The Future of Humanity Is Interplanetary
To survive the next thousand years, humans must save Earth and then venture beyond it
It’s easy to imagine we’re coming to an end.
We are, after all, facing a warming planet, ocean acidification, impending mass extinction, and immense resource depletion. It’s not such a leap to suggest that humanity has hit its peak and is now poised for a great unraveling.
But in taking that apocalyptic view, you’d miss something important. There’s a path leading out of the despair. Amid the Sturm and the Drang is another, very different kind of future. To find it, all you have to do is look up. That future is the solar system, and if we get things right, that’s where we’re headed.
Climate change is just one aspect of much broader planetary transformation. Ten thousand years ago, when the last Pleistocene-era glaciers melted, our planet entered the geologic epoch scientists call the Holocene. Earth’s air, water, rock, and life were in a stable state that was mostly warm and mostly moist (with not too much ice). Now, human activity has driven Earth out of the Holocene and into a new epoch scientists call the Anthropocene, a planetary change in which humanity now dominates how the planet’s systems function.
