Humanity Crisis: There's No Escape from Nature

Contemporary crises - from nuclear over armament to the degradation of the biosphere - highlight the potentially absurd character of cosmic evolution. The essence of this drama can be described in three phases: 1) Nature generates complexity; 2) complexity generates efficiency; 3) efficiency threatens the future of complexity.

There are 6.6 billion humans on the planet. Demographers predict that in les than a century the population will reach and peak at 10 billion individuals. This raises a crucial question: can our resource-finite planet serve 10 billion people without suffering irreparable damage? The answer to this question is writing nowhere. It depends on us.

Shuman beings possess prodigious intellectual faculties. They have split atoms, explored the solar systems and probed the first instants of the universe. The task they now face is incomparably more difficult. Our ancestors were never confronted by this crisis. The onus is on our generation, and on those that follow, to face and resolve this awesome challenge or to disappear, for nature makes no concessions. No species is sacred. Those that fail to establish a harmonious relationship with the biosphere ate destined to rapidly die out.

The marvellous achievements of modern technology have grown in the context of biological evolution. Living creatures have developed behavioural patterns to survive in a hostile environment. The advent of the human species has raised these techniques to a formidable and problematic degree of efficiency. The history of life on earth, from the first cells to large mammals, is to our knowledge the most advanced phase of the growth of complexity. Beginning with the dissociated state prevailing at the tremendous temperatures of the Big Bang, cosmic matter progressively organized itself to form - on a small scale - nucleons, atomic nuclei, atoms, then molecules, and - on a large scale - galaxies, stars and planets. On Earth we see a further stage of complexity: animals and plants.

The various crises faced by humans through the recent decades call into question the very viability of this complexity. Seen from the distant star Sirius, would the end of life on our planet matter at all? A nuclear war would not even be visible from Jupiter. Why make such fuss? The significance of the possible failure of complexity transcends our local perspective, bearing implications of cosmic dimensions. If, as many believe, life exists on other planets and living creatures have evolved and adapted, it is highly likely that intelligence and technology have developed on Earth.

Under these circumstances, crises analogues to ours have or will occur, jeopardising the very future of complexity there. A galactic voyage would reveal one of two distinct realities: living green planets harbouring beings that have resolved the crises, or dead planets covered toxic or radioactive debris where they have not. It is from this perspective that the evolution of life on Earth takes on a truly cosmic significance.