Fireball Earth, Our Extinction, and the Fermi Paradox

 Our Earth does not have an equilibrium that it tries to keep to. It does not balance itself to help us living things survive. That living things on this planet have evolved has led to some effects that cause the planet to be more habitable for a certain kind of life, but there is and has been no plan for this. The Earth does not care, or not care, about life or our human species. We tend to think of the story of our planet in humanized terms, as if it had feelings and a goal that should be nice for us. It does not. But the human species perhaps can. As we are creatures which are self-aware, and we have scientific knowledge, maybe we have the possibility of consciously intervening in our planet’s trajectory. It remains to be seen; at the present we are not capable of this, it is only potential.

Scientific findings based on data have demonstrated that the planet on which we live has had periods in its history when there have been mass extinction events in which a majority of life goes extinct, and that these periods correspond strongly to times when there have been rapid changes in climate, such as dramatic warming. Sometimes these have been in response to ice ages, as a kind of ‘over-correction’ when carbon in the atmosphere has risen due to the effects of continuing massive volcanism and when the ice and snow covering cannot absorb all the emissions, leading eventually to extreme heating.

The Earth still has periods of ice-ages, it oscillates between average temperature extremes, and we are currently in an interglacial period, in fact more near to the end of it than the beginning. Climate scientists say the evidence shows that fast human caused climate heating due to our burning of fossil fuels will prevent the next ice age from happening.

Yay! You might think. It will be nice to avoid all that cold. But every such dramatic change in temperature, and this human caused change is the fastest ever, has led to really big extinctions amongst Earth’s creatures.

Why? Because evolutionary alterations to adapt to such changes occur much slower than this rate of change. Living things cannot speed up evolution. What the science has noticed is that animals have instead had to, if they did not simply die out (which they did), migrate to colder regions of the globe if they could. Sea creatures migrated for instance, whilst some land creatures might have found it more difficult due to being cut-off by seas or the landscape. One of the science articles points to surface sea water temperature during a hot period of 40C, which meant that land temperatures must have been even hotter. Sustained general average temperatures of this size lead to the mass deaths of plants and animals.

The human species will be unable to change course from their current trajectory of burning fossil fuels and large-scale agriculture for crops and livestock, which causes the increasing emissions of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere which in turn creates the heating effect. Political forces will be unable to tackle this problem in a scientific manner, as we have already clearly seen, because science is not the primary goal of our capitalist politics. To put it schematically, this is because the most powerful and profitable globally spanning industries: energy, security, and drugs, influence our politicians and shape their policies.

Just as importantly, these industries also decide the discourse that the rest of us perceive through the media. It therefore becomes unpopular to talk about climate warming, and again as we have seen increasingly climate science is being depicted in the press as crackpot. Add to this the fact that these industries provide a multitude of jobs for people who obviously do not want to lose their livelihoods, then we have a political environment which is totally opposed to doing anything substantial about climate heating, and will fight it even in the sneaky and subtle ways that our media industry knows how. It is the same with the offshoots of the petrochemical industry, such as plastics and plastic pollution. This industry is profitable and is hardly likely to give this up voluntarily, so there have been no agreements over preventing plastic pollution (as recently seen).

The interests that exist in these industries therefore are inevitably against the dismantling of their dominance, something which would be necessary to prevent further climate heating. But even if they wanted to do this, as a few people in the industries clearly do, they would find it very difficult to change course because they are massive juggernauts, and it would be too socially disruptive to capitalism. At the same time, it is also unlikely that the democratic consensus could agree on a globally unified approach to this enormous problem, given that all the different nation states compete economically, and it would need some short and probably medium term severe economic pain and disruption to even begin to ameliorate in a real way the effects of the pollution.

So, what is likely to happen in the future? Continuing the current course, we are likely, sooner than later, to experience more instances of deadly heatwaves, especially in areas that are already warm, such as nearer to the equator. Wildfires are likely to become a constant feature of summers in these regions, but also in regions more northern that still experience much less regular rainfall or only get the rainfall in overly large downpours onto dry and hard ground and so produce floods.

Quite soon, apart from the effect this will have on agriculture, these areas will become non-survivable in the warmer seasons. And mass animal and human migration from these regions will be likely. But this will be resisted by the cooler northern countries by default, as is already happening. It is similar with the rise in sea levels and the necessary abandonment of coastal cities, which will also lead to mass migration which will be resisted.

In short, in human terms, the social disruption and the massive numbers of refugees in combination usually lead to wars and wars always lead to even greater and faster emissions. We could call this and other factors of a similar nature the social feedback loops that add to the climate disaster. Given that this will happen quite quickly it will lead to great stress on the human population, and this will reach a tipping point beyond which it will not be survivable.

The ever-increasing temperatures may even lead to a Fireball Earth phenomenon, where the confluence of the normal volcanism and geologic tectonic activity from beneath the ground combines with the atmospheric heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels to squeeze the habitable space in the middle. We have all heard of Snowball Earth, where in the past our planet has been completely covered in glaciers, this will be the reverse phenomenon. But it may be harder for the Earth to recover from this hellish state and get back to its current fairly pleasant condition for our species. Venus, one of our neighbouring planets, is like this, essentially a fireball. Evidence suggests it once had oceans, long ago.

The Fermi Paradox is the idea that intelligent life should be prevalent and even abundant in the universe but strangely does not appear to be present to our astronomers. It is likely one of the reasons that we have not discovered intelligent alien species out in space is because this global catastrophe is the kind of thing that usually happens to the top predator in an ecosystem. Its own success becomes its failure because it cannot prevent itself from using up all the resources that it needs to continue to thrive and so destroys itself.

We like to think we are conscious and in charge of our destiny, but it is probable that we are not, and that this idea is mostly a self-delusion.

I have only been a little hyperbolic here, unfortunately. See:

 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/31/cop30-climate-us-officials

Adolescence – Review, Netflix TV series

This series is a hit and has had some rave reviews, so to mention its good aspects is almost superfluous, but I will a bit: it presents a very current, relevant storyline, approaches a difficult subject head-on, a child murderer, the incel, the manosphere, misogyny, chauvinism; it uses some interesting realist filming techniques, and has some good and even great acting. OK, on to the bad stuff:

Like with so much British media of this kind, our offering hits you with a moral sledgehammer that too self-consciously sees itself as ‘finger on the pulse’, but you can’t help feeling it is already dated. It fails pretty miserably at capturing the working class and working class emotions, except in a very caricatured way, instead for the difficult moments it resorts too obviously to petit bourgeois kinds of behaviour for its characters, for instance the main subject, the boy murderer, seems too middle class, something like a cuckoo child in his family, he is quite erudite, unlike his father, a plumber, a small small businessman with tattoos and a van. At the same time, every other child in the series that gets any significant screen time seems to be stamped from the same mould, with the same blank expression, unsmiling, humourless, - practically inhuman. Except by some miracle, the son of the cop. He is dealt with far too obviously in such a way that flags to us that we are supposed to see this man, his father, as even more of a hero than he already is, for he is such a good Dad too. Earlier he had been so nice and honourable to the suspected murderer (with a kitchen knife) on his arrest that it was like an advert for the police.

Then the school scenes. What a strange place, on the one hand full of liberal caring teachers and staff, with a few token nasty ones added , and the children are all uncaring, and show totally no sadness about the death of one of their own, in fact they were mostly excited about it. This seemed the most unrealistic passage in the series. It must be difficult to capture this kind of school, for sure, probably because it would have working class kids in it, and this series seems unable to address them, it is for it foreign territory, so we just get a harsh caricature, like a Hogarth painting where everyone is emotionally kitsch.

The part that was probably the most successful after the first episode was the psychologist who visited the boy murderer in an institution. The interview had a Tarantino-esque quality to it. It was gripping, edge of your seat stuff. But the last and final episode I found difficult to follow either because the sound quality was poor and did not pick up the conversations very well but also maybe because the Liverpudlian accents, with all that emotion and stress, were quite strong, especially for the two women, it made me ask myself were they using this accent to signify crudeness?  Neatly for us, we knew the father was going to display his anger problems, which he did on tap. I could not recall what a ‘Nonce’ was initially, I had to look it up. It seemed as I was watching a slightly offset thing to spray on the father’s van, I was not sure why. Perhaps it was that the sexual side of all this had not been, until this word appeared, raised to any great level, except in the indirect sense of sexism. But this sexism was quite sexless, until finally at the end what you are led to suppose is the possibility that the father, when he was refused his oats by the mother, got into a big, barely suppressed, strop and everything condensed his anger from there. Surely this was not blaming the wife, the woman?

One of the most glaring omissions, which we must assume was fully intended, was the complete absence of any perspective from the parents of the girl who was murdered, or indeed of the girl herself up to the fateful moment. You briefly saw her pushing the boy in a black and white CCTV video, and then him attacking her. Her schoolfriend had a memorable small part, but in which she just seemed angry rather than sad. Maybe this was the problem, the emotions on display throughout were telegraphed and without subtlety, they were either blank and bland or heart wrenchingly crazed. Only the main cop, a man, his son, and the father of the boy murderer were given a wider range of emotional responses. I suppose this was intended to be kind to them and sort of absolve them, because they were trying hard to make sense of things in a difficult modern world, full of weird emojis, of all things. But that they were all male sits a bit strange in a series that has been received as bravely tackling misogyny.

For this series, the misogynism seemed to be mainly understood as being perpetrated by social media as the bad guy, or bad gal to be more exact. The female stabbing victim had been bullying the boy (OK, not impossible, but come on…) as an incel, we are informed. Surely this was not suggesting she, sort of, deserved it, or that she was a part of the explanation for what happened? Was the series doing its own sly version of victim blaming, having a go back at the MeToo argument in the guise of criticism?

But the tension the father caused and which was revealed to us in the final episode clearly went against this interpretation in the end, his pent up anger was a violence that did not need to go much further to have its horrific effects on his family, which had obviously grown accustomed to it and developed coping techniques. But this just left us in an eclectic mess of moral possibilities, reflecting, I suppose, a too enthusiastic desire to be on point.

There are some glaring things that have been left out: there was no transgender concerns on display in this series, peculiar because one of the most high-profile murders by young people recently was of a transgender person. So, it seems as though the whole issue has been forced into a mould that excludes this. The critical language that followed in response to the series used the modern buzzwords like toxic masculinity and incel but avoided toxic gendering, which was at least suggested as a factor in the programme. The problem of capitalism and democracy was also avoided, - if on the broad scale capitalism can be expansionist and imperialist, why should the individual be any different?

Today news is not so financially free as it once was, even if it is more widespread and potentially available, if young people today mainly get their news from online sources, on their smartphones, the majority will go to free versions, not the so-called reliable stuff behind the paywalls.  But here in the wild west lie all the exploitative sensationalist dangers, and the extreme right-wing version of reality. The free market, unhindered, leads to fascism. We got a bleak taste of this from the depiction of the school, with the kids staring at their phone screens as they walked home, but these were mainly, if I recall correctly, female students, as if they were the ones mainly affected.