7
MIRROR TO THE WORLD

On the early Saturday evening of 23 November 1963, electromagnetic waves were beamed out from tall metal masts across Britain. They carried within them faithful replicas of human movements and words that had, a little earlier, been captured as a combination of microscopic silver crystals and magnetically aligned iron particles, ingeniously ingrained into long loops of plastic film. These patterns were then converted back into patterns of light and sound via cleverly manipulated cathode rays and electrical currents in heavy square boxes that were, at exactly the same time throughout the land, brought to life by 4.1 million other humans, as all these humans had been cleverly manipulated in turn, to absorb a dream for the next half hour. The dream (repeated religiously each week thereafter) was of yet more astounding marvels, amid high adventure, to arise in a promised future. The first ever episode of Doctor Who was about to be aired, to change the mental landscapes of its human recipients.

The scatty and irascible old Doctor was an unlikely hero, the Tardis of banal police-box exterior was the quirkiest of spaceships, and his nemesis, the slowly trundling Daleks, were villains in the most absurdly pop art style—though their merciless extermination of all non-Dalek life-forms was watched, by many duly terrified adolescent humans, from that safe space behind the sofa. Nevertheless, this inspired piece of science fiction gave at least some of its viewers their first inkling of the wonders of the cosmos, and of the near-miraculous potential of technology.

That technology was in full swing by the time Doctor Who was screened, forming an indispensable backcloth to the lives of the viewers. The emerging television network was just one more obviously visible part, while the space race developing between America and Russia produced real-life derring-do that reached out to the cosmos. But many more prosaic things were happening, too, that in their own way were just as extraordinary as the feats of the Apollo and Vostok spacecraft—and that had a much deeper impact on Earth.

The day after the Doctor Who ritual, the young devotees would have time free to play—but the following day they would, reluctantly, be wrapped in woven fabric to protect them from the cold and put into wheeled transporting machines to be taken, along hardened strips of ground that snaked through the countryside, to a gathering point. There, organized into groups within large, baked-clay constructions, their elders would, day by interminable day and year by never-ending year, teach them something of how their world was built—and how they, in turn, in years to come, would maintain and extend that world. This was their empire. Their grip on it would grow forever tighter, so their lives would be ever more comfortable, even while their perspectives stretched out to the stars.

This world—including the make-believe world of Doctor Who—is replete with things that have been made, to help ensure survival, or just make life easier, or more amusing. These artefacts have become so ubiquitous and so ingrained in our lives, now, that we rarely notice their presence—though we keenly feel their absence if for some reason they are taken away from us. They are all things that, whether simple, like knives and forks, or complex, like digital cameras and television sets, have been puzzled out by the human mind and then physically constructed to serve some kind of purpose. They are the fruits of human technology, based on materials that extend back deep into geological history. Our technological creations, together with us, seem to be creating a new planetary presence, that is now evolving at high speed.

The process, though, had a very slow start.

The history epoch

The stone tools used by early humans predate our own species, Homo sapiens, by more than two million years: rough choppers, axes, scrapers, they show only glacially slow change from crudely broken rocks to somewhat better-shaped implements over this time. Generation after generation, our human ancestors copied their elders; innovation was on the menu only very rarely. A new step took place some 300,000 years ago, when the systematic fracture of ‘flint cores’ allowed a greater number of useful fragments from one starting block: a very early form of production line. Then, about 50,000 years ago, came the discovery that pressing on a rock with a sharp point—with care and experience—could shape it, by ‘pressure flaking’, more precisely than just by hitting it. From about 30,000 years ago came a flood of tiny flakes, ‘microliths’, seemingly made to embed into wood to form spears and harpoons. Innovation was beginning to speed up.

Wander through the North African desert, and you can, here and there, stumble upon beautiful flint arrowheads—some leaf-like, others triangular, many with carefully made notches to fit into a wooden shaft. This newly sophisticated manufacture shows not just more beautiful handiwork, but patterns that evolved, now over just a few millennia, and not over hundreds of thousands of years. The changes mark the start of the Neolithic, or ‘New Stone Age’, that started more or less when the latest of the Pleistocene ice ages gave way to today’s warmth.

Hunter-gathering—the lifestyle that had, previously, wholly sustained Homo sapiens and all other species of humans for millions of years—then began to be replaced by agriculture. Humans settled, to tend to their delicate, newly domesticated crops and obstreperous animals, and their numbers grew. For a few there was less physical work, if they were strong or cunning or ruthless enough to seize control, and have others work for them. Hierarchical societies grew. This early settled human life was probably more miserable, by and large, than the hunter-gathering one (there is an old joke among archaeologists that fermented grain, and thus beer, was invented as consolation for this new servitude). But, it provided more calories, and hence was more successful.

Within this ‘agrarian’ revolution many new technologies evolved and developed. Pottery, for example, which had been invented 10,000 years earlier in some Far Eastern cultures¹ was reinvented in the ‘Pottery Neolithic’ of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East about 10 millennia ago, and the idea and the skill to make it migrated, as word of the usefulness of this new invention for cooking and storing food spread. Weapons became used less as instruments to kill other animals and more to kill other humans. And, someone more than five millennia ago—perhaps while working in a pottery kiln—saw a strange red-hot fluid puddling on the ground. When cooled and hardened, it formed a hard material that could take a wickedly sharp edge. This was metal, and new and more deadly sorts of weapon were born from this new material. It could be shaped into use for protection against weapons, too, to fuel a race between arms and armour that remains of deadly intensity today.

There came the invention of things like the wheel (a tricky thing to construct initially, from wood), money, woven fabrics for clothes, the saddle and bridle, the plough, scythe, and spade, writing, new kinds of buildings, aqueducts, lamps, roads, bridges, and (inevitably) new kinds of weapons. It is the material story of the Holocene epoch, a flowering of the creation and production of artefacts, the remains of which now form a diverse and varied terrain for archaeological study. It is a new kind of evolution—albeit being channelled through exactly the same biological species, Homo sapiens, that had managed such slow and limited technological progress for so many millennia previously. Indeed, this early halting progress was not much more sophisticated than that achieved by its fellow human species, Homo neanderthalensis, and one wonders whether the Neanderthals might ultimately have been the vehicle for a similar technological lift-off, if they and not our own species had survived.

Nevertheless, for all of this new material sophistication, there were limits to the spread of technology—and of humans. The energy that people could obtain to do work—in building, farming, warfare—was ultimately limited to human muscle power, to the muscle power of the animals that humans forcibly co-opted, and to inventive but limited attempts to harness the energy from streams and rivers, in watermills and weirs, and the wind, in windmills and sailing ships. The technology could be ingenious, but it was mostly artisanal; the continuous input of physical and mental effort and learned skill set a limit on the amount of manufacture. Humans were limited nutritionally, too, by the crops they could grow and the animals they could rear—and these organisms were limited in turn by the nutrients in the soil, notably nitrogen and phosphorus. Even with fewer than a billion people on the planet, hunger and starvation were always around the corner. And, for those that managed to stay well fed for a while, there was always some kind of plague or pestilence to threaten them. Those people travelled, and migrated, to trade or to try to reach more promising lands, but that travel was long, arduous, and dangerous—an adventure that all too easily and often finished in tragedy. The world of Holocene civilization was connected, but only semi-connected. Many people did not leave their towns and villages in their lifetimes, and different parts of the world developed their own distinctive cultures, with influences from trading, travel, and imperial conquest modifying, but generally not overwhelming, these differences.

One might call it a sustainable world, for all the hardships and dangers that its human (and non-human) inhabitants endured. The basic support system for all of this life was in place and more or less stable, at least as far as memories and ancestral stories went: soils and the sustenance they provided; clean water (though this was increasingly in question, where humans gathered in larger numbers); the ‘immemorial’ pattern of land and sea, upon which property and empires alike were based; and the seasons followed each other, some better and some worse, but with the sense that this pattern, too, was simply woven into the fabric of a capricious but fundamentally everlasting Nature. Into this world, civilizations rose and fell over the millennia, but neither the well-being of humanity, nor the natural world, was seriously threatened.

But something was about to change.

Breaking the limits of nature

Wood has been humanity’s main fire-provider for most of our long species’ history (and was fire-provider to ancestral human species too). It continues to be used in large amounts, whether in rural Africa, South America, and Scandinavia, or as imported wood pellets in power stations in the UK. But the fires can only be kept burning for as long as there is wood—and the trees that supply it, once cut down, can only grow so fast. The need for fire, for heating, cooking, and smelting metal, led, as the millennia of the Holocene passed, to forests progressively being stripped from landscapes across the world. For more of this plant-sourced energy, one had to wait until the trees grew back again. It was a natural brake upon human growth.

The discovery of coal, the rock that burns, added another source of fire—moreover, of a fire that burned hotter than wood, and that gave out more heat, kilo for kilo. It has probably been used, occasionally and serendipitously, for many thousands of years. Its systematic use, though, seems to stretch back some five millennia, to northern China, where trees are scarce and coal seams lie close to the ground surface. The ancient Greeks used it, as did the Aztecs, and the Romans who, when they colonized Britain, found and won coal from most of the major coalfields. But to do any more than dig out any coal that happens to lie at the surface is a brutally difficult and dangerous business, as any coalminer knows, with the danger of rockfall, underground flooding, and explosion ever present. So, across those millennia and until little more than a couple of centuries ago, the efforts to extract this subterranean energy were—as far as the Earth was concerned—little more than scratching the surface. Such artisanal extraction and burning of coal had a negligible effect, for instance, on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

That began to change a little more than a couple of centuries ago, as technology and energy started a new phase in their relationship, to solve a problem that had bedevilled human use of coal—and, indeed, the extraction of anything from deep underground. Dig a deep (sometimes not all that deep) hole in the ground, and it will fill with water, because rocks at depth are soaked in water that has fallen as rain on the landscape and then gradually percolated down. Go below the level at which this subterranean water collects, the water table, and you have to be permanently baling out the water if you want to keep a mine or quarry safely dry. Coal mines could only go with great difficulty beyond shallow depths, and mine owners searched constantly for ways to remove the water that stubbornly kept flooding in. Another form of water—steam—gave them the answer.

Heat water until it boils, and the steam is not only scaldingly hot, but exerts a strong pressure as it expands. This has long sparked curiosity. The Greek mathematician Hero (or Heron) of Alexander (about 10 to 70 CE) built a curious machine called an aeolopile—a water-filled cylinder on an axis with a couple of angled nozzles coming out of the sides. Heating this contraption made steam gush out of the nozzles, making the cylinder rotate. For Hero, it was probably mainly a party trick, but a generation earlier, the Roman architect Vitruvius (about 75 to 15 BCE) commented of an earlier protype that the ‘violent wind’ that it produced was testament to some ‘divine truth lurking in the heavens’.

The seventeenth and eighteenth century mine-owners were probably little interested in divine truth, but when the English inventor Thomas Savery proposed using the power of steam to force water out of coalmines and metal mines, they pricked up their ears. The early designs were crude, only partially successful—and dangerous too, being liable to be explosively shattered by the high-pressure steam. But improvements to the design by first Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729) and then James Watt (1736–1819) made them more effective, and soon ubiquitous in deep mines. These early steam engines needed a lot of energy—from the burning of coal, of course—to make them work, but the release of that energy allowed hugely greater amounts of coal to be hewn from ever deeper within the Earth. This yielded energy that was very soon expended in other forms of steam engine, put to use to make factory machinery more powerful and productive, and to power locomotives and ships. All of this hugely increased the demand for coal, and allowed the development of yet more different kinds of machine by those ingenious and indefatigable Victorian-era scientist-engineers. Humanity began to lose its dependence on the normal resources of Earth which had sustained it—as it had sustained so many other species—for so many millennia, and began to explore a lifestyle that, until very recently, has seemed to be almost limitless in its use of natural resources.

A few decades later, oil and gas joined coal as energy providers, and they also spawned families of new machinery designed simply for their extraction from their hiding places deep underground: drilling rigs, supertankers, refineries, oil platforms. And these new energy sources, fluid and supremely manageable, generated a further cornucopia of machines: automobiles, planes, earth- and rock-moving machines, metro systems, and much more. A fire had been lit that would soon be an explosion—a constructive explosion, out of which millions of new species bloomed. These were not species of flesh and blood (or at least mostly, they were not). They were technological species, ‘technospecies’. And they would soon, in some important respects, take over the world.

We are now surrounded by so many things, such an enormous variety of stuff, that we take this for granted. We are a supremely adaptable species, and this new material hyper-diversity has become part of the background of our lives, to the extent that we can barely imagine life without the almost limitless opportunities it provides. How could we cope, now, without computers and mobile phones, without ballpoint pens, lamps, knives, forks, clocks, chairs, combs, scissors, refrigerators, ovens, TV…?

And what are these things, these species of modern technological invention, really? We generally call them all artificial, or artefacts—that is, things not found in nature—and so in our minds they are mostly separated off from nature into a new category that has nothing to do with biology, the biosphere, or ecosystems. And yet we are biological organisms. We have developed the capacity to make tools, of course—but we have already seen that other organisms, like the New Caledonia crow, can fashion and use tools—and that humans genetically identical to us used tools not much more sophisticated than those devised by the New Caledonia crow for most of the timespan of our species. But, there is a profound difference in quality between a Stone Age hand axe and crow-fashioned twig and, say, a television set or lightbulb. There is also a profound difference in quantity between a hand axe/shaped twig and all of the manufactured objects that surround us, when we are comfortably sitting and watching television. And, yet more, there is a difference in connectedness between those individual ancient simple tools, and the complex material networks that allow, for example, an episode of Doctor Who to be made and screened around the planet. So, what has happened—indeed, is happening—to cause the emergence of this new kind of world?

Counting technospecies

One of the problems in trying to understand this new world of technologically made objects is its sheer profusion. How many kinds of human-made objects are there out there? And how rapidly are they multiplying? As far as we know, no one is even trying to make any overall census of this (not least as it is now a permanently, and rapidly, moving target), but we can at least try to set the phenomenon of technological species into some kind of biological perspective (where some numbers at least do exist, for comparison). We can link our technological artefacts back to biologically made or shaped objects or structures made by earlier human species, and also by non-human species, and here we can move into the realms of biology and, perhaps more surprisingly, palaeontology, as we seek this perspective.

We might start by trying to estimate the number of biological species present on Earth today, which includes the number of named and catalogued species alive, and those yet to be discovered and named. Even the former number, a little surprisingly, has various estimates, but they centre around about 1.5 million. Estimates of the number of species still to be found and described have ranged from about three million to over a hundred million, more recent ones being of the order of 10 million species.²

From palaeontology (which recognizes species in a different way to biology, but not so differently that inter-comparison cannot be made) we know that the average species known from the fossil record exists for something between one half and five million years. If we take 3 million years as an average, the last half billion years of abundant multicellular organisms should have seen the appearance and then extinction of about 1.5 billion species. Now, the number of species discovered and catalogued by palaeontologists (who work slowly and carefully, it must be admitted) is around a quarter of a million—and so only a tiny fraction of ancient biodiversity has so far been recognized. This is because most species are soft-bodied, and so fossilize only very rarely, if at all—but also because there are many fossil species still to find out there in the rock strata (between us, in our careers we have found and named a few dozen species of fossils, and if we but had time to do more active palaeontology, we would undoubtedly find more).

There is a category of biological phenomena, and of the fossil species that can form from them, that is a little special, and that takes us a little closer to the realms of technology. These are the traces that animals leave behind as they move, a category which grades into and includes the constructions that some of them build. These are things like footprints, animal burrows, and insect nests. When fossilized in strata, they are called ‘trace fossils’ by palaeontologists, to distinguish them from the ‘body fossils’ represented by things such as bones and shells. In non-human biology, one of the features of these traces is that one animal tends to make only one or a few kinds of traces, each being more or less directly from specific coding for this purpose in their DNA. Thus, each species of ant, termite, or wasp, tends to build the same kind of nest, albeit often adapted around the local small-scale topography of the ground. Each spider species has its own pattern of web, and each burrowing organism has its own pattern of burrow. Each animal can have a range of behaviour, of course: the iconic fossil trilobites of the Palaeozoic Era, for instance, are well known for producing three types of trace, depending on what they are doing at any particular time: a set of V-shaped marks called Cruziana from ploughing through the sediment; an oval depression called Rusophycus from settling into a little scooped-out depression on the sea floor; and ‘tip-toe’ walking marks called Diplichnites. And of course, some very different animals can make the same kind of trace. While Rusophycus is most usually associated with trilobites, very similarly shaped depressions can be formed by particular kinds of worms, snails, and shrimps.

The lesson here is clear. The ways in which animals reshape their local environment, to the extent of making constructions—and which extends to occasionally using tools—is limited, and closely coded by genetic make-up. We are not aware of any total counts of named trace fossil species, but probably those recognized so far—for the whole of the geological record—might amount to several thousand.

Now, the various ways that we reshape solid material around us can be considered as a form of trace, whether it is a footprint (where the relation is clear), or a building (which is directly comparable to a wasp or termite nest), from which the analogy can be extended to the electrical fittings, the carpet, television set, the cutlery, and furniture—and the car parked outside on the driveway, and mobile phone in the pocket of the driver.

The difference, of course, is that we are but one species, and what we have very suddenly developed is the ability to conjure up a range of artefacts of such near-infinite variety that making an estimate of ‘technospecies numbers’ is an even more daunting task than trying to measure biological species numbers on Earth today. Examples of technospecies may include a Swan lightbulb from 1880, or the Osram version from the 1920s. Or a Bic Cristal ballpoint pen, which is instantly recognizable—and abundant too, well over 100 billion having been manufactured since its commercial release in 1950. There are many other kinds—and so technospecies—of ballpoint pen, each sharing general characteristics of ball, barrel, ink-filled cylinder, and cap, but recognizably different in detail. These might all be regarded as being members of a genus of ballpoint pen, in a similar way that our species sapiens is just one within the genus Homo, along with the species habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis, and so on. And what of pencils, fibre-tip pens, fountain pens, crayons? These might be regarded as representing other genera within a family of writing implements, each with their own myriad component species, a little like we belong to the family Hominidae, that is the great apes, along with gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. It is important not to push this analogy (and it is only an analogy) too far, because these relationships in technospecies are based on similar morphology and function, and not on evolutionary connections acquired over millions of years. But equally, the analogy is important to try to gain some appreciation of this phenomenon that is unfolding around us among these so-newly evolving genera and species of technospecies.

The ballpoint pen genus is less than a century old, invented by the Jewish–Hungarian journalist László Bíró in the 1930s.³ Noticing that newsprint ink dried more quickly than fountain-pen ink, but was too thick to flow, Bíró came up with the idea of placing a small rotating ball at the end of a tube of this viscous ink. From this he obtained fame, but not fortune. In those turbulent times of danger and racial persecution, he had to sell all his shares in the fledgling company to allow him and his family to flee to safety (he did not regret this bargain, made of necessity).

The fountain pen that he helped to relegate to obscurity has a longer history,⁴ though mostly of rare, isolated attempts to make a writing implement that worked consistently and without too much mess. The Ma'ād al-Mu'izz, the caliph of the Maghreb, in north-west Africa, wrote in 973 CE of having an ink-filled tube made for him, and in 1663 the diarist Samuel Pepys mentioned talk of a similar contraption—but functional and widely available fountain pens only really appeared from the mid-nineteenth century. The fibre-tip pen is younger even than the ballpoint pen, first appearing in 1962. Even the humble pencil is just a little more venerable by comparison, the trick of placing a graphite stick in a small wooden casing only being worked out in 1795, by Nicholas-Jacques Conté,⁵ an officer in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. A ‘universal man’, according to Napoleon, he invented the crayon, for use by artists too, for good measure. This new plethora of writing instruments overwhelmed the basic writing machinery that had been used for many centuries—a bird’s feather or reed cut diagonally to make a nib, or a piece of chalk to write on a slate tablet—and, incidentally, brought writing within the range of the whole human population, and not just a few select scribes.

How many individual technospecies of pen and pencil have been designed and manufactured since then, in innumerable factories around the world? Just rummaging in a single office or study will normally turn up several dozen. We would guess tens of thousands, but it may well be more. The same kind of uncounted, perhaps uncountable, profligacy holds true for so many of those familiar household objects that populate the world that we now live in. Technospecies counts are rare. One example is a count of the published book titles that now lie within Google’s vast electronic databases. Each can be thought to represent a single technospecies, having a specific pattern of page numbers and shapes, printed word patterns, covers, binding. Some, the best-sellers, are abundant, produced in their millions; others are rare, some slim volumes of delicate poetry being lucky to see a print run of a hundred—but such a range of abundance holds true for biological species, too. The grand total of book technospecies, totted up by some exceedingly patient Google employee in 2010, was 129,864,880. And, each year some 2 million new book titles are added to this mountain of narrative (the book you are reading is one of them), and so by now the number has likely risen to about 150 million. Extraordinarily, the technodiversity just within the book family (admittedly a large and extended one) exceeds modern biodiversity more than tenfold. Add in all the other technospecies and it may be—who knows?—perhaps a hundredfold. It is a kind of evolution which, for so much of human history a thin trickle, has turned into an explosion.⁶

We are living amid the full power of this continuing explosion—what is it doing now? Commonplace items, like pens and books, help to give an idea of its scale, but one might say that these are almost infinite variations on relatively simple themes. A spin-off from this technodiversity explosion gives another, and perhaps deeper perspective: the synthesis of new kinds of solid inorganic chemical compounds in the laboratories of the materials scientists. In nature, these are known as minerals, and the Earth has, over its history of 4.5 billion years, produced a little over 5,000 different kinds, as patiently tabulated by mineralogists. Some are familiar and common, like quartz and calcite, while many are exceedingly rare. Humans began to make new minerals, not present in the natural world, when they began to do things like extract metals from rocks and make new alloys. But their capacity to do this long remained limited—until new technical possibilities came, in the form of laboratories with ever more sophisticated equipment. There is a database that shows exactly how those possibilities flowered, in the German city of Karlsruhe,⁷ and for years it has been patiently collecting data on all the new kinds of mineral that humans have suddenly developed the capacity to make—and ‘suddenly’ is the exactly appropriate term. In the early part of the twentieth century a few hundred extra minerals were noted. By the 1930s it had reached about 1,500, and by 1950 this had roughly doubled to about 3,000. Then the boom began. By the early 1980s, 30,000 synthetic minerals had been synthesized. By 2000, this number had more than doubled to over 70,000. Now, another two decades on, the number of synthetic minerals has tripled from that to over 200,000. Currently about 7,000 new minerals—more than the Earth managed to produce in 4.5 billion years—are synthesized each year. It is symbolic of this sudden explosion of technological possibilities, and is an outburst of chemical creativity that may be unique in the cosmos.⁸

This extraordinary diversification is not driven by any change in the biology or genetics of the humans involved, for we are no different in this respect from our Stone Age ancestors. It is driven by patterns of circumstance and history, and on the back of generations of ever more sophisticated technology devised, ever more rapidly, by our ancestors, mostly our very recent ancestors. Indeed now, that ‘ancestor’ is often a younger version of the same human individual, as major technological advances are made from one decade to the next. We see the most obvious manifestations as they immediately affect us, as a stationary phone line is replaced by a mobile phone, and that in turn by (now, several generations of) smartphone. Behind that, though is the kind of global hinterland which can, say, increase the world’s mineral content many times over, as just one globally interwoven system involving accelerating levels of knowledge, energy, materials, and finance. These are refashioning the Earth’s surface materials at a speed that is now dizzying.

All these structures are biologically made, in the sense that we are a biological species, but something else is going on, and not only because our biological skills and aptitudes are now increasingly augmented by computers, with silicon-based computational capacities and speeds far outpacing human capabilities. A new planet-spanning entity of technological structures has, very recently, arisen on Earth. Peter Haff of Duke University in North Carolina, an extraordinarily insightful combination of geologist, engineer, and philosopher, calls it the technosphere⁹: a new ‘sphere’ on the Earth’s surface to join—and intersect with—the lithosphere of the solid Earth, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. Like the other, ancient ‘spheres’ of the Earth it is much greater than simply being the sum of its individual parts, and has ‘emergent’ properties and behaviour, many of which cannot be easily predicted—or controlled.

Weighing the technosphere

Something like the technosphere has been present ever since humans began making tools, but for most of this time it has been as small local entities, mostly thoroughly embedded within, and not greatly perturbing, the dominant biosphere. But, almost without us noticing it—mainly because we have been too busy building its many parts—it has coalesced and grown, very recently, into something that is gigantic and planet-spanning. The exploding diversity of most of its parts is difficult to measure, as we have seen, but its physical bulk seems to be a little easier to assess, albeit in different ways. One means is by using the data of the scientists who study the material flows of the economy—the raw materials we mostly take from the Earth, and the things we make out of them: buildings, roads, bridges, dams, railways, vehicles, and all else. At the beginning of the twentieth century the mass of all of these things that were in use was estimated to weigh in at about 3 per cent of the mass of all living things on Earth (that is biomass, measured as dry weight). By the mid-twentieth century, the working physical technosphere had grown to be equal to about 7 per cent of the biosphere’s mass, but this growth was now accelerating, so by 2000 the value was about 50 per cent. It is still accelerating, and 2020 is the year when this active and functional technosphere has become equal in weight to the biosphere¹⁰—and is set to quickly pull away to grow yet larger. Over the last 120 years, the living biosphere has diminished by something like 5 per cent, mainly as forests have been cut back to make way for cities and agriculture;¹¹ the active technosphere has mushroomed by some 5,000 per cent, mostly in the last half-century. It is an astonishingly swift and dramatic entry onto the planetary stage.

The calculated mass, that is possessed equally by both active technosphere and biosphere, is a little under 1.2 trillion tonnes (i.e. 1,200 billion tonnes), of which a little under half is that modernity-symbolizing synthetic rock, concrete, in which metals such as steel and aluminium, and recently plastics too, figure as ingredients. This is a large amount—about two and a half kilos of manufactured, currently functional constructional material per square metre of the Earth, both land and sea.

But there is more. We are a terrifically wasteful species and have discarded far more than we use. So, to add to that figure, there are all the constructions that once served us a purpose, but are no longer in use—whether dismantled, bulldozed away, or simply discarded casually or to fill the growing landfill sites. There is also all the waste material generated when resources are extracted from the ground; this can vary from a modest proportion of the total (when sand and gravel are extracted from the ground, say) to vastly outweighing the resources themselves (in mining copper, typically more than 99 per cent of the material excavated is waste). There is also the material that we move in ploughing soil, and trawling sea floors, to keep alive the humans (almost all of us) who are involved in keeping the technosphere going. Factor all of that in, and the total amount of material that we use, or have used and discarded, is something of the order of 30 trillion tonnes.¹² About half of that is concentrated in and around the world’s urban areas—but spread it evenly across the planet, and there would be about 50 kilos of material per every square metre (again, land and sea) of the Earth’s surface. On such a world, thus, we are about ankle-deep in the things we have made and (largely) thrown away.

The human component

Peter Haff’s concept of the technosphere is not just of some inanimate robot-like growth of concrete and steel, copper, and silicon, that is outgrowing its ancient biological parent. There is—for now, at least—its human component, for it is human hands and minds that have built and shaped its myriad components, from toothpicks to skyscrapers. But the human role is not just to create and maintain it, but to be an integral part of this new sphere, caught up within it and, in all too many ways, trapped within it and dependent on it. For it is the global technosphere, and its ceaseless, ever-shifting transglobal flows of energy and matter, that is keeping virtually all of us alive. Peter Haff notes that in a world where humans were simply yet another normal part of the biosphere, living by hunting and gathering—as we were for most of our species’ existence—the Earth could support a population of just some few millions. It has been our ability to shape the environment around us that has allowed our numbers to grow, at first slowly and, much more recently, to skyrocket. Many individual steps have contributed to this. A key step, many thousands of years ago, was the development of agriculture, a way of life that could feed more humans in a smaller area than could hunter-gathering. But even after that, the human population grew only slowly, pegged back by the normal carrying capacity of the land. That barrier was shattered in the last century, by directed, hydrocarbons-fuelled, energy, that led to, among many other things, the energy-intensive manufacture of nitrogen fertilizer directly from thin air.

It is therefore a sphere that maintains humans in completely unprecedented numbers (for a primate) on Earth—but Haff argues that it is not as simple as that. The main function of the technosphere is to keep itself going, not us. We are completely tied into it and forced to maintain it, but have not directed its creation and development, as if we were a unified global society directed by some kind of omniscient and far-sighted world government. Rather, a combination of expanding technical possibilities and individual human discoveries have thrown up novel structures here and there, like spores landing on a petri dish. Those that in modern times landed on fertile ground—where there was infrastructure, investment, finance, a trained workforce, a marketplace—could take root, develop, multiply, and expand their territory, at extraordinary speed. Phenomena like the internet and smartphones are classic general examples, but there are many prosaic things too—CDs, e-cigarettes, selfie sticks—that, in a few years spread through human populations across the whole Earth.

What is more, these accelerating technological invasions have happened even as human society is (and seems to have become more) highly fractured, divided into competing—and often warring—nation-states, and with these internally divided into fiercely competitive political groups and industrial clans. In this state of affairs, there is little chance of unified control or direction. Regardless, the technosphere carries on growing and evolving, its planetary interconnections ramifying and diversifying, as new inventions dreamed up by the harried humans enmeshed within it are quickly taken up and incorporated into its ever-expanding repertoire of ways of transforming matter and energy.

Many of the functions and controls are increasingly automated, through the instantaneous electronic connections of the global internet that are now woven ever more tightly into it: the algorithms that run the speed-of-light transactions of modern stock exchanges, the databases for everything from banking to health to national security to science, or the programming of drones for modern automated warfare. Within this, artificial intelligence is still largely a facilitator of human-made plans, and we are (it seems) still some way away from the science-fiction scenario (or ‘singularity’, as it is sometimes called) where super-intelligent computers take over to run things for themselves. The technosphere still needs humans, as much as humans now need the technosphere. And humans, of course, are not the only biological components of the technosphere. To keep them—us, that is—alive in our present numbers requires huge nutritional inputs, supplied by the expanding agricultural landscapes that continue to grow at the expense of natural wilderness. To make these productive enough to feed us all requires the continuous expenditure of fossil-fuelled energy and inputs of high technology (one might recall the broiler chickens, pitifully short-lived, and helpless outside of their closely controlled enclosures): modern agriculture may still be technically part of the biosphere, but it is firmly enmeshed within the technosphere.

But the situation is not stable, is moving fast, and may be prone to collapse. Peter Haff has described it as ‘racing ahead like a forest fire’.¹³ The vivid analogy gives pause for thought. In this situation, one thing quickly leads to another. Quite where all this is going to lead is anybody’s guess. But one of those possibilities, now emerging, is the development of living machines, of flesh and blood.

Dawn of the xenobots

The technosphere has already blurred the dividing line between life and technology. We humans already walk the Earth augmented, many of us, by teeth filled with amalgamated mercury, silver, tin, and copper, hip joints of steel, titanium, plastic, and zirconia-toughened alumina, and electronic heart pacemakers. And while our basic biology remains more or less identical to that of our distant ancestors, the same cannot be said for broiler chickens, as we have seen: these newly modified organisms can now only exist, however briefly, within a technological support system. However, we can still more or less work out what is organism and what is machine.

That distinction, though, has just got more difficult.

The trouble with the machines we make is that, however complex, robust, decay-proof, and hardwearing they may be, each one is based on a single inflexible design that, by and large, cannot adapt and, when eventually worn out or broken, cannot self-repair, or reproduce itself. Living organisms, by contrast, may seem fragile by comparison with, say, a tank or fighter plane—but their ability to adapt, self-organize, repair their injuries, and produce new organisms has now been continually honed over more than 3 billion years. Could one therefore get the best (or worst, as some may think) of both worlds by making machines out of living matter, or—which amounts to the same thing—design organisms from scratch to fulfil specific purposes? A research team in the USA has just taken some steps to that very end,¹⁴ and made what some people call xenobots.¹⁵ These may be opening up a new kind of future somewhere in the space where technosphere and biosphere overlap that seems to be promising and disquieting in equal measure.

The team combined biological and computer expertise to create these new living machines. The ‘xenobots’ here has the ring of alien robots, but is derived from the raw material used, cells of Xenopus laevis, the clawed frog, which is one of the model organisms used by biologists. The particular cells used were embryonic stem cells—that is, those which still have the capacity to develop into any specialized kind of cell—but which were on the cusp of specializing into muscle cells capable of movement, and immobile skin cells. These were put into clusters about a millimetre across, and then sculpted into patterns: not random patterns, but ones which had been computer-designed to fulfil a particular purpose—to move in a certain fashion, for instance. With these blueprints as guides, the sculpting was then carried out by human hand, wielding tiny forceps to move cells into place, and a fine electrode to obliterate others. The researchers then sat back and watched their creations.

The xenobots functioned—but not always as expected. This is not like assembling a machine out of metal wires and microchips, where the properties are known, and the interactions can be precisely predicted. Here the machines are of living tissue, which has infinitely complex dynamics of its own. So, some of the xenobots ‘walked’ across the experimental surface, or manipulated objects, more or less as programmed. Others, though, developed new behaviours, attaching or moving around each other when they met, or forming new shapes such as holes within them, in effect improvising on or subverting the original designs.

Baby steps, perhaps, but the xenobots give pause for thought. The researchers point to possible uses; such bespoke organisms might be designed to deliver drugs within the human body, say, or clean up environmental pollution. How far might this new kind of science reach? In a final sentence, the possibility of producing such new forms of life with ‘cognitive or computational functions’ was mooted, to create a new kind of intelligence. Would it, one wonders, develop a mind of its own?

The technosphere, newly arrived on planet Earth, is clearly evolving at furious pace, as its ever more sophisticated machines interact with thousands of highly trained, imaginative, and innovation-focused humans at its leading edge. The possibilities, viewed this way, seem endless. Whether this new planetary experiment will survive long enough to produce a new pattern of life, though, is an open question. There is a hurdle to get through first, one that may be best viewed from a safe distance, before we examine it in ugly detail, close up.

The eternal technosphere

We humans are, biologically, just animals, creatures of flesh and bone. In his strikingly experimental novel William S. Burroughs called us The Soft Machine. In primitive form, we are not really designed for the kind of planetary immortality that palaeontologists call fossilization. After death, flesh rots quickly. Even bones, discarded on the landscape, begin to disintegrate within months, or are scavenged. This is why ancient hominid remains are so rare, despite being avidly sought as well-funded palaeontological teams scour the most likely fossil sites worldwide.

Burroughs’ novel was influential in the most unlikely places. It introduced the phrase ‘heavy metal’, which was to become the banner for a whole genre of music, and for good measure, it was the direct inspiration for Soft Machine, a highly regarded jazz-rock band formed in the psychedelic 1960s. The band itself is durable (it is still going strong). Its personnel are, of course soft-framed in the standard biological way, but the ensemble cheats the grim reaper by recruiting new band members when needed.

The band’s armoury, though, has a hardness and durability that will likely give it a rather greater chance of immortality, at least of the palaeontological kind. This Soft Machine has the standard rock band carapace of drums, guitars, saxophones, microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, swathes of electrical cables. Extending outwards, there is that realm, shared with other bands, of concert hall, of brick, concrete, steel, glass, and plastic. We can now watch electronic ghosts of the band, past and present, on our laptops, through the globe-encircling hardware that is several evolutionary levels beyond that with which we watched the primordial Doctor Who in our childhoods.

All of these artefacts are built to last. They are designed to resist microbes, termites, mice, spilled beer, over-enthusiastic fans, and careless roadies, to function faultlessly in sunshine and rain, drought, and frost. Steel is galvanized or chrome-covered. Wood is seasoned and varnished. Copper has one or two coats of that most indigestible of modern materials, plastic. Durability today is useful today. It is a very handy headstart, too, as regards the ultimate tomorrow of fossilization.

In nature, the fossils handed down to us from the deep past, from dinosaurs to trilobites to the most delicate of fossil leaves, are those which have escaped the highly efficient recycling processes of the biosphere. Dinosaurs, trilobites, and leaves in life are simply temporary stores of nutrients which, upon death, are passed on for equally temporary loan to the next transient generation of organisms. The rare scraps that spill over from this near-eternal cycle is what keeps palaeontologists in business.

The technosphere is much newer, and much less efficient at recycling. Today, it is growing and discarding its components as though there is no tomorrow. The Soft Machine’s impressive hardware is durable—but it is not functionally everlasting. An amplifier blows, a guitar succumbs to over-enthusiastic use, a tape recorder becomes redundant—and the usual route from there is to join the growing mountains of discarded technology. These complex artefacts are designed to make profits for the manufacturer, not with recycling in mind. So, the Soft Machine’s cast-offs will, more likely than not, make their own minor contribution to the truckloads that wend their way, each day, to our contemporary burial sites.

Burial is the first step towards fossilization, and modern landfill sites—particularly the most modern, highly engineered ones, are developed on a truly gargantuan scale. They are mostly invisible, placed out of sight and mostly out of mind, for the peace of mind of the people who live nearby—we will shortly visit one where the process is laid bare and gives a clearer and truer picture of what is going on.

There is a very good deal of overspill, too—the casual spills now all too visible in soils, rivers, beaches, and lakesides—while a far greater amount is accumulating invisibly in underwater sediments worldwide. Durability and rapid burial are the first steps towards fossilization, and to bear in mind the long future of today’s artefacts, one may call them ‘technofossils’,¹⁶ and some curious palaeontologists of the far future will find that one of the most visible parts of humanity’s ultimate legacy to the planet will be strata loaded with the hyperdiverse petrified remnants of our trash:¹⁷ flattened and carbonized plastic bottles, the impressions of aluminium cans—and among the rarities, perhaps the corroded and crushed remnants of an electric guitar (which would represent one of the more puzzling of those fossil enigmas-to-be).

This far future scenario is a safe, almost comforting one: many millions of years from now, these abundant new fossil assemblages will mostly be buried deep underground, far from where they can do harm (while some of the plastics will likely be stewing in the high subterranean heat and pressure to produce their own distinctive addition to future oil and gas resources). The examples exhumed by tectonic forces back to the surface will, petrified and rockbound, also provide little threat, while having—assuming there will be those curious far-future explorers to analyse them—a complex and abstract fascination.

Looked at from the here and now, though, the fascination is anything but abstract.

Used-up planet

For centuries the decrepit places where society has almost collapsed have lurked in our wilder imaginings, to be occasionally rendered in nightmarish visions. One of the masters of this art, the Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, lived in the Dutch city of S-Hertogenbosch. Like many medieval cities, S-Hertogenbosch was a cramped place of closely stacked buildings hiding behind its fortified walls. The fifteenth century was not a good time for S-Hertogenbosch. It suffered two great fires in 1419 and 1463. The young Hieronymus probably witnessed the second fire, and it may even have burnt down the house where he was born. It seems to have left a lasting impression on his psyche, and on his paintings, which often show depictions of hell that have a fire-scape of burning buildings in the background.

Around 1500, Bosch produced his most celebrated work of art, one that would become known as the ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’. It is a large painting, a three-panelled triptych that is 2 metres high and nearly four metres long. Its left-hand panel shows a majestic Garden of Eden filled with many exotic animals including a giraffe, a lion, and an elephant, and just two people, Adam and Eve. The central panel is a rambunctious rendering of a proliferating humanity enjoying all manner of ‘Earthly delights’ with a cavalcade of animals, some recognizable as goats and donkeys, whilst others are chimaeras. Everywhere these animals seem to be under the domination of people.

The images of the right-hand panel show the end game, in a hellish scene that warns what may happen when Earth’s delights are consumed with impunity. Here humans fill the picture but are assailed by strange beasts on all sides, including a pig dressed as a nun, and cannibalistic and sadistic demons. Unconsciously, perhaps, Bosch retells human history, a world where once we walked amongst the beasts, that then became a world where we took mastery over the non-human. This grim final panel shows the kind of world towards which we may be heading here on Earth (and not in any hell of the afterworld) if we continue to consume unabated.

Such places already exist.

To the north of the Nairobi National Park, in the eastern suburbs of Kenya’s capital city, is a vision of one of Bosch’s hells, albeit brought right up to date. It is the Dandora rubbish dump. It lies just a few miles from the splendid giraffes and lions of the national park but is in reality a million miles away. Dandora is a poor suburb established in the late 1970s, ironically with money from the World Bank to provide a higher standard of housing. Something went awry in implementing this aim. Bracketed between the Nairobi River to the north and east, and the John Osogo Road to the south and east, the Dandora rubbish dump covers some 30 acres, about four times the surface area of the Acropolis in Athens. Each day about two-thirds of Nairobi’s daily waste, some 2,000 tonnes, are delivered to the site on an endless conveyor of trucks from the city. This waste includes the surplus food from the airline flights that arrived at the international airport that morning. A row of mechanical diggers forms a kind of welcoming party as the waste arrives, as if in some scene from a post-apocalyptic Terminator movie. The food scraps are quickly picked over by hundreds of people who make a living from the dump. Some of the food is recycled for human use, but most ends up in bags for animal feed, sold for the equivalent of a few pennies. Metres-thick layers of rubbish have accumulated since the 1970s, including discarded syringes that poke out of the rubbish underfoot. The Nairobi River is slowly eating into this dump from the northern side and the debris then flows downstream into the city, carrying with it a cocktail of pollutants, quietly returning the rubbish to where it came from. When the rubbish is burned, the site reeks of noxious gases. Nevertheless, many people scratch a living here, assembling the rubbish into neat piles of plastic and metal that can be sold to make a living of a few dollars a month. If this scene was not Boschian enough, the waste is picked over by a small army of primeval-looking Marabou storks, each standing about a metre tall. Their bald heads identify them as carrion birds: being featherless, these heads are not clogged by blood and tissue as they ferret inside the carcasses of dead animals. To add to this menagerie, pigs roll in the mud and dirt, whilst gaunt men pick their way across the rubbish heaps, gnawing on discarded animal joints from downtown Nairobi restaurants.

Dandora is what planet Earth might look like when humans have nearly used everything up, when all of Earth’s delights have been consumed, and nobody has thought to recycle anything for future generations. Dandora is not yet quite ‘used up’. There is the plastic to recycle, and the tin cans, and discarded animal fat to be scraped off plastic bags and reused, and oxygen to breathe, though at night the acrid smoke from burning rubbish seeps into the homes of people living in the adjoining suburbs. Even so, this nearly used-up world of foul-smelling gases and discarded materials is still, by normal planetary standards, a marvellous gem in this universe. It is still a place of tough and resistant biology, infinitely more diverse ecologically than barren Mars, where wistful scientists dream of sending space missions to colonize a desert. Around the Dandora dumpsite, tobacco plants grow. These have strange chemistries preserved in their leaves that record the history of chemical contamination at the site. Metals like lead, cadmium, and chromium in the tobacco make smoking cigarettes made here a yet more hazardous business.¹⁸ The bacteria that live at the Dandora dump are even stranger still. Many are pathogens, waiting to re-enter the nearby human population and then spread out into the city and beyond.¹⁹ These include strains resistant to bactericides amongst the medical waste of the site. Like the humans that inhabit Dandora, these microbes show the ability of life to overcome the most seemingly hostile of environments. And one day some might mutate, escape, and cause widespread human tragedy, just as the COVID-19 virus has.

There are thousands of Dandoras around the world. In richer parts of the world, the disposal of rubbish usually takes place more secretively, protected from curious eyes by guards and fences, the rubbish—without the opportunity for the impromptu recycling that Dandora has—being buried in enormous plastic-lined pits. Out of sight and out of mind, perhaps. But many of these sites are just as much ecological time-bombs as Dandora, as changing conditions—the erosive power of a rising sea level, for instance—can exhume our garbage, and bring us face to face with it again.

Dandora is a vision of our planet used up. That world would be a kind of gigantic field of discarded artefacts, human feedstock, and depopulated seas, combined with a huge waste bin. It is not just an Easter Island with no trees, but a whole world devastated. It is a world where there is nowhere left for us to dissolve back into our ecosystem and live sustainably with it again. Instead, it is a world where humanity’s impact rips through the Earth’s resources like a forest fire out of control, via a technosphere running its course.

The problem of the technosphere’s waste lies today, hence, and in the immediate decades, centuries, and millennia to come. It is now too indigestible, by far, for a diminished and ailing biosphere to cope with, and too abundant to be safely diluted by the hydrosphere and surface lithosphere. One might think of the plastic trash now drifting pretty much everywhere: much of it will sicken or kill the animals that mistake it for food, or that become trapped within it, before this new material is finally, safely, buried in some newly forming strata. Its waste gases are loading the atmosphere, too, to heat the planet and place further strain on its living organisms. And while the technosphere’s own metabolism grows and ever more rapidly evolves, this evolution has not yet led to a capacity for recycling its own materials at anything like the scale needed to maintain its own future, or that of the future of the biosphere from which it so recently emerged, and which it now parasitizes.

If the parasite is not to kill the host, this is among the most pressing tasks for us component humans to attend to—while we still have some influence on this phenomenon, simultaneously marvellous and monstrous, that we have helped to emerge as a major planetary force. As the technosphere’s grasp on the Earth System tightens, the consequences of its failure to recycle are growing.

But, there are ways of living that might help us to engineer human societies that live beneficially with nature. In the final chapter we ask how humans and the technosphere might coexist with what will remain of nature.