Life is something precious, which appears at the end of an evolutionary chain that took about 14 billion years (yes! the life of the universe), which may exist in other places, but we still do not know it; what is real, is that in the third planet in order of distance from a star called the Sun...there is life and this is the only possible world for life as we know, from unicellular to the most complex beings, those that even manipulate matter by the one that took those 14000 million years to be able to replicate. Climate change is a central issue that did not begin in the 21st century, of course, but for which we human beings in this century bear absolute responsibility. Are we really willing for something as significant for the universe as life to be extinguished because we simply don't care about anything? It is probably difficult to reverse some processes, the catalytic power of men and women to accelerate some natural processes and introduce unsolvable problems is enormous... however, I like to think that we are in time to slow down at least the inexorable line of time stopping the soil, air and water contamination, using a a more rational way the energy, consuming just what we really need, assuring the good distribution of the resources, educating the citizens to protect the environment, following the scientific recommendations, and this leads me to remember a great phrase of probably the most famous Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, which is very appropriate for closing: "The future is not what is going to happen, but what we are going to do".

Georgia MacMillan
Mayo Dark Sky Park Development Officer/IRC Employment Based PhD Scholar in partnership with NPWS and NUI Galway

When we talk about the Mayo Dark Sky project to new communities, we like to highlight why dark skies are important to everyone regardless of whether they are interested in astronomy or not. However, to illustrate this I often find myself referring to the description of earth in space as the "Pale Blue Dot" as coined by Carl Sagan in his wonderful quote describing the Voyager 1 space probe photo. It portrays the fragility of earth and how insignificant we are, yet how amazing this little dot is to host our 7bn population and support us in the goldilocks zone of the solar system. So I think that without a little knowledge and interest in astronomy, I may not have considered the context of where we are in space and how small we are in the cosmos.... and how insignificant our time here on this little planet is.

Andy Lawrence
Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and author of Losing The Sky

The Galaxy could be teeming with life - we just don't know. But in our own solar system, the Earth stands alone as a precious jewel. It makes me feel humble. If we destroy our environment, the Earth will recover, but humanity will not. We won't be here to enjoy it. The fragility of our environment has also made me think more carefully about the way we are cluttering and polluting the orbital space around the Earth - I am trying to campaign to treat space as a precious environment, just like the land and the oceans and the air.

Paul Sutherland
Science journalist and author of the Philip’s Essential Guide to Space and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society

All the science clearly demonstrates that Earth faces a climate crisis. But too many people seem to take so much for granted, believing that everything will be all right and problems will sort themselves out. My most powerful reminder that our atmosphere is fragile came around ten years ago when I visited ALMA, the highest observatory in the world, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, at an altitude of more than 5,000 meters, which is around half the height that airliners cruise. To make that ascent, I had to have a health check before leaving the UK, and again on the day of the visit. The air was significantly thinner, leaving one feeling disoriented, and we carried little cans of oxygen in case we needed them. Having discovered for myself just how shallow and precious our atmosphere is, I now look on with amazement when I see motorists leaving their car engines running while stationary.

On a larger scale, though astronomers are now discovering that planets are commonplace around stars, our own Earth is still the only planet on which we know life, and particularly intelligent life, to exist. It is possible that we are unique. 

On a cosmic scale, the Earth is small and vulnerable. This was powerfully indicated by a photo taken by NASA's Voyager 1 space probe when it was flying between Saturn and Uranus in February 1990. The craft was commanded to look back and photograph the inner Solar System. The resulting images showed our Earth as a point of light, less than a pixel across, suspended in the vastness of space. The noted astronomy populariser Carl Sagan, famous for his TV series Cosmos, called it the Pale Blue Dot. 

In a book of the same name, Sagan later wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."