1. 30 percent of bee colonies: See U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Colony Collapse Disorder Progress Report” (2011), in which the Colony Collapse Disorder Steering Committee reports, “Annual surveys clearly show that overall colony losses continue to be as high as 30 percent or more since CCD began to be reported,” http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/ccd/ccdprogressreport2011.pdf.
2. amphibian crisis: D. B. Wake and V. T. Vredenburg, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction? A View from the World of Amphibians,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (2008): 11466–73.
3. E. O. Wilson estimates that 27,000 species of all kinds go extinct per year: I should note that Wilson’s estimate has been extremely controversial in the conservationist community, with some scientists strongly disagreeing with the way he reached this number. Still, most biologists who disagree with the size of the number do not disagree with the notion that we are seeing a rise in extinctions. The estimate comes from E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992).
4. coined in the 1990s by the paleontologist Richard Leakey: See Richard Leakey, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (New York: Anchor Press, 1996).
5. Elizabeth Kolbert has tirelessly reported on scientific evidence: Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction?” The New Yorker (May 25, 2009): 53.
6. when you meet Earth scientist Mike Benton: Personal interview, November 2010. Previously quoted in my article “How to Survive a Mass Extinction,” io9.com (Nov. 29, 2010), http://io9.com/5700371/how-to-survive-a-mass-extinction.
1. Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old: For a more detailed account of the origins of life on Earth that I summarize here, see Andrew H. Knoll, Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. and Roger Summons is one of them: Personal interview, August 22, 2011.
3. asked his student Dawn Sumner: P. F. Hoffman and D. P. Schrag, “The Snowball Earth Hypothesis,” Terra Nova, vol. 14, no. 3 (2002): 129–55.
4. I visited Kirschvink at the California Institute of Technology: Personal interview, October 11, 2011. You can read Kirschvink’s groundbreaking paper on Snowball Earth, “Late Proterozoic Low-Latitude Global Glaciation: The Snowball Earth,” in J. W. Schopf and C. Klein, eds., The Proterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). It’s also available online here: http://www.gps.caltech.edu/users/jkirschvink/pdfs/firstsnowball.pdf.
5. Bill McKibben, who argues in his book Eaarth: Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010).
6. In a remarkable paper published in Nature: Anthony Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471 (March 3, 2011): 51–57.
7. The statistician and paleontologist Charles Marshall: Personal interview, October 18, 2011.
1. Peter M. Sheehan, a geologist with the Milwaukee Public Museum: Peter M. Sheehan et al., “Understanding the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event (GOBE): Influences of Paleogeography, Paleoclimate, or Paleoecology?” GSA Today, v. 19, no. 4/5 (April/May 2009).
2. “We are seeing a mechanism that changed”: Young said this through a press release from Ohio State University about his NSF-funded research. See Pam Frost Gorder, “Appalachian Mountains, Carbon Dioxide Caused Long-Ago Global Cooling,” Ohio State University Research News (October 25, 2006).
3. Adrian Melott, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas: Personal interview, September 27, 2011. For more information on the gamma-ray theory and the 63-million-year cycle, you can read A. Melotte et al., “Did a Gamma-Ray Burst Initiate the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction?” International Journal of Astrobiology 3 (2004): 55, and Robert A. Rohde and Richard A. Muller, “Cycles in Fossil Diversity,” Nature 434 (March 10, 2005): 208–10.
4. Donald Canfield conducted a study of the atmosphere: Donald E. Canfield, et al., “Devonian Rise in Atmospheric Oxygen Correlated to the Radiations of Terrestrial Plants and Large Predatory Fish,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107 (October 19, 2010): 17911–15.
5. Alycia Stigall, has a theory that could explain: Personal interview, September 22, 2011. See also Alycia Stigall, “Invasive Species and Biodiversity Crises: Testing the Link in the Late Devonian,” PLoS One 5(12) (2010): e15584.
1. Paul Renne, the center’s head geologist: Personal interview, October 4, 2011. See also Paul Renne et al., “Synchrony and Causal Relations Between Permian-Triassic Boundary Crises and Siberian Flood Volcanism,” Science 269 (September 8, 1995): 1413–16.
2. Jonathan Payne, a geologist at Stanford: Personal interview, November 7, 2011. See also Payne and his colleagues’ paper on this topic: Jonathan L. Payne et al., “Calcium Isotope Constraints on the End-Permian Mass Extinction,” PNAS 107 (May 11, 2010): 8543–48.
3. The Permian expert Mike Benton: For a terrific account of what happened during the Permian mass extinction, see Michael J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003).
4. For answers, I visited Peter Roopnarine, a zoologist: Personal interview, November 21, 2011. See also P. D. Roopnarine, “Ecological Modeling of Paleocommunity Food Webs,” in G. Dietl and K. Flessa, eds., Conservation Paleobiology, The Paleontological Society Papers 15 (2009).
1. “It is very hard to imagine what happened”: Personal interview, February 1, 2012. For more about what might have happened directly after the bolide impact, see Jan Smit et al., “The Aftermath of the Cretaceous-Paleogene Bolide Impact,” Geophysical Research Abstracts 13 (2011): 12724. And for Smit and his colleagues’ original groundbreaking paper about the bolide impact, see Jan Smit et al., “An Extraterrestrial Event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary,” Nature 285 (May 22, 1980).
2. Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction: Though most mass extinctions are usually referred to using the geological periods they ended (such as the Permian mass extinction, or the Ordovician mass extinction), the K-T mass extinction is known by a name that refers to two geological periods, the Cretaceous (which follows the Jurassic) and the Tertiary. These are two names for roughly the same period of geological time, which was ended by a mass extinction. Welcome to the weirdness of geological nomenclature, which is a confusing mix of older and newer names, some of which refer to overlapping stretches of time. Making things even more complex are the many names for geological periods used in Asia and other regions of the world. Some paleontologists prefer to call this extinction the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-P) mass extinction, because the Paleogene is the period that comes after the Cretaceous. However, you’re more likely to hear the mass extinction called K-T, so I’ve chosen to call it that here.
3. “iridium anomaly”: See the Alvarezes’ first paper on this subject here: L. W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, F. Asaro, and H. V. Michel, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Science 208 (1980): 1095–1108.
4. Princeton geologist Gerta Keller began publishing papers: Personal interview, September 23, 2011. See also her papers about the discoveries she made in India: G. Keller et al., “Deccan Volcanism Linked to the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Mass Extinction: New Evidence from ONGC Wells in the Krishna-Godavari Basin,” Journal of the Geological Society of India 78 (2011): 399–428; and G. Keller et al., “Environmental Effects of Deccan Volcanism Across the Cretaceous–Tertiary Transition in Meghalaya, India,” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 310 (October 2011): 272–85.
5. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall said: Personal interview, October 18, 2011. Marshall made this comment after I asked him what he thought of Keller’s theories.
6. Smit told the BBC: This comment comes from an interview Smit did with the BBC program Horizon, in the episode “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?” You can read a transcript here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dino_trans.shtml.
7. the dinosaurs died of fungal infections: See Arturo Casadevall, “Fungal Virulence, Vertebrate Endothermy, and Dinosaur Extinction: Is There a Connection?” Fungal Genetics and Biology 42 (2005): 98–106.
8. Brown University geologist Jessica Whiteside put it: Personal interview, January 12, 2012. See also: J. H. Whiteside, P. E. Olsen, D. V. Kent, S. J. Fowell, and M. Et-Touhami, “Synchrony Between the CAMP and the Triassic-Jurassic Mass-Extinction Event? Reply to Comment of Marzoli et al,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, and Palaeoecology 262 (2008): 194–98.
9. CAMP: A helpful map of the CAMP eruption can be found here: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/science_math/res_area/geology/camp/Fig1.jpg.
10. Jennifer McElwain, a paleobotanist at University College Dublin: Personal interview, January 16, 2012.
11. dinofuzz: See Ryan C. McKellar et al., “A Diverse Assemblage of Late Cretaceous Dinosaur and Bird Feathers from Canadian Amber,” Science 16 (2011): 1619–22.
12. they may have been social, like birds: See, for example, D. J. Varricchio, Paul C. Sereno, Zhao Xijin, Tan Lin, Jeffery A. Wilson, and Gabrielle H. Lyon, “Mud-Trapped Herd Captures Evidence of Distinctive Dinosaur Sociality,” Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 53 (2008): 567–78.
1. University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins: Personal interview, February 9, 2012. See also Dennis Jenkins et al., “Clovis Age Western Stemmed Projectile Points and Human Coprolites at the Paisley Caves,” Science 337 (2012): 223–28.
2. UC Berkeley biologist Anthony Barnosky has been at the forefront: Personal interview, October 18, 2011.
3. March 3, 2011, issue of Nature: Anthony Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471 (2011): 51–57.
4. Peter Ward, a geologist at the University of Washington: Personal interview, September 27, 2011. See also Peter Ward, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2009).
1. “effective population size”: For more on this concept, see Matthew B. Hamilton’s valuable primer Population Genetics (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), plus you can find a good introduction to this idea in R. Kliman, B. Sheehy, and J. Schultz, “Genetic Drift and Effective Population Size,” Nature Education 1 (2008).
2. human effective population size: N. Takahata, Y. Satta, and J. Klein, “Divergence Time and Population Size in the Lineage Leading to Modern Humans,” Theoretical Population Biology 48 (October 1995): 198–221.
3. Toba catastrophe: Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).
4. But, as John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, put it to me: Personal interview, November 29, 2011.
5. according to the anthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History: Personal interview, December 13, 2011.
6. we were part of a hominin group: Most of the evolutionary history I describe here comes from Richard Klein’s indispensable evolutionary biology text The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins (Third Edition) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In this book I’m following today’s accepted scientific practice of referring to humans and our ancestors as “hominins.” Hominids include the greater group of humans and apes (and their ancestors).
7. But as the Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein told me: Personal interview, November 30, 2011.
8. but the University of Utah geneticist Chad Huff recently argued: Chad Huff et al., “Mobile Elements Reveal Small Population Size in the Ancient Ancestors of Homo Sapiens,” PNAS 107 (February 2, 2010): 2147–52.
9. As Hawks explained in a paper he published with colleagues in 2000: Hawks et al., “Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 17 (2000): 2–22.
10. That’s how speciation creates a genetic bottleneck: It’s worth noting that the definition of “species” can get as messy as evolution itself. For example, two classes of species may look similar but have very different genetic backgrounds, like bats (from the class Mammalia) and birds (from the class Aves); two species can crossbreed and produce viable offspring, like bonobos and chimps; and two very different-looking animals might actually be the same species at different stages in their development, like tadpoles and frogs. Scientists who study phylogeny, the family trees that define a species, use many rubrics to draw boundaries between species, but there are no absolute rules. But when two groups’ genetic makeup, body shape, and behaviors diverge enough, they are generally said to be separate species. There is a great deal of debate over where to draw species lines between ancient human groups, but we can say for certain that today’s H. sapiens descended from a pretty small genetic pool—and speciation could be part of what made that pool smaller.
11. his book Prehistoric Art: Randall White, Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind (New York: Abrams, 2003).
12. In his book The Mating Mind: Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
13. The 10,000 Year Explosion: Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
14. humans bred themselves to be the ultimate survivors: It seems counterintuitive to say that we’re survivors when most of us have been taught that genetic diversity is vital to species health. Does our low genetic diversity mean that we’re weaker than other species? In some cases, as we’ll see later, it can be a vulnerability. However, the kind of inbreeding that creates low effective population size is not the same thing as inbreeding between close relatives like a brother and sister, which can result in genetic defects. Indeed, as Murdoch University’s geneticists Alan Bittles and Michael Black point out in a paper about human “consanguinity,” or inbreeding, it was long considered acceptable for second cousins and more distant relatives to marry in Western cultures—and is still common in many parts of the world. Such marriages have few deleterious effects, and as we’ve seen, these traditions grow out of what is probably a very ancient human practice in founder populations. Inbreeding between distant relatives seems to be the human norm.
15. DNA extracted from the fossils of Neanderthals and other hominins: Svante Pääbo et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome,” Science 328 (May 7, 2010): 710–22.
1. Neanderthals used tools and fire: See Brian Fagan, Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011).
2. Neanderthals were mostly meat-eaters: Fagan, Cro-Magnon.
3. Richard Klein: Personal interview, November 30, 2011.
4. possibly with red hair: The possibility of some Neanderthals having pale skin and red hair is raised in Carles Lalueza-Fox et al., “A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals,” Science 318 (2007): 1453–55.
5. Many Neanderthal skeletons are distorted by broken bones that healed: Joe Alper, “Rethinking Neanderthals,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 2003).
6. a generous estimate: John Hawks, personal correspondence, October 9, 2012.
7. many scientists believe: V. Fabre, S. Condemi, and A. Degioanni, “Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups Among Neanderthals,” PLoS ONE 4 (2009): e5151.
8. A 60,000-year-old Neanderthal grave: Jennifer Viegas, “Did Neanderthals Believe in an Afterlife?” Discovery News (April 20, 2011).
9. Neanderthals talked or even sang: See Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
10. two dominant theories: John Relethford, “Genetics of Modern Human Origins and Diversity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27, (1998): 1–23.
11. Rebecca Cann and her colleagues found a way to support: Rebecca L. Cann et al., “Microbial DNA and Human Evolution,” Nature 325 (1987): 31–36.
12. Popularized by Wolpoff and his colleague John Hawks: See Milford Wolpoff and John Hawks, “Modern Human Origins,” Science 241 (August 12, 1988): 772–74.
13. “out of Africa” migration is based on an artificial political boundary: According to Clive Finlayson, who writes, “The first proto-humans would have gradually expanded into favorable habitats wherever these were.” Clive Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
14. Hawks has presented compelling genetic evidence: John Hawks, Gregory Cochran, Henry C. Harpending, and Bruce T. Lahn, “A Genetic Legacy from Archaic Homo,” Trends in Genetics 24 (January 2008): 19–23.
15. the truth lies somewhere in between African replacement and multiregionalism: The middle-of-the-road take on all this is often dubbed the “assimilation theory.” Anthropologist Vinayak Eswaran (see Vinayak Eswaran et al., “Genomics Refutes an Exclusively African Origin of Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 49 [July 2005]: 1–18) and his colleagues take this perspective in a paper in which they argue that genetic evidence suggests that there were two distinct waves of immigration out of Africa—the archaic human one and the H. sapiens one. But as H. sapiens moved out into the world, they assimilated the local Neanderthal peoples, along with their other cousin H. erectus in Asia.
So basically, in the assimilation-theory model, H. sapiens didn’t destroy their kindred, nor were they deeply interrelated with them as in the multiregional theory. They met them as strangers, but forged alliances and formed families with them. Gradually, though, H. sapiens became the dominant culture.
16. Simon Armitage published a paper suggesting that H. sapiens emerged from Africa: Simon Armitage et al., “The Southern Route ‘Out of Africa’: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia,” Science 331 (2011): 453–56.
17. Svante Pääbo, who led the Neanderthal DNA sequencing project: Svante Pääbo et al., “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual,” Science 338 (October 2012): 222–26.
1. wiped out over 60 percent of the population of the British Isles: Ole Jørgen Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, U.K.: The Boydell Press, 2004).
2. The son of a wealthy wine merchant, Chaucer grew up: All the biographical details here come from Larry Benson, Robert Pratt, and F. N. Robinson, eds., The Riverside Chaucer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
3. our own growing societies: We see the first stirrings of modern global culture during the late Middle Ages in Europe, when a growing middle class began laying the foundations for capitalism and global trade communities. As the sociologist Anthony Giddens would have it, this was the moment when the premodern era gave way to the modern. In a sense, today’s world is part of a narrative arc that began during Chaucer’s time. Before that era, urban or global cultures still tended to be exceptions.
Probably the closest historical analogy to the global culture that began stirring to life during Chaucer’s time would have been that of the Silk Road trade route that crossed from China into Europe for over a millennium. Still, the Silk Road culture was also a localized phenomenon, accessible only to nearby regions. Within a few hundred years of Chaucer’s time, the oceans became in essence an enormous Silk Road, uniting every continent in the world.
4. Jo Hays, a historian at Loyola University whose work focuses on pandemics: Personal interview, October 2011.
5. Likewise, the common people began questioning government authorities: Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1983), especially chapter 5.
6. After the Black Death, there was a rise: Frances and Joseph Gies, Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).
7. SUNY Albany anthropologist Sharon DeWitte: Personal interview, November 30, 2011.
8. sequenced bacterial DNA: Kirsten I. Bos et al., “A Draft Genome of Yersinia pestis from Victims of the Black Death,” Nature 478 (October 27, 2011): 506–10.
9. New York University’s literary historian Ernest Gilman: Personal interview, February 15, 2012. See also Ernest Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
10. In the late 1990s, Jared Diamond argued: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999, originally published in hardback in 1997). Diamond’s argument about the Americas is contained in a couple of chapters where he discusses the conquest of the massive Incan army by Pizarro’s small band of hooligans. Though very much aware of how plagues also played into this scenario, Diamond focuses in these chapters most heavily on how the Inca lacked steel and writing.
11. As Charles Mann explains in his book 1491: See Charles Mann, 1491: The Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Vintage, 2005), especially part one, where Mann discusses how historians have arrived at the 90 percent number I mention a few paragraphs later.
12. only today finally being deciphered: One of the main places this decipherment is being done is at the Khipu Database Project at Harvard University. Scholars involved have identified several ways that the knots convey meaning, including size, orientation, color, and shape. They’ve already figured out the numbering system and are now moving on to the written language. You can learn more about the project here: http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/.
13. Arizona State University forensic archaeologist Jane Buikstra: Personal interview, February 14, 2012.
14. Paul Kelton, of the University of Kansas: Personal interview, February 2012. See also Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast 1492–1715 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
15. David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical doctor, sums up the issues: David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (October 2003): 703–42.
16. Susan Kent explains in her recent book about the 1918–19 flu epidemic: Susan Kent, The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2013).
17. native cultures and peoples have survived throughout the Americas: Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
1. Famines have been recorded in historical documents: Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009).
2. Cormac Ó Gráda has spent most of his career: Personal interview, December 8, 2011.
3. This famine had its roots in politics: John O’Rourke, The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (Dublin: James Duffy and Co., Ltd., 1902). This is a fascinating account by a man who gathered together many first-person accounts of the famine, mostly from interviews he did with survivors in the late nineteenth century. He credits “the public press” as being one of the first groups to alert the world to the famine, and place it in a political context.
4. Amartya Sen first advanced this theory in the 1980s: Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
5. Evan Fraser, a geographer at the University of Guelph: Personal interview, February 16, 2012. See also Evan Fraser, “Social Vulnerability and Ecological Fragility: Building Bridges Between Social and Natural Sciences Using the Irish Potato Famine as a Case Study,” Conservation Ecology 7 (2003): 9.
6. According to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor: I’ve pulled these numbers from publicly available statistics on the summer 2012 Midwest drought, available from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in its August 2012 State of the Climate drought report. This document is available online here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/#national-overview.
7. Newcastle University historian and demographer Violetta Hionidou: Personal interview, February 15, 2012. See also Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8. University of Hong Kong history professor Frank Dikötter: Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker and Company, 2011).
9. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent models: You can see these predictions in S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor, and H. L. Miller, eds., Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). It is online at http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html.
10. “You get a famine if the price of food”: Personal correspondence, February 14, 2012.
1. Stories about how cool it is to rip: Yes, I’m joking a little bit here—I don’t think anybody actually talks about ripping faces off in the Old Testament, but there is a lot of chopping off of various body parts and driving stakes through people’s heads and similarly graphic violence against enemies. In Assyrian cuneiform tablets, which were often erected as ceremonial stelae or monoliths in celebration of various kings, it was standard practice to praise the current leader by recounting all his battle victories. Indeed, we get some of the first historical accounts of the Jewish people in one of these stelae, in the Louvre’s collection. On it, King Sargon talks about how great it was to capture and kill thousands of Jews from the northern kingdom of Israel, called Samaria. It’s important to remember that this kind of writing was part of the style of national monuments of the era, and probably didn’t reflect the common people’s sentiments or even the sentiments of the people writing. They were patriotic documents, intended as propaganda. But it was against the backdrop of this kind of propaganda that Exodus was written and compiled, which makes many aspects of the story quite remarkable.
2. In modern parlance, the term “diaspora”: William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1991). See also Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction—Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008).
3. UC Berkeley archaeologist Carol Redmount: “Bitter Lives: Israel In and Out of Egypt,” from The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1998).
4. But then in the eighth century: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: The Free Press, 2001).
5. adopting the local language, Aramaic: “Into Exile: From the Assyrian Conquest of Israel to the Fall of Babylon,” Mordechai Cogan, from The Oxford History of the Biblical World (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1998).
6. Yehudim, or Jews: Ibid.
7. As geneticist David Goldstein notes in his book: David B. Goldstein, Jacob’s Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).
8. we know from contemporary sources: Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Roman Policy Towards the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome During the First Century C.E.,” Classical Antiquity, vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1994): 56–74.
9. Ostrer wanted to know: Personal interview, April 6, 2012.
10. researchers at the Jewish HapMap project scoured their data: See Gil Atzmon, Li Hao, Itsik Pe’er, Christopher Velez, Alexander Pearlman et al., “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry,” The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 (June 11, 2010): 850–59. You can also read Harry Ostrer’s popular account of their work in Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
11. hints about where people’s ancestors settled in the diaspora: Scientists can even narrow down the time period when different groups likely split up and headed in different directions. Earlier in this book, we talked about how evolutionary biologists tracking the origins of Homo sapiens can trace the divergence of two species by looking at DNA shared between them and assuming a fixed rate of mutation, or change over time. The divergence of two or more haplotypes can be traced the same way. Syrian Jews and Eastern European Jews, for example, share many long strands of DNA. But in the centuries since those two groups split apart, those strands have accumulated a lot of random mutations. Assuming a fixed rate of mutation over time, scientists like Ostrer can estimate that the two groups likely split up roughly 2,500 years ago. And, by looking at the geographical distribution of haplotypes over Europe, some scientists have even started to track migration paths. See W. Y. Yang, J. Novembre, E. Eskin, and E. Halperin, “A Model-Based Approach for Analysis of Spatial Structure in Genetic Data,” Nature Genetics 44 (2012): 725–31.
12. once again sent Jews running: Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
13. A group of Portuguese anthropologists: Inês Nogueiro, Licínio Manco, Verónica Gomes, António Amorim, and Leonor Gusmão, “Phylogeographic Analysis of Paternal Lineages in NE Portuguese Jewish Communities,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 141 (March 2010): 373–81.
14. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Reissued Edition) (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993).
1. Its subsequent 3.5-billion-year career: T. N. Taylor and E. L. Taylor, The Biology and Evolution of Fossil Plants (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993).
2. cyano evolved inside other cells: This account of plant-cell evolution is called endosymbiotic theory, and originated over a century ago. Today it’s fairly widely accepted and is backed by genetic evidence. See, for example, Geoffrey I. McFadden and Giel G. van Dooren, “Evolution: Red Algal Genome Affirms a Common Origin of All Plastids,” Current Biology 14 (July 13, 2004): R514–16.
3. Brett Neilan, a biologist at the University of New South Wales: Personal interview, January 15, 2012.
4. circadian rhythms of light and dark: Hideo Iwasaki and Takao Kondo, “The Current State and Problems of Circadian Clock Studies in Cyanobacteria,” Plant Cell Physiology 41 (2000): 1013–20.
5. ubiquitous and sustainable: At least until the Sun incinerates the Earth in about a billion years.
6. One of these scientists is physicist-turned-biologist Himadri Pakrasi: Personal interviews, January 6 and March 8, 2012.
7. “You know why most plants are green?”: Personal interview, March 9, 2012.
8. Environmental engineer Richard Axelbaum: Personal interview, March 8, 2012.
9. As a result, the only by-products: S. A. Skeen, B. M. Kumfer, and R. L. Axelbaum, “Nitric Oxide Emissions During Coal and Coal/Biomass Combustion Under Air-fired and Oxy-fuel Conditions,” Energy & Fuels 24 (2010): 4144–52.
10. his team made an incredible breakthrough: Anindita Bandyopadhyay, Jana Stöckel, Hongtao Min, Louis A. Sherman, and Himadri B. Pakrasi, “High Rates of Photobiological H2 Production by a Cyanobacterium Under Aerobic Conditions,” Nature Communications 1 (December 14, 2010).
11. Steven Chu has talked about replacing the oil economy: “The Alternative Choice: Steven Chu Wants to Save the World by Transforming Its Largest Industry: Energy,” The Economist (July 2, 2009).
1. Charles Melville Scammon wrote about his experiences hunting grays: Charles Melville Scammon, The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America (San Francisco: JH Carmany, and New York: Putnam, 1874). Full text available via the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/marinemammalsofn00scam.
2. Their brains “sleep”: Most scientists believe that gray whales, like other cetaceans, experience “unihemispheric slow wave sleep,” where only one hemisphere of the brain “sleeps” at a time. Whales also experience little to no REM sleep. See, for example, Oleg I. Lyamin, Paul R. Manger, Sam H. Ridgway, Lev M. Mukhametov, and Jerome M. Siegel, “Cetacean Sleep: An Unusual Form of Mammalian Sleep,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 32 (October 2008): 1451–84.
3. 2.5 million years ago: N. D. Pyenson and D. R. Lindberg, “What Happened to Gray Whales during the Pleistocene? The Ecological Impact of Sea-Level Change on Benthic Feeding Areas in the North Pacific Ocean,” PLoS ONE 6 (2011): e21295.
4. Harvey, now a professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories: Personal interview, February 2, 2012. All subsequent quotes from Harvey are from this interview.
5. grays are migrating later in the year: John Upton, “Scientists Look Far to the North to Explain Young Whale in San Francisco Bay,” New York Times (March 17, 2012).
6. got caught in the frozen Artic in 1988: This story is recounted by the journalist Tom Rose, in his book Big Miracle (Reprint) (New York: St. Martins, 2011). Originally published in 1989, under the title Freeing the Whales: How the Media Created the World’s Greatest Non-Event.
7. A large group of grays lived in the Atlantic for thousands of years: Scott Noakes, “Georgia’s Pleistocene Atlantic Gray Whales,” Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary, http://graysreef.noaa.gov/science/research/gray_whale/welcome.html.
8. 20,000–30,000 individuals: This number is a point of some debate, as populations change every year, and the only way we can count them is by observing how many different individuals pass by observation stations along the Pacific Coast. The number that scientists seem to agree on most is 22,000 individuals, based on average numbers from data collected over the past two decades. The population is growing by over 2 percent every year, and in 2012 over 200 babies were born. I’m basing my numbers on two sources: S. Elizabeth Alter, Eric Rynes, and Stephen Palumbi, “DNA Evidence for Historic Population Size and Past Ecosystem Impacts of Gray Whales,” PNAS 104 (September 18, 2007): 15162–67, and the annual population estimate reports issued by NOAA, which collects data from several observation stations along the coast from Alaska to Mexico (http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/sars/).
9. Korean-Okhotsk grays: O. Yu. Tyurneva, Yu. M. Yakovlev, V. V. Vertyankin, and N. I. Selin, “The Peculiarities of Foraging Migrations of the Korean-Okhotsk Gray Whale (Eschrichtius robustus) Population in Russian Waters of the Far Eastern Seas,” Russian Journal of Marine Biology 36 (March 2010): 117–24.
10. in 1949 the newly formed International Whaling Commission: The IWC was established in 1946, and included several member states such as the United States, Japan, and the then Soviet Union. You can see a record of every annual meeting online (http://www.iwcoffice.org/meetings/historical.htm). What’s interesting about this and other early conservation groups is that it combined the interests of environmentalism with commercial interests. It’s also worth noting that some Inuit groups are still permitted to hunt a small number of grays every year.
11. Others argue, based on genetic data: Alter et al., “DNA Evidence for Historic Population Size.”
12. Several studies suggest that noise pollution: Many of these studies are collected in Scott D. Kraus and Rosalind M. Rolland, eds., The Urban Whale: North Atlantic Whales at the Crossroads (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007).
1. “To try to foretell the future”: Octavia Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Essence (May 2000).
2. Butler recalled visitors making casually racist remarks: Octavia Butler, “Octavia Butler’s Aha! Moment,” O, The Oprah Magazine (May 2002).
3. Devil Girl from Mars: Octavia Butler, “Devil Girl from Mars: Why I Write Science Fiction,” MIT Communications Forum, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/butler.html.
4. In her trilogy of novels called Lilith’s Brood: Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000). Original trilogy of novels published in 1987, ’88, and ’89.
5. Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000). Originally published in 1993. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000). Originally published in 1998.
6. “I used to despise religion”: “Octavia Butler: Persistence,” Locus (June 2000).
7. “There’s no single answer”: Octavia Butler, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future.”
1. In the past decade, the number of people on Earth living in cities: The highlights of “World Urbanization Prospects” (last revised April 2012), a U.N. Report on population demographics in cities, gives us this statistic, adding that “urban dwellers will likely account for 86 percent of the population in the more developed regions and for 64 percent of that in the less developed regions.” You can view the U.N.’s World Urbanization Prospects report, and the data that informs it, on the U.N. website at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm.
2. The World Without Us: Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).
3. It would require us to regulate the bodies of billions of women: I am talking here about what it would take to lower the population over the next half century. Many studies have shown that birth rates plummet dramatically in countries where women receive the same educational and economic opportunities as men. It is my fervent hope that over the long term, women’s equality with men around the world will lead to a population size that is better adapted to the Earth’s environment. Until that happens, however, we must accept that our population is growing and prepare for it.
4. Jane Jacobs, in her groundbreaking 1961 book: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
5. Some call it an emergent property: See, for example, Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2002).
6. And the fantasy author Fritz Leiber dubbed it “megapolisomancy”: This is from Fritz Leiber’s incredible 1977 urban fantasy novella about San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness.
7. “battle suits for surviving the future”: Matt Jones, “The City Is a Battle Suit for Surviving the Future,” io9.com (September 20, 2009), http://io9.com/5362912/the-city-is-a-battlesuit-for-surviving-the-future.
8. Anthropologist Monica L. Smith, who researches the development of cities: Monica L. Smith, ed., “Introduction,” The Social Construction of Ancient Cities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003).
9. Spiro Kostof suggested the same thing: Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1991).
10. Cities were born in two very different regions of the world: A helpful primer on ancient Peruvian cities can be found in Kimberly Munro, “Ancient Peru: The First Cities,” Popular Archaeology 3 (March 18, 2011). And my information about ancient Mesopotamian cities and their relationship to agriculture comes from Charles Gates, Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome (Second Edition) (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
11. Ian Hodder, who has led excavations at Çatalhöyük: Ian Hodder and Craig Cessford, “Daily Practice and Social Memory at Çatalhöyük,” American Antiquity 69 (January 2004).
12. Anthropologist Elizabeth Stone has been excavating ancient cities: Personal interview, April 25, 2012.
13. The differences between ancient and medieval cities are just as stark: For much more nuanced representations of historical urban development, see Kostof, The City Shaped; Josef W. Konvitz, The Urban Millennium: The City-Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); and Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1996).
14. As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser puts it in his book: Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).
15. Urban geographer Richard Walker believes the San Francisco Bay Area provides: Personal interview, June 16, 2012. For Walker’s insights into San Francisco as an environmental city, see also his book The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007).
1. experimental reconnaissance robots: See, for example, “Robots Converge on Disaster City,” Disaster Preparedness and Response: TEEX (March 22, 2010), http://www.teex.org/teex.cfm?pageid=USARresc&area=USAR&storyid=984&templateid=23.
2. At Oregon State’s tsunami lab: Officially called the O. H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, the facility makes its data publicly available so that other researchers can build simulations based on what other scientists have learned about wave behaviors. A good example of how this data-sharing works can be found in this paper: T. E. Baldock, D. Cox, T. Maddux, J. Killian, and L. Fayler, “Kinematics of Breaking Tsunami Wavefronts: A Data Set from Large Scale Laboratory Experiments,” Coastal Engineering 56 (May–June 2009).
3. I met the UC Berkeley civil engineer Shakhzod Takhirov inside a three-story warehouse: Personal interview, February 16, 2012.
4. Richard Iverson has created hundreds of landslides to learn more: Personal interview, June 26, 2012. You can also see an incredible collection of videos from Iverson’s experiments on the USGS Debris Flow Flume site: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1315/.
5. George Thomas, a former structural engineer: All comments are from his public presentation “Smarter Cities,” at Washington University in St. Louis (March 7, 2012).
6. Japan was unprepared for the calamity: Emily Rauhala, “How Japan Became a Leader in Disaster Preparation,” Time (March 11, 2011).
1. David Blythe manages health surveillance for the Maryland public-health department: Personal interview, January 26, 2012.
2. “In this classic urban-plague scenario”: N. C. Stenseth, B. B. Atshabar, M. Begon, S. R. Belmain, E. Bertherat et al., “Plague: Past, Present, and Future,” PLoS Medicine 5 (2008): e3.
3. In its report, the WHO speculated: “WHO Issues Consensus Document on the Epidemiology of SARS” (October 17, 2003), http://www.who.int/csr/sars/archive/epiconsensus/en/.
4. Tini Garske is a mathematician and researcher with the Imperial College London’s: T. Garske, H. Yu, Z. Peng, M. Ye, H. Zhou et al., “Travel Patterns in China,” PLoS ONE 6 (2011): e16364.
5. “SARS quarantine in Toronto was both inefficient and ineffective”: Richard Schabas, “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome: Did Quarantine Help?” Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases and Medical Microbiology 15 (July–August 2004): 204.
6. Brian Coburn, and his colleagues claim that school closures: Brian J. Coburn, Bradley G. Wagner, and Sally Blower, “Modeling Influenza Epidemics and Pandemics: Insights into the Future of Swine Flu (H1N1),” BMC Medicine 7 (2009): 30.
7. Laura Matrajt, a mathematician at the University of Washington in Seattle: L. Matrajt and I. M. Longini, Jr., “Optimizing Vaccine Allocation at Different Points in Time during an Epidemic,” PLoS ONE 5 (2010): e13767.
8. Dr. Tadataka Yamada of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Tadataka Yamada, “Poverty, Wealth, and Access to Pandemic Influenza Vaccines,” New England Journal of Medicine 361 (2009):1129–31.
9. Robert Moss is an immunization researcher: R. Moss, J. M. McCaw, and J. McVernon, “Diagnosis and Antiviral Intervention Strategies for Mitigating an Influenza Epidemic,” PLoS One 6 (February 4, 2011): e14505.
10. Joseph Wu says his models show that countries should always “hedge”: J. T. Wu, A. Ho, E.S.K. Ma, C. K. Lee, D.K.W. Chu et al., “Estimating Infection Attack Rates and Severity in Real Time during an Influenza Pandemic: Analysis of Serial Cross-Sectional Serologic Surveillance Data,” PLoS Medicine 8 (2011): e1001103.
1. frying the ozone layer off: I’m getting my account of the effects of a gamma-ray burst from astronomer Phil Plait’s excellent chapter on the subject in Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the World Will End…(New York: Viking, 2008).
2. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) complex beneath Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain: These days, NORAD has been relocated to another facility and the underground city is run by a skeleton crew. Nuclear weapons technology has advanced enough that the city would likely not survive a direct attack.
3. raids from neighboring groups and from Muslims during the Crusades: See a historical account of the region in Spiro Kostof, Caves of God: The Monastic Environment of Byzantine Cappadocia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
4. a layer of concrete can provide more safety still: For an interesting discussion of the history of designs for radiation shielding, including contemporary thinking on the topic, see J. Kenneth Shultis and Richard E. Faw, “Radiation Shielding Technology,” Health Physics 88 (June 2005): 587–612. They point out that concrete is such a good material for most kinds of radiation shielding that it is one of the most widely studied substances for this purpose.
5. John Zacharias, a city-planning professor at Montréal’s Concordia University: Personal interview, June 5, 2012.
6. “stimulating, varied environments”: Raymond Sterling and John Carmody, Underground Space Design (New York: Wiley, 1993).
7. Agust Gudmundsson, a geology professor at Royal Holloway, University of London: Personal interview, June 26, 2012.
8. Dmitris Kaliampakos and Andreas Bernardos, two engineers who specialize in underground development: D. Kaliampakos and A. Bernardos, “Underground Space Development: Setting Modern Strategies,” WIT Transactions on the Built Environment 102 (2008).
9. RÉSO-like structures such as the one: You can see the full plans for this underground city, to be called Amfora, on Zwarts & Jansma Architects’ website: http://www.zwarts.jansma.nl/page/1597/en.
10. “Smoke—especially black, sooty smoke”: Alan Robock, “New Models Confirm Nuclear Winter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68 (September 1989): 66–74. Not much has changed since Robock published this article in terms of our understanding of how nuclear winter would work. Many climate scientists agree that a massive explosion would plunge the planet into unseasonable winter for at least a year. Interestingly, it’s likely a megavolcano would cause the same problems we face in a nuclear disaster—minus the radiation danger. See Alan Robock, “New START, Eyjafjallajökull, and Nuclear Winter,” Eos 91 (2010).
1. Raquel Pinderhughes, an urban planning professor at San Francisco State: Raquel Pinderhughes et al. offer a short account of the history of urban farming in Cuba in an essay called “Urban Agriculture in Havana, Cuba,” in Down to Earth (New Delhi: Centre for Science and the Environment, 2001).
2. “small-plot intensive farming” (SPIN): You can learn more about SPIN, and view a number of articles and videos about the system, on its website here: http://spinfarming.com/whatsSpin/.
3. skyscraper farms: See Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010).
4. A popular way to transform cities in Germany is by building green roofs: Not likely to be used as a food supply: Khandaker M. Shariful Islam, “Rooftop Gardening as a Strategy of Urban Agriculture for Food Security: The Case of Dhaka City, Bangladesh,” Acta Horticulturae 643 (2004).
Might help with reduction in cost of cooling buildings: S. Gaffin et al., “Energy Balance Modeling Applied to a Comparison of White and Green Roof Cooling Efficiency and Cool Surfaces and Shade Trees to Reduce Energy Use and Improve Air Quality in Urban Areas,” Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Proceedings (Washington, D.C.: Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, 2005).
Storm-water runoff: Doug Hutchinson, Peter Abrams, Ryan Retzlaff, and Tom Liptan, “Stormwater Monitoring Two Ecoroofs in Portland, Oregon, USA,” proceedings for Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference (Chicago: Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, 2003).
5. without burning coal: One of the big issues with variable power sources like solar and wind is storage. For an excellent and thorough treatment of how we could transition our energy infrastructure over to systems that rely partly on variable power, see Maggie Koerth-Baker’s excellent book Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, 2012).
6. MIT’s environmental-policy professor Judith Layzer: Personal interview, August 22, 2011.
7. vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate: One of the issues here is obviously the current trend toward a general warming of the global climate. Cities located in fertile areas could, in just a century, find themselves trapped in arid, drought-racked landscapes. This is something that land planners are already worried about, and are preparing for today. How do we build cities and farms that are ready for radical climate change? The environmental journalist Mark Hertsgaard deals with this extensively in Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
8. Amy McNally, a geography researcher with the group: Personal interview, February 27, 2012.
9. But it’s possible that our political priorities: How would we transform the political and social landscape to prioritize environmental concerns? This is an enormous question that is outside the scope of this book, but luckily many other thinkers have tackled it, including Judith Layzer in The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy (Third Edition) (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press College, 2011).
10. New York architect David Benjamin: Personal interview, April 5, 2012. For more about his AutoCAD-like software for biological design, you can look at the project website: http://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects/biocompevolution.
11. The students described BacillaFilla: For more about this substance, you can see the BacillaFilla project page here: http://2010.igem.org/Team:Newcastle.
12. synthetic-biology designer Rachel Armstrong’s: Personal interview, May 5, 2012.
13. who hope to use experimental proto-cells: Armstrong describes some of her work on the Venice reef in her e-book Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives (TED Books, 2012).
1. Bill McKibben and Mark Hertsgaard: See, for example, McKibben’s books The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989) and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010); and Hertsgaard’s Hot: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
2. Maggie Koerth-Baker points out: Maggie Koerth-Baker, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us (New York: Wiley, 2012).
3. Government representatives who attend the annual U.N. Climate Change Conferences: Currently, our most urgent task as a planet is to form international agreements that limit carbon emissions. The only certainty when it comes to climate change is that if we limit fossil-fuel use we will slow down the warming process that threatens to cause food shortages and the sixth mass extinction. We already have the technological ability to reduce carbon emissions. How we will do it politically and socially is outside the scope of this book, though it’s likely that the same international bodies regulating emissions will ultimately regulate any geoengineering projects we undertake.
4. “hack the planet,” as they say in science-fiction movies: I am, of course, referring to the famously silly (but undeniably awesome) 1990s movie Hackers, where two characters have a TV show called Hack the Planet.
5. Futurist Jamais Cascio: Personal interview, July 9, 2012. You can read Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering online: http://openthefuture.com/2009/02/hacking_the_earth.html.
6. sulfur-laced aerosol exhaust emitted: There are a number of studies showing a connection between ship aerosols and changes in the albedo of clouds. For example, P. A. Durkee et al., “The Impact of Ship-Produced Aerosols on the Microstructure and Albedo of Warm Marine Stratocumulus Clouds: A Test of MAST Hypotheses 1i and 1ii,” Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 57 (February 12, 1999): 2554–69. Using this as a form of geoengineering is discussed in part in Y.-C. Chen et al., “Occurrence of Lower Cloud Albedo in Ship Tracks,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 12 (2012): 13553–80. It remains unclear whether these ship aerosols are actually having a substantial effect on clouds and weather. See K. Peters et al., “A Search for Large-scale Effects of Ship Emissions on Clouds and Radiation in Satellite Data,” Journal of Geophysical Research 116 (2011): D24205.
7. One of its researchers is Simon Driscoll: Personal interview, May 11, 2012.
8. The Harvard physicist and public-policy professor David Keith: See David W. Keith, “Photophoretic Levitation of Engineered Aerosols for Geoengineering,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (September 7, 2010): 16428–31.
9. Driscoll’s colleagues at Oxford believe: See, for example, an experiment proposed by the group Driscoll works with, called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE), in which researchers have suggested they would accomplish atmospheric injection via a balloon tethered to the ocean: http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~hemh/SPICE/SPICE.htm.
10. Alan Robock has run a number of computer simulations: Alan Robock, “20 Reasons Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 62 (May/June 2008): 14–18.
11. During many of the experiments, however: This difficulty is explored in the Royal Society report Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (London: the Royal Society, 2009). More recent experiments with iron fertilization appear to work somewhat better than the ones described in the Royal Society report. See Victor Smetacek et al., “Deep Carbon Export from a Southern Ocean Iron-Fertilized Diatom Bloom,” Nature 487 (July 2012): 313–19. Smetacek and his colleagues report that the algae they worked with fell over 1,000 meters into the deep ocean, often finding its way into sediment on the ocean floor.
12. Tim Kruger, who heads the Oxford Martin School’s geoengineering efforts: Personal interview, May 10, 2012.
13. The Cambridge physicist David MacKay: See David MacKay, Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air (Cambridge: UIT Cambridge, Ltd., 2009).
1. Torino scale, a kind of Richter scale: Devised by MIT astronomer Richard Binzel in the late 1990s, the Torino scale is used to estimate the likelihood that an object will hit the Earth, as well as how much damage it might do. You can see a diagram of the Torino scale here: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/torino.cfm.
2. NASA launched an asteroid-spotting program called Spaceguard: Read more about Spaceguard at NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report.html.
3. bring them close to our own orbit: Generally, an object is classed as an NEO if its orbit is between 0.983 and 1.3 AU from the Sun. One AU (astronomical unit) is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 149,597,871 kilometers.
4. some near misses: For a complete list of every NEO that’s flown by since 1900, you can search NASA’s database here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_ca.
5. asteroid hunter Amy Mainzer calls one of the most hopeful: Personal interview, July 9, 2012.
6. she and her colleagues estimate: A. Mainzer et al., “Characterizing Subpopulations Within the Near-Earth Objects with NEOWISE: Preliminary Results,” Astrophysical Journal 752 (June 20, 2012): 110.
7. Run by aerospace engineer William Ailor: Personal interview, July 9, 2012.
8. a series of suggestions over the past 15 years for how we’d deal with asteroid threats: These include, among others, recommendations urging governments to gather more data on the locations of asteroids, create a governmental organization for “planetary defense,” fund tests to figure out how we could move an asteroid, and “include NEO impacts as possible disaster scenarios for disaster recovery and relief agencies.”
9. Ailor’s company, the Aerospace Corporation, did a study in 2004: You can read the entire study via NASA here: http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=139.
10. NASA’s Deep Impact mission: Learn more about Deep Impact via NASA here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html.
11. In an early paper about nuclear winter: Alan Robock, “Snow and Ice Feedbacks Prolong Effects of Nuclear Winter,” Nature 310 (1984): 667–70.
12. Alex Weir, a software engineer based in Zimbabwe: Download the database here: http://www.cd3wd.com/.
13. CD3WD and similar projects can help us restart civilization: One of these is Marcin Jakubowski’s Civilization Starter Kit project. It’s a free online resource (you can print it out to prepare for an asteroid strike) that will eventually contain all the information required to make 50 crucial farming machines and sustain a small village. Find out more here: http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php. A slightly different example is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located beneath the mountains on Norway’s remote Arctic island of Svalbard, where philanthropic and diplomatic groups have paid to build a massive underground structure for seed storage. It’s designed to be a backup copy of the planet’s ecosystems in the event of a dramatic crash in biological diversity, such as what you’d see after a global disaster like a PHO impact. See more at: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-vault.html?id=462220.
1. NASA has offered prizes of up to $2 million: Find out more about NASA’s Strong Tether Challenge, which offers up to $2 million to the team that creates an elevator cable strong enough to form the centerpiece of a space elevator, on the NASA website: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/centennial_challenges/tether/index.html.
Much like the X Prize, the Space Elevator Games are events where inventors compete for large cash prizes, in this case for viable models of space-elevator climbers and ribbon structures. ISEC, the International Space Elevator Consortium, is a group that holds annual conferences and prize giveaways for inventors and investors to explore novel materials and methods we could use to build a space elevator. This association unites groups from Europe, Japan, and America that are working on space-elevator engineering, and they also publish books and a journal devoted to designing a working space elevator.
2. a scientist named Bradley Edwards, who wrote a book about the feasibility: Though there are other models for space elevators, Edwards’s design is the one that NASA and its affiliated scientists are currently pursuing. Indeed, spaceflight engineer Peter Swan has written extensively about the process of building space elevators, and suggests that the final designs may change a great deal by the time we’re actually building the structure. See, for example, Peter Swan and Cathy Swan, Space Elevator Systems Architecture (Lulu.com, 2007).
3. reduction in water pollution from perchlorates: See the EPA’s information about perchlorates: http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/unregulated/perchlorate.cfm/.
4. NASA reports that each Space Shuttle launch cost about $450 million: See NASA’s Space Shuttle FAQ online: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10.
5. 100,000 kilometers out into space: There is some disagreement over whether this length is necessary, or whether it could be shorter. Different plans call for different lengths.
6. In 2009, NASA awarded $900,000 to LaserMotive: Clara Moskowitz, “Space Elevator Team Wins $900,000 from NASA,” MSNBC.com (January 7, 2009).
7. “I like to compare [carbon nanotube development]”: Personal interview, August 12, 2011.
8. Engineer Keith Lofstrom suggested: Personal interview, August 12, 2011: You can see his plans for the maglev platform on launchloop.com.
9. Vasilii Artyukhov argued that we might not want to use carbon nanotubes: “Making and Breaking Graphitic Nanocarbon: Insights from Computer Simulations,” Space Elevator Conference presentation, Microsoft Campus, Richmond, WA (August 12, 2011).
10. “The bottom line is that you need to find”: Personal interview, June 26, 2012.
11. Alex Hall, the senior director of the Google Lunar X Prize: “When Can I Buy My Ticket to the Moon?” Panel discussion at SETICon 11, Santa Clara, CA (June 23, 2012).
12. Bob Richards, a cofounder of Moon Express: Ibid.
1. I visited the UC Berkeley synthetic biologist Chris Anderson: Personal interview, June 6, 2012.
2. “During a long-duration manned space flight”: Personal correspondence, June 25, 2012.
3. Still, her research and that of other geneticists working with NASA: Personal interview with Sylvain Costes, June 15, 2012. Costes works at the Berkeley Lab, researching how radiation damages DNA. His work is funded in part by NASA, and he hopes that at some point we can pinpoint regions on the genome responsible for making some people’s DNA more robust against cosmic radiation damage.
4. “I’m of the mind that we’re going to fuck everything up”: Personal interview, May 7, 2012.
5. “pollution sensing lung tumor”: You can see this design, along with several more from the Synthetic Kingdom series, on Ginsberg’s website here: http://www.daisyginsberg.com/projects/synthetickingdom.html.
6. The British author Paul McAuley has suggested in recent novels: Personal correspondence, June 12, 2012. See also The Quiet War (Amherst, NY: Pyr Books, 2009).
7. Kim Stanley Robinson, another science-fiction author: Personal interview, June 18, 2012. Robinson’s most recent novel about how synbio modifications will be part of space colonization is called 2312 (New York: Orbit Books, 2012).
8. Nick Bostrom heads the institute, where he’s written widely cited articles: Personal interview, May 8, 2012. See also Bostrom’s considerable body of work on this subject, starting with “When Machines Outsmart Humans,” Futures 35 (2000): 759–64. You can read the full text of this essay, along with many others, on Bostrom’s personal website: http://www.nickbostrom.com. I’d also recommend an essay collection Bostrom coedited with Milan ´Cirkovi´c called Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). This is a book produced by the Institute for the Future of Humanity, and it introduces many of the key concerns the institute addresses, including the intelligence explosion.
9. “having a biological body in space is stupid”: Personal interview, May 8, 2012.
10. Many evolutionary biologists believe that humans are still evolving: Many recent studies deal with how humans are still under selection. For example: Alexandre Courtiol et al., “Natural and Sexual Selection in a Monogamous Historical Human Population,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (March 28, 2012): 8044–49. Courtiol and his colleagues argue that a thorough examination of the lineages of a Finnish village reveals natural and sexual selection at work, producing people who meet definitions of fitness involving better resistance to disease. Other researchers look at the human genome, and have discovered that some genes are undergoing fairly rapid transformation. Bruce Lahn and his colleagues describe how two genes that regulate gene size appear to be rapidly evolving in humans: P. D. Evans, S. L. Gilbert, N. Mekel-Bobrov, E. J. Vallender, J. R. Anderson, et al., “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” Science 309 (2005): 1717. John Hawks has also written about this in a paper with his colleagues: “Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (December 26, 2007): 20753–58.
11. I spoke to Oana Marcu, a SETI Institute biologist: Personal interview, June 23, 2012.
1. “Our kids are the last generation”: Personal interview, June 26, 2012.
2. Armin Kleinboehl is far more conservative in his estimates: I spoke with Kleinboehl on June 10, 2012, during the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s annual open house, a fantastic event where scientists meet members of the general public, give them tours of the facilities, and explain what people at the lab are studying. Find out more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter here: http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/projects/MRO/.
3. Futurists like Ray Kurzweil: See, for example, Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). Other futurists who suggest the future is speeding up include Nick Bostrom, whose work I discuss in chapter 22, and Bill Joy in his famous essay “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired 8.04 (April 2000). Among futurists, this idea is sometimes referred to as “Moore’s law.” The sobriquet was originally intended to describe how computer chips improve exponentially over time. Now it’s used to describe any exponential growth in scientific knowledge over time.
4. a project run by the doctor and former astronaut Mae Jemison: Personal interview, June 23, 2012.
5. planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol: Personal interview, June 23, 2012. For more about Cabrol’s work in the high lakes, see N. A. Cabrol et al., “The High-Lakes Project,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences 114 (2009): G00D06. She also has an incredible field log of some of her work there, which you can read here: http://www.highlakes.seti.org/.
6. led the celebrated science historian Richard Rhodes to speculate: He made this speculation on the panel “All Aboard the 100 Year Starship” at SETICon II (June 23, 2012). He was specifically referring to Jemison’s work, but I think it’s fair to say that Cabrol’s is relevant here too.
