I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.
We don’t necessarily deserve this role.
I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.
But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.
If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?
To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.
I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.