Summer 2003, Italy, the hottest summer.
Everyone was talking about global warming and climate change. I remember being on a train for a small vacation with my parents in Florence, completely absorbed by the view of rural fields. Unfortunately the drought caused many fires, and the scene was an alternation between dusty gold and black, where fire has passed through. It made me feel anxious. So I started to do what most children do when they feel powerless. I retired into my own world.
In my own world, I became the president of the most important climate change committee on earth. I held imaginary meetings, where I devised plans to stop the heatwave. Forgive my child ego.
I became fiercely conscious and vocal about the topic with my parents. I forced them to do recycling. That was a real victory for me cause my parents were insensitive to the issue.
Thirty years later, as a science-fiction writer and former academic, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about our extinction. The main ideas of my short stories are speculative, but they're grounded in real science.
One of my recent dives into the scientific literature turned up to be extremely juicy of material. Climate change and global warming are serious threats, of course, and their global impact is computationally difficult to model.
But I found myself drawn to the less obvious paths to extinction that still pose a real threat. Let's start.
I’ve got the inspiration to search about Plant Diseases from Interstellar, which is my current source of inspiration. If you don’t remember the plot, Interstellar is set in a near future in which a plague, called the blight, has ravaged almost all remaining food sources on Earth.
As Nobel laureate Kip Thorne explain in the above interview, the idea for the blight came from Jonah Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s brother and co-screenwriter. But because Kip Thorne have been extremely fixed that Interstellar must have scientific groundness, the creative team brought together top biologists for a lengthy dinner with wine, set up a recording, and let the conversation run for three to four hours.
The goal was to find the most scientifically credible backstory for a global agricultural collapse.
According to Thorne, the biologists explained that there are essentially two categories of crop blight. The first type is highly specific to a single crop species. These can be extremely lethal, potentially wiping out an entire species worldwide. The second type is more generalized, capable of attacking multiple crop species, but these tend to be relatively benign.
The biologists told Thorne’s team that they could not rule out the emergence of a generalized blight that was also devastatingly lethal. Nothing in their scientific understanding prevented such a pathogen from developing. Even if unprecedented, it is plausible.
Too speculative? Here’s what is already happening. In this study, Ristaino et al. (2021) documents how plant disease outbreaks are increasing, driven by climate change, global food trade networks, pathogen spillover, and the evolution of new pathogens. In history, we have already seen severe plant epidemics. The 19th-century Irish potato famine killed over two million people and triggered mass emigration. Today, Panama disease remains one of the most severe threats facing the global banana industry, with no cure and no resistant varieties yet developed.
Singh et al. (2023) from Nature Reviews Microbiology also argue that the incidence and severity of plant disease outbreaks are growing with climate change as the main driver. Annual crop yield losses from pathogens and pests are estimated at US$220 billion.
While nothing points to a “generalist blight” all these problems can create extreme pressure on fragile populations and cause political unrest.
I don’t know when I’ve heard about this first, but I’m pretty sure it was my conspiracy theorist friend.
One sign of a planet's habitability is the presence of a geomagnetic field, which protects life from solar wind and cosmic radiation, preventing atmospheric erosion and water loss.
A geomagnetic reversal is when Earth's magnetic north and south poles swap places. During the reversal, this is a fragile moment because the shield weakens.
It has happened before. The Laschamps event, the best-studied reversal, occurred during the last glacial period. The transition from normal to reversed polarity lasted roughly 250 years, and the field remained reversed for around 440 years.
The effects of the reversal, however, are still disputed.
Cooper et al. (2021) linked the Lascamps event to several other evolutionary mysteries, including the extinction of Neanderthals and the sudden, widespread emergence of cave art.
However, other researchers have pushed back and argued that Cooper constructed a narrative unsupported by current data. Pan & Li 2023 argue that geomagnetic field reversals can even have a positive evolutionary effect. Their claim is that increased UV radiation stimulates the emergence of new functions and organisms through mutation and forced adaptation.
Then, think about it. A weakened magnetosphere lets more extraterrestrial particles through, so we can add even more variety to the salad of life.
Anyway, I personally think that the threat to humanity is real. Although organisms and our ancestors survived the flip, we’re a fragile species, addicted to electronics and electricity. If the reversal happens, cosmic radiation would destroy electric power grids and satellite networks, which are the backbones of our advanced civilization. Then also imagine that we can’t go outside anymore because the cancer risks will increase. Do you understand now why we lived in caves? (Maybe I’m skewed, but I totally believe the Cooper narrative.)
Ok, this investigation started from a comment from my writing mentor. I mentioned that I live near an inactive volcano. He replied: “Are you sure it’s inactive?“ Researchers had told him that the majority of volcanic activity is undetectable and that there is no proof that inactive volcanoes will remain inactive. And… he is damn right.
The distinction between dormant and inactive is very subtle. A dormant volcano is a volcano that is not erupting, but that are experiencing some signs that the magma is accumulating or moving underneath.
Scientists classify a volcano as extinct if they believe it has no magma supply, but this is a probability, not a certainty. Meaning that there’s no way to know if magma supply is really finished, it can only be inferred by the data, or the absence of seismic activity, gas, and other stuff collected.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Anyway, the problem with volcanic eruption is not just the devastating effect of the eruption per se, which can be mitigated by monitoring and observing the seismic activity.
Consider this historical event. On 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, began a week of explosions recorded as global history’s most impactful volcanic eruption. Quantities of dust and sulphur were ejected into the atmosphere, turning day into night by blocking the sun’s rays from reaching the ground and triggering a mini ice age.
The following year, 1816, became known as “the year without a summer.” The eruption led to famine, political unrest, and disease across the globe.
And then came the literary aftermath. While trapped indoors for days by constant rain and gloomy skies, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a horror novel set in an often stormy environment.
And the fun part is that Tambora wasn’t even a supereruption!
If a supervolcano would explode, like the Yellowstone, something like a nuclear winter would occur. The ash in the upper atmosphere would dim the sun. And it could last for years. This would create a horrible hit to the food chain, and animals in the wild would starve in wholesale numbers. As a consequence, we will starve.
This is not just speculation. The volcanic winter of 536 was among the most severe and protracted episodes of climatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last two thousand years, caused by at least three eruptions of uncertain origin. In 538, the Roman statesman Cassiodorus described the following to one of his subordinates in letter 25: A winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat.
The cascading consequences were devastating: the volcanic dimming led to crop failures, which led to malnutrition, which created the ideal conditions for a major health crisis, possibly serving as the hidden ecological trigger that led the plague bacterium to disperse in the years just following the spasm of volcanic activity.
But hey! At least we can cool the global temperature, right? We solved Global Warming!
This is part 1. Part 2 will follow, maybe.
But the real reason I’m subjecting myself to this hell-microdosing of extinction scenarios isn’t just for novel and short story material. It’s because sometimes I just imagine this. We spend an entire life working, goal after goal. We have overoptimized our life with the assumption that everything will stay the same. Then, Campi Flegrei explode, a famine follows, and if you’re lucky enough to survive, you have to become a farmer while the people around you kill each other for a piece of bread. Or the poles inverts and we have no more access to Internet. Or goodbye commercial bananas.
How fragile we are. How confidently we act as if we’re in control of our own destiny.
And that’s it for today. Thank you for being here.
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