There's nothing better than Planet Earth 03 July 06

We're all going to die. Horribly. If a stray asteroid doesn't get us, rampaging nanobots will quickly turn the planet into grey goo. That's without even mentioning supervolcanoes, global warming or the coming nuclear winter. As the celebrated astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said at a lecture on 15 June, the survival of humanity now depends on its ability to find new homes far away from this blighted disaster area of a planet.

“It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” Hawking told a packed lecture hall at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Life on earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

This sense of imminent catastrophe is heightened by a flurry of recent books. To the Royal Society president, Martin Rees, this could be Our Final Century. He ranks bio-engineered viruses as the greatest threat, closely followed by asteroids, nanotech and nukes. James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia, which focuses more specifically on climate change, envisages a world where the bedraggled remains of humanity huddle in sub-polar refuges as global temperatures soar.

The books on peak oil – The Party’s Over by Rich ard Heinberg and The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler are two of the best examples – compound this sense of gloomy fatalism. The most recent addition to the list is Fred Pearce’s The Last Generation, though the author admits a little sheepishly at the end that the title refers to the stability of the climate rather than the imminent extinction of humanity. Fair enough, but not quite what it said on the tin.

I worry that something is going wrong in our collective perception of risk. Highly unlikely scenarios – the asteroid and rampaging nanobots – are conflated with highly likely ones – global warming and peak oil – as if they were much the same thing.

The result is a paralysing anxiety, where our obsession with unreal threats seems to blind us to the real ones. It is rather like the constant middle-class campaigns against mobile-phone masts in residential areas: not only is there no con vincing evidence that masts are dangerous, but far more serious threats to communities (new roads and supermarkets, for example) often raise barely a murmur of protest.

I worry, too, that some of us environmentalists are guilty of a kind of subconscious millenarianism. There seems to be something about the human condition which makes us want to feel special: the last generation, as it were. Millenarian movements are nothing new – throughout history wise men have prophesied the coming “end times”.

Once it was the imminent arrival of the Day of Judgement which made us feel that the end was nigh; now it is the destruction of the planetary environment.

So is there any way to rank risks rationally? The Australian academic Mark Leggett has attempted to do just this in an upcoming paper for the journal Futures. He methodically considers each risk in turn, from an avian influenza pandemic to a global-warming-sparked oceanic release of methane hydrate. Far from being scary, his conclusion is rather upbeat: mitigation of all the worst risks is not only doable technically but affordable economically – costing in total $67trn, about 2.2 per cent of gross world product per year. By contrast, US expenditure on the Second World War in 1944 was 35 per cent of GNP.

As for Stephen Hawking, I’d like to recommend him some further reading – a classic of 1970s literature by a writer called Michael Foreman. In the story, a man is obsessed with visiting a faraway star, and trashes the earth in order to build a rocket. Once there, he finds nothing but desolate rock.

Back on earth, however, dinosaurs re-emerge and clear up the mess, breaking up the factories and letting plants grow again. When the man returns, he wonders at this new planet’s marvellous beauty. The dinosaurs let him stay, but only if he repents and agrees to share it with all life.

The lesson is obvious but all too easily forgotten: Planet Earth is the best there is, and we had better treat it well. Dreaming up human colonies on distant stars is nothing but folly. Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish is a children’s book, of course, but I can’t imagine a wiser message in these desperate times.

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)