I do enjoy perusing lists of upcoming books. This time round, my eye was caught by the number of books about humans fleeing a dead or dying Earth. This is, of course, nothing new. Humans have been fleeing a dead or dying Earth since Cole Hendron’s fleet set off for Bronson B1. Perhaps before.
While Cole was quite correct to be concerned about the effects of a gas giant slamming into Earth, many of the other “doomed Earth” stories feature considerably smaller scale events. Of particular note to me, those driven by human folly: If humans aren’t reducing Earth to a radiation-soaked sterile wasteland, they’re triggering runaway greenhouse gas crises. I think we all can agree that humans are crappy planetary caretakers, forever finding another rake on which to step. I do not, however, think we’re up to killing Earth.
It’s obvious that writers cannot believe in all the contrivances around which they construct their stories. The point is to tell an entertaining story. We’re all happy reading about bold captains in their faster-than-light starships, even though there’s no evidence FTL is possible and lots of evidence that it’s not. Nevertheless, whenever I see a book in which humans flee an Earth dead or dying at human hands, I wonder2 if the authors are familiar with some of the previous events that failed to expunge all life on Earth3.
Take nuclear war. There are about 12,000 nuclear warheads on Earth. A total war involving nukes would be less than entirely wonderful, Jim and Hilda Blogg’s sunny expectations to the contrary4. Small wonder that some authors have suggested nuclear war could be the end of all life on Earth. They may have hoped to dissuade nations from pushing the button, or they may just have wanted to provide a compelling reason for their characters to decamp elsewhere.
However, there was in the recent past5 an event beside which our pitiful weapons of mass destruction pale into insignificance. A ten-kilometer diameter6 asteroid slammed into the Earth with an impact energy roughly ten thousand times that of our nuclear arsenals. The event was ultra-violent. The shockwave killed animals three thousand kilometers from the impact at Chicxulub. The combination of the immediate and the secondary effects (exacerbated by the geology of the impact site and possibly other factors as well) doomed three quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth.
Estimates vary on how long it took for life to regain its pre-impact diversity (this paper suggests it was about two million years) and of course even when it did recover, many lineages had been completely expunged. Knowing the mammals and birds would do A-OK would have been cold comfort to a T. Rex as it evaporated from the heat of the incoming bolide. The important thing to remember, here, is that an impact many orders of magnitude greater than the combined nuclear arsenals of Earth did not succeed in sterilizing the planet.
Climate change (and anthropogenic ecological collapse in general) is another popular driver for a dead or dying Earth in SF. Again, there are lots of reasons why we might not want to dramatically alter the conditions on which necessities like agriculture depend. Moreover, suggesting that climate change could end all life on Earth might convince people to mitigate climate change. From a plot POV, an Earth on its way to become an abiotic pressure-cooker is an excellent reason to march into our starships and migrate to some other planet (which we are likely to trash in its turn).
Again, Earth’s history suggests that dooming all life on Earth via climate change is probably beyond our current means. Take the end-Permian extinction, for example. It appears to have been driven by the formation of the Siberian Traps, a two-million-year eruption literally the size of Siberia. Side effects included increasing atmospheric CO2 from 400 ppm (roughly the current value) to 2,500 ppm and acidifying and anoxifying oceans while increasing global temperatures by ten degrees. Equatorial oceans may have reached 40o C. Not only were 80% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species expunged, just under 60% of biological families vanished.
“Apocalyptic” is not an understatement. No surprise that books about the Permian-Triassic Extinction have titles like When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time and Extinction: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago. However, life as a whole survived! Granted, knowing that an entirely new constellation of species dominated Earth ten million years down the road wouldn’t bring much joy to a Siberian gorgonopsid wondering why the land had suddenly become a sea of lava.
A few novels have turned to runaway replicators to drive humans off-planet: nanotech, von Neumann machines, and the like. This is an effective motivator. Most people would likely decline to be disassembled down to the molecular level and reassembled into a relentlessly replicating machine, if only because that it would probably sting a bit.
Even here, there is precedent in the geological record. Photosynthesizing plants transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, filling it with plentiful oxygen. For anaerobes, the Great Oxygenation Event was as beneficial as having all of the Earth’s water transformed into bleach would be for us. The GOE might have temporarily shrunk the living biosphere by as much as 80%. The much later Neoproterozoic Oxygenation Event may have played a role triggering a “Snowball Earth” event, also not entirely desirable.
But life survived! It even flourished!
Now, I am certainly not saying that humans couldn’t have a significantly negative impact on the Earth or that we won’t end up part of an anomalous sedimentary layer sooner rather than later. In fact, it would a bit surprising if the first terrestrial species to command weapons of mass destruction and other potentially calamitous technologies also happened to possess the right combination of cognitive traits to survive commanding weapons of mass destruction and other potentially calamitous technologies. Maybe we’ll end up as shadows on a scorched wall, or perhaps we will be the Anthropocene’s analog to lystrosaurus7. Whatever happens to us, Earth will be fine, and after a few million years of recovery, so will life. Indeed, given the general trend of increasing encephalization quotients, it would not be surprising if entities as bright as we are and equally capable of shaping the world evolved again and again and again, before becoming part of their own individual anomalous sedimentary layers.
I understand that this may not be the upbeat moral you might like. It is the upbeat moral you’re going to get. There are worse fates than crawling so that the intelligent racoons of one million CE could walk and the hyper-evolved land-squid of five hundred million CE could fly.
- When Worlds Collide is a classic SF novel (1933) and a classic SF film (1951).
- I also wonder if a calamity serious enough to end life on Earth will allow us to relocate to another planet. If a simple pandemic can upend supply chains, what will nuclear war ecological collapse do?
- Obligatory survivorship bias acknowledgement: for me to write this, life on Earth had to survive until at least September 2024. Not a lot of essays on the resilience of life coming from essayists on Mars or Venus.
- I’m referring to the film When The Wind Blows, another classic downer movie. A recent paper suggested that a Pakistan-India exchange could kill two billion people, while a US-Russian exchange could kill five billion people. Well worth avoiding, especially for those two to five billion casualties. One cannot help but notice that even the worst-case scenario leaves three billion humans alive, more than were alive before 1960. That said, it would really suck to have a nuclear war and discover the paper underestimated the casualties by a factor of two.
- Geologically speaking, that is. The Earth was 98.5% of its current age sixty-six million years ago.
- For the metric averse, ten kilometers is roughly as long as one hundred thousand toupees set end to end.
- Lystrosaurus was a genus of herbivorous dicynodont therapsids. They looked like the sort of mammal a slacker God would create after a six-day bender, just barely in time for a pressing deadline. Lystrosaurus flourished after the Permian-Triassic Extinction, in some regions comprising 95% of land vertebrates. And then they went extinct without issue.
In “Earth” by Brin the protagonist discovers that someone dropped a singularity on the Earth and it’s slowly eating away at the planet. Other than that I can’t recall any stories where the planet was left completely lifeless or completely destroyed.
The gamma ray burster that destroys all life on earth in Robert Charles Wilson’s ‘Divided By Infinity’? Or, the complete destruction of Earth in Bear’s ‘The Forge of God’ (neutronium/anti-neutronium bullets at the core + H-bombs along the ocean trenches)? I’m sure that there are many more.
Ah, ignore that. I see it was meant to be humans killing the planet, not aliens.
WALL-E says ‘hello’, although it’s a major plot point that it isn’t *completely* lifeless.
cf an early Niven story (possibly “Wrong-Way Street”) in which somebody time-traveling a long way back accidentally lets loose a black hole on the Moon; without its influence, the present-day Earth he returns to is similar to Venus. (This was in accordance with a theory over half a century ago; I don’t know how seriously it was taken even then, and IIRC it has been thoroughly debunked since.)
I just checked. Yes, that’s the right story, though the device makes matter disappear, rather than being a black hole. I’m not sure that a black hole formed from a large moon would behave much differently from the large moon itself, in terms of that theory.
In a recent re-read of Niven’s early fiction, I noticed that this theory – basically that only planets with large moons could develop Earth-like atmospheres / environments- showed up in several stories. I’ve also no idea of how seriously or widely the theory was held, but Niven certainly latched onto it for quite a while.
Asimov also uses it in Foundation as the reason why humans are the only intelligent life in his universe. Big moons are rare, apparently, and technobabble technobabble something about radiation.
IIRC, Asimov posited that a. the Moon acts as a shield against meteor impacts and b. through tidal action was responsible for the concentrations of heavy metals, incl. radioactive ones, in Earth’s crust, and without that specific combination of protection and radiation life could neither get established nor complexify.
Some early H. G. Wells:
I think the sun goes out at the end of “The Time Machine” (spoiler?)
In “The War of the Worlds”, Mars is unlivable enough for some of its inhabitants to head for Earth. I think at least some editions of the book foresee a time when surviving Earthmen (spoiler?) will have to consider leaving for Venus as the Sun continues to cool down. Unfortunately it looks like the Martians got there first.
“The Star” described a rogue “star” entering the Solar System and plopping into Sol with no discernible effect, after a hot planetary close encounter also having no very significant effect in the opinion of astronomers living on Mars, since the planet that the close encounter was with is the Earth.
I could write a whole essay about dead and dying Earths.
you haven’t yet?
The Earth Doth Like A Snake Renew
“GEO” mentioned right after the Great Oxygenation Event smells like a typo.
Fixed, thanks!
Charles Stross’s Saturn’s Children featured an Earth lost to the greenhouse effect as a result of human neglect. The robots who inherited the Solar System hadn’t bothered to try reversing this, as the humans were all gone anyway.
there is also Stross’s Accelerando — human created AI/nanotech turning the Solar system into a Matrioshka brain
Realistically, the only event that could wipe out Earth is the death of the Sun, when it becomes an expanding red giant. I don’t recall any SF that deal with this inevitable (but billions of years in the future) scenario.
H.G. Wells got there pretty early with “The Time Machine”.
Anyone with a time machine would have no trouble getting there early.
Probably long before the red giant thing, the slightly warming Sun will reach the point of evaporating all the water on Earth, which is theoretically inconvenient for life-forms that are chiefly made of water. I believe I’ve seen it put at 1 billion years from now, which I take as an estimate to the nearest 1.
also consider the possibility of a gamma-ray burst –
Not from the Sun of course. And otherwise – won’t it roast only one side of the planet?
If a gamma-ray burst cooked one side of the planet, it would superheat or boil off its air and water, which would have pretty devastating effects on the other side of the planet. At the very least, it would burn up half the ozone layer and create huge amounts of toxic nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, and generate huge fires whose smoke and ashes would spread around the world. It’s all connected.
I’ve also heard the 1-billion-year estimate. Of course, Earth getting too hot might also mean that Mars gets warm enough to migrate to, though that would be a stopgap on a gigayear scale.
Larry Niven’s World Out of Time has this as a plot point. Also Tchaikovsky’s Cage of Souls, although it’s implied that the start of the red giant phase was accelerated by human experimentation.
In Spin (Robert Charles Wilson) the Earth is slow-timed by a factor of 100 million, leaving just a few decades of physiotime until toast.
The Earth doesn’t have to be lifeless for it to no longer be habitable by humans/capable of sustaining agriculture/other circumstances that might lead people to decide to look elsewhere for living space, particularly if someone has invented FTL or an STL drive that can get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time, and especially if some more pleasant biosphere is known to exist somewhere.
“I also wonder if a calamity serious enough to end life on Earth will allow us to relocate to another planet. If a simple pandemic can upend supply chains, what will nuclear war ecological collapse do”
It’s not uncommon for the space/interstellar colonies to have happened first, before the disaster became irrevocable, sometimes with a spate of last-ditch refugees right before it’s too late, whatever that means.
“One cannot help but notice that even the worst-case scenario leaves three billion humans alive, more than were alive before 1960.”
Of course, that’s just the casualties of the actual nukes. The accompanying disruption of infrastructure and supply chains will do for more people, through disease, starvation, fighting over local resources when external resupply is no longer available, etc. That still probably won’t kill everyone, but in the end there might be a lot fewer people than that left.
As soon as I saw the headline I was reminded of this glorious page: https://qntm.org/destroy It starts with the sentence “Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.” and proceeds to examine in painstaking detail a number of methods that might be adopted by “those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore”.
Greg Bear’s Forge of God did see Earth quite effectively destroyed, but it did take some rather unpleasant aliens.
Yep. Although I enjoyed it, most of the book is about the how the aliens distracted humanity. Which was unnecessary – their tech was so advanced there was nothing anyone could have done about it. Hope that wasn’t too much of a spoiler.
There’s an article in a recent issue of Utopia magazine about how much energy it would take to actually destroy the Earth
https://www.utopiasciencefiction.com/product-page/june-july-2024
It’s a lot…
In the first scene in Some Desperate Glory we learn that Earth was destroyed by an anti-matter bomb. Let’s take it that the planet was not completely destroyed. It still was very bad. If someone wants to do the math and figure out just how bad it had to be, I guess you can do that.
Depends greatly on how big the antimatter bomb is
A very final sort of destruction would be visited upon the Earth if it turned out to be in the way of a new hyperspace expressway.
Or if it was eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat.
That hardly ever happens.
RE Footnote 4; the animated film “When the Wind Blows” was of course an adaptation of the late Raymond Briggs’ wonderfully tragic book of the same title. A classic, though don’t expect reading it to be a cheering experience.
I read a non-fiction book by Isaac Asimov as a child, called in German “Die Apokalypsen der Menschheit” (I checked the original title, “A Choice of Catastrophes”). Here we have discussions about all kinds of possible endings sorted into five tiers. It starts with the end of the universe, and then goes to the end of the galaxy, solar system, earth and finally, human civilization. So, from “far future and nothing we can do about it” to “possibly quite soon and it is totally in our hands to stop it”. The way the book was structured and written impressed me a lot when I was young.
A finale of the Pratchett-Baxter epic ‘Long Earth’ series features the total deconstruction of (one) Earth by an alien race via some hard SF mechanics. I can’t recall a convincing accidental or byproduct destruction.
Rotating* the planet- as suggested in Have Spacesuit- Will Travel would certainly destroy all life. I suppose the actual planet would survive, and perhaps allow for anaerobic life.
*Earth would be moved to another dimension, but the Sun wouldn’t go along.
The space drive in the Lensman books turns inertia[/momentum — the author was a food chemist, not a physicist] off and on; the final blow against the evil world involved bracketing it with putting two planets with opposed vectors, then turning their [momentum] back on. Nobody cared about living in that solar system anyway….
Not sure if it counts, but Terror in The Ring of Ritornel (Charles L Harness) is an Earth in the process of being destroyed.
“The giant Earth ship ARK… drifting through deep space over 800 years into the far future. Its passengers, descendants of the last survivors of the dead planet Earth, locked in separate worlds heading for destruction… unless three young people can save… The Starlost.”
In “Last and First Men,” Stapledon suggests a pending collision between Earth and Moon, that cannot be avoided; humanity terraforms Venus as a refuge.
Why a civilization that could terraform Venus, however imperfectly, could not solve the Earth-Moon problem is left unanswered.
A planet’s atmosphere is a very thin surface layer compared to its total mass. It’s a lot easier to replace the siding on a house than it is to move the house.
True, but the Moon is not a planet.
Stapledon was not an astronomer or planetologist, of course, but Venus’ atmosphere is much more massive than that of Earth (like ~90 times, roughly); replacing it would, presumably, require a significant expenditure of energy, as would evacuating Earth’s population to Venus, etc.
Earth’s Moon is, all things considered, not that all that large or dense, and could, presumably, be made “less” of a threat … it’s Stapledon, after all; handwavium is on every page, practically.
The Moon is massive enough to be categorized as a planetary-mass object, or a satellite planet in the terminology of planetary scientist Alan Stern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary-mass_moon
And it’s the mass that I’m talking about. The Moon is 153 times as massive as Venus’s atmosphere. And modifying Venus’s atmosphere is something you could do gradually. It should be quite obvious that it’s far easier to change Venus’s atmosphere than to physically prevent a planetary collision.
This is *exactly* how I have been trying to comfort myself: by focusing on geologic time.
Humans will very likely ruin our own biosphere, but after a million or so years a new one will emerge. Maybe even the plastics will be gone by then. Maybe the next bio-epoch will know better than to endow any of its species with sapience, much less sapience-plus-opposable thumbs. Sentience is fine: stop there, evolution!
I save all my grief and sympathy for the species we’re taking with us.
How could I have forgotten the complete conversion of all the waters of Earth into solid ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle? Unlike most of the holocausts discussed here, there’s no obvious mass death — but it’s obvious the Earth is just as hosed as it would have been had judgment in Have Space Suit, Will Travel gone against it.
There’s also whatever blew up planet Krypton, though I am not sure there has ever really been a consensus besides “We need it to blow up as a metaphor about ignoring science and a plot reason that a couple would shove their baby in a space probe and launch him on an interstellar journey”
“Consensus” is an inapplicable word when the continuity has been reinvented and reinterpreted numerous times, both in the comics and in various adaptations. Sometimes Krypton blows up from natural causes, e.g. a radioactive chain reaction in the core that turns its minerals into lethal kryptonite. In at least one version, it was vaporized when its red-giant star exploded or swelled up. There are some versions where the destruction is artificial, triggered either by the Kryptonians’ overmining of the core or through the deliberate action of a villain such as Brainiac.
Doesn’t Heinlein’s/Robinson’s Variable Star have a destroyed Earth? If I remember, the generation ship left just in time.
Well trolled, good sir!
Stephen Baxter’s EVOLUTION adds a downer note at the end, too, looking at an Earth which is tired, to say the least.