I’m in the non-apocalyptic camp of climate change believers. I don’t believe even the worst case will make the world uninhabitable. Let’s say that’s a 5% likelihood scenario of maybe 90% species loss and even 90% human population decline. But what do those numbers *mean*?
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Ironically, we hyper-atheists are most vulnerable to soul death because we keep our souls in atoms around us. Those who believe in any religion keep souls in eternalist, aionic, safe spaces. There’s a nice Dr. House rant about why atheism makes you value life more, not less.
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The universe is not exactly a mirror-of-living-earth, and potential alien life wouldn’t be a “reflection” but there would be sense of mutual recognition if we did find *any* life. Even if it was alien/predator/andromeda-strain style life that “recognizes” us by trying to kill us.
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Back on earth, we’re not the only creatures with a sense of outer space (turtles and spiders orient towards the moon/stars for example) but we’re the only ones who experience the Gaia instinct and pass the cosmic mirror test. It’s not just a firmament with twinkling lights to us.
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The earthbound side of the Gaia instinct is caring about an idea like “90% species extinction”. No other species is capable of caring about anything more than its immediate kin, predators, and prey. Local eco-web consciousness only. The Gaia instinct is for tech-modern humans.
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As individuals we can feel an individual version of mutual recognition with almost any creature that we can respond to and that responds to us. Cats and dogs of course, but even trees and slugs. Even if that sense of mutuality is an “eww” or pang at cutting down an ancient tree.
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THIS is what at risk. Life may go on even in the worse 50% of climate change outcomes, but the Gaia instinct might die. The world will end in the sense of an idea of ourselves reflected back when we look up. Even if we retain a gritty, anthropcene kind of cyber-paleo modernity.
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What might end is the capacity to feel the kind of incredibly poignant loneliness that took Hubble, Pioneer 11, shipping containers, and a double helix to deliver to us. It might be the most precious emotion we’ve constructed for our minds to experience. Better than religion.
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Our ability to feel this feeling might be perhaps the peak experience of being human if the worse climate futures play out. We might live on, but on a dispiriting subhuman journey. Or we beat the crisis and go on to experience way more on our many frontiers of the spirit.
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You may not share this sensibility. But ask yourself: do you possibly not feel this because you’ve short-circuited your capacity to feel it by putting your “soul”, for lack of a better word, in an illusory place where it cannot die, but doesn’t truly live either?
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This is ultimately what many of us are thinking/feeling when we talk about climate. We’re not secretly trying to shove Big Government down the world’s throat. We’re trying to prevent the soul-death of the world as we know it. Harsh as 90% collapse might be, soul death is worse.
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