Аннали Ньюиц: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

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.

ill.1 Illustration by Stephanie A. Fox

ill.2 Illustration by Stephanie A. Fox

ill.3 Illustration by Stephanie A. Fox

ill.4 Illustration by John Sibbick

ill.5 Peter Roopnarine, Jonathan Mitchell, and Kenneth Angielczyk

ill.6 Illustration by Stephanie A. Fox

ill.7 © The British Library Board. Royal MS 18.E.i-ii f. 175 (date: 1385–1400).

ill.8 David Kilper for Washington University

ill.9 ANIMALS ANIMALS © Bob Cranston

ill.10 Illustration by Stephanie A. Fox

ill.11 Courtesy O. H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, Oregon State University

ill.12 Shakhzod Takhirov, Site Operations Manager of nees@berkeley, University of California at Berkeley

ill.13 From On the Mode of Communication of Cholera , by John Snow, published by C. F. Cheffins, Lith., Southampton Buildings, London, England, 1854.

ill.14 Tim Barker/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

ill.15 Glenn Beanland/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

ill.16 Photo by Robinson Esparza

ill.17 © Guardian News & Media Ltd., 2011

ill.18 Ron Miller

ill.19 NASA Artwork by Pat Rawlings/Eagle Applied Sciences

ill.20 Cassini Radar Mapper, JPL, ESA, NASA

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

aerosols, 19.1, 20.1

ship, 19.1, nts.1 n

Aerospace Corporation

Africa, 6.1, 10.1, 13.1

droughts in, 9.1, 18.1

human migration out of, itr.1, itr.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 23.1

African replacement theory (recent African origins theory), 7.1, 7.2

agnathan fish

Ailor, William

algae blooms

Alvarez, Luis

Alvarez, Walter, 4.1, 4.2

American Museum of Natural History, 6.1, 6.2

Americas, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, nts.1 n

colonial plagues in, 8.1, 13.1

ammonites, 2.1, 2.2

amphibians, itr.1, itr.2

crurotarsans, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4

fungal infections of

Amsterdam

Anderson, Chris, 22.1, 22.2

Appalachian Mountains, 2.1, 2.2, 19.1

Aramaic language

Armitage, Simon

armored fish, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Armstrong, Rachel

artificial intelligence (AI), 22.1, 23.1

Artyukhov, Vasilii

Assyrian empire, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2, nts.1 n

asteroid impacts, itr.1, itr.2, itr.3, itr.4, 1.1, 20.1

deadly aftermath of

defending against, 20.1, 23.1

Torino scale of, 20.1, 20.2, 21.1, nts.1 n

Australopithecus, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3

autotrophs

Axelbaum, Richard

Aztec empire, 8.1, 14.1

BacillaFilla

background extinction rate, 1.1, 2.1, 5.1

bacteria, 3.1, 16.1, 18.1, 18.2

Yersinia pestis, 8.1, 16.1

Baghdad

Barnardos, Andreas

Barnosky, Anthony

bats, 4.1, 16.1

bees, Colony Collapse Disorder of, itr.1, nts.1 n

Before the Lights Go Out (Koerth-Baker),

Benjamin, David

Benton, Mike, itr.1, 3.1

Bigelow, Robert

biodiversity, 2.1, 4.1, nts.1 n

biological cities, 18.1, 22.1

biomimesis

bioreactors, 18.1, 18.2

birds, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1

Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy),

Black Death (bubonic plague), 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 16.1, 16.2

Church officials’ response to, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3

death tolls of, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5

origin of, 8.1, 16.1

1665 Great Plague of

social effects of, 8.1, 8.2

stages of

urban poverty and, 8.1, 8.2

blue-green algae, see cyanobacteria

blue whales

Blythe, David

boron nitride nanotubes