The window of opportunity is open right now to make life multiplanetary.
We cannot count on it being open for a long time.
We need to take advantage while this window is open.898
Becoming Multiplanetary Is an Evolutionary-Scale Event
Deciding what is important through the lens of history is a good way to distinguish what seems important now from what is truly important over the long term.899
If we get to Mars and beyond, that will seem far more important in historical context than anything else we do. Things like the Soviet Union will be forgotten or merely remembered by arcane historical scholars. The invasion of Iraq won’t even be a footnote.900
If you zoom out and look at a long period of time—a four-billion-year history of Earth and the evolution of life itself—there are only about six major milestones. Single-celled life, multicellular life, the differentiation into plants and animals, the transition from ocean creatures to land mammals, and consciousness.
Life becoming multiplanetary also belongs on this list of milestones. It would be at least as important as life going from the oceans to land, probably more significant.901
The universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. In another 0.5 billion years the sun will expand and make life impossible on Earth. If it had taken consciousness 10 percent longer to evolve, it would never have evolved at all. Just 10 percent longer.
Any species that does not become multiplanetary is simply waiting around until their extinction event, either self-inflicted or external.902
The geological history of Earth is long and complicated. There have been many extinction events, not just a few. Read about the great extinction events in the fossil record. If you do, you’ll see there have been five major extinctions where 80 to 90 percent of all creatures on Earth died.
In the Permian Extinction, 90 to 95 percent of all species were destroyed. Frankly, that doesn’t tell the whole story because most of what remained were sponges, fungi, and things like that. Unless you were a mushroom or a cockroach, you died. Almost no large life survived the Permian Extinction.903
This doesn’t count the many cases where entire continents were destroyed. That happened a lot, but wouldn’t count as a major extinction. Yellowstone erupts every seven hundred thousand years or so. That would destroy pretty much all life in North America. At least we’ll see that one coming now, thanks to our current technology.904
Humans can cause our own extinction too; other creatures didn’t have that option.905
I’m a fan of Carl Sagan. He had a great way of putting things: “All of our consciousness, all our civilizations, everything we’ve ever known and done is on this one tiny blue dot.”
People get too trapped in their squabbles among humans. They don’t think of the big picture. They take civilization and our continued existence for granted. We shouldn’t do that. Look at the history of civilizations: they rise and they fall.
Now there’s no geographic isolation. Our civilization is globalized, so civilization rises and falls together. This is a big risk. This should be the most important lesson of history: Things don’t always go up.906
I’m fairly optimistic about the future of Earth. I don’t want people to have the wrong impression, like we’re all about to die. Things will most likely be okay for a long time on Earth. Most likely, but nothing is certain.907
When I talked to Stephen Hawking many years ago, he thought there was roughly a 1 percent chance of civilization ending in any given century. Even a 1 percent chance of consciousness ending is still too much. It’s worth spending a fair bit of effort to ensure we back up the biosphere, or build planetary redundancy. This is important. It’s like Russian roulette where ninety-nine barrels are empty. Every century is a click. Click, click, click. Eventually…908
Making life multiplanetary is one of the most important things we could accomplish. This will help preserve the light of consciousness.
The probability of consciousness existing for a long time becomes much greater if we’re on two independent planets. If something catastrophic happened to Earth, life would still exist on another planet.909
Say there was a giant meteor impact, a supervolcano, a massive nuclear war, or some super virus. It might not destroy human civilization, but it could knock us back to a much lower technology level, and then we risk a decline to our extinction.910
There are certain things we simply cannot avoid on Earth. Is it within your power or mine to stop World War III? I don't think so.911
We may get hit by a comet like the dinosaurs. If the dinosaurs had spaceships, they’d probably still be around. Even if we dodge all of that, the sun will continue to expand and eventually engulf Earth and destroy all life in the solar system.912
There’s a pretty substantial bifurcation in our future: We're either out there among the stars on many planets or confined to Earth until some eventual extinction.913
This is the first moment in 4.5 billion years that it has been possible to extend life beyond Earth.914