Grey Matter

My writing will be there for you extra-terrestrials or re-emergent Homo sapiens to read someday,
hopefully to learn from our mistakes. All was not well with the planet in 2016, and it was awash with
contradictions. The capitalists of the developed world had a banner year, at least economically.
However, the Muslim world, still in the midst of a tragic, unendable, internecine religious war exactly
akin to the one that had racked the Christian world five centuries earlier, was now, under the leadership
of durable, lunatic religious fanatics, increasingly united against the egregiously wasteful West. Iran, a
newly certified member of the Atomic Weapons Club, allied with other, hardly more stable powers like
Pakistan and North Korea, was rattling sabres far and wide at India and Israel in particular. Chaos
danced with the Devil. The threat of all-out nuclear war had never been graver, not even during the
Cuban missile crisis. Do you know about that? Humanity would not have survived a twenty-first
century nuclear holocaust; nor would the biosphere!
During the summer of 2015 the Arctic Ocean was ice-free. A little came back in 2016, but it was hard
not to notice the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. The oceans were unmistakably rising quickly. On
this matter, scientists had been much too cautious. Im not sure what they expected; if you throw ice
into a pot of hot water, it melts, and the water level rises up the sides. The atoll nations in the southern
seas seemed about to sink off the member list of the United Nations, and those builders of mighty
dams, the Dutch, were issuing warnings that unstoppable breaches of their dykes could be expected
before the end of another decade. The pandemic was encouraged by the permanent flooding of some of
the worlds largest river deltas. It had already set in motion what was, even as it was just beginning, the
greatest environmental migration and mixing of humankind ever.
While capitalism continued to nourish its Ponzi scheme with an empty faith in growth, by the
beginning of 2017, the whole enterprise seemed frayed and desperate. It couldnt last. We were finally
considering strategies that moved away from the nostrum of growth, but the old-line economists and
corporations continued to push stuff and to stoke the fire as though there were no tomorrow as,
indeed, there wasnt. Most of the stuff, designed principally to feed our insatiable appetite for magic,
had no real utility. We are swimming in junk, even here just below the Arctic Circle. Worldwide its
everywhere, house upon dusty house, store after cobwebbed store crammed with it. Blowing around
unpeopled streets, catching in soon-to-rust wire fences, soggy and dingy in ditches and gutters, or
trapped, unwelcome and incongruous, in burgeoning greenery at the edge of forests, its the slough of
disease. Wherever there is asphalt, there are jumbles of dead, decaying stuff.
Most is covered with slowly deforming images originally designed to squeeze out every possible
advertising moment to sell as much stuff as possible, thus to prop up the myth of perpetual growth.
Ugly and useless, without the fire to make it go and us to look after it, the junk is dangerous and
destructive. For me, because I cant clean it up, its depressing. The last rubbish of mankind, the stuff of
our last Christmas, all by itself, will cause over the next decades a great upsurge in the size of those
oceanic garbage dumps before sinking to the floor of the seas to suffocate everything, even anaerobic
life. I wish that all that garbage would go away, sucked into the limbo of space along with enough
atmospheric carbon to cool the planet to pre-Anthropocene levels. It wont of course. Some of it,
designed by our best Nobel-Prize-winning human ingenuity to be unnaturally invulnerable to the
normal process of decay, will persist five billion years on, when the sun finally comes to eat our planet;
the story of global warming will play out without us.
One of the stranger aspects of our last days was the digital frenzy that had overtaken us. Anyone under
the age of about fifty who could afford to become permanently wired to the Internet was considering

various implant options. There was a celebrated case moving through the European Court of Justice
brought by parents on behalf of their gifted three-year-olds, demanding the right to enhance them with
brain implants. Less digitally-rabid parents merely competed against each other in their boasts about
how precocious their infants were at manipulating digital technology. This meant, while no one seemed
to care, that it was impossible for our children to enjoy innocence for long. In the weird wired world,
the touching innocence of a ten-year old was a thing of the past. It also meant that the whole new
generation of the wealthy and privileged was being prepared to be perfectly comfortable with passing
the torch of intelligence to a new species of super-machines.
The Singularity, that moment when digital intelligence (Artificial General Intelligence) surpassed
biology, seemed imminent. The geniuses at the top of the digital world held their twelfth annual
Singularity Summit in the fall of 2016, presenting talk after talk with new-speak glee. In the minds of
those gurus, biological evolution had become a bottleneck in the progress of our hallowed intelligence
that would, now that the Singularity was within sight, be blessedly free to evolve exponentially faster
than biological intelligence. Yee-haw! Sometime around 2011 we had passed an important milestone
when science found the way to create artificial life for the first time. The boast of genetic engineering
soon became that science could now speed up the process of natural evolution by as much as a million
times. Bring on the radiation-eating bacteria; bring on the meat substitute grown in a Petri dish to feed
and energize billions more of our tribe. When you think about the possibilities arising from the merging
of genetic and digital engineering, its hard not to conclude that our species was hell-bent for
obsolescence. However, a few of us, mostly white guys like the smart, ultra-urbane high priest of the
Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, expected to exist on in quasi-immortality as a digital presence within the
machine. What about the rest of us? What about everything else in the biosphere? I guess the machine
would have known. For sure, none of us were consulted.
If those of you who are reading this can still find a paper dictionary somewhere, look up the word
limbo. What Mr. Kurzweil slavers after is a perfect likeness of the limbo that the fertile imaginations
of his ancestors immortalized centuries before in works like Dantes Inferno. No one was trying to
make a secret of any of the advances in digital and genetic engineering. In fact, they were being sold
as hard as possible. Dr. J Craig Venter, Kurzweils equivalent in the genetic world, trumpeted his
prediction that biological engineering, with its limitless possibilities for actually refashioning the living
world to our taste, would be the economic driver of the twenty-first century. The economy! Can you
believe it? But then, the economy has always come first among humans, way ahead of ethics, way
ahead of god, maybe even ahead of sex. Is that ethical, for Gods sakes? The economy has been the
excuse to do anything, no matter how dangerous, how vile, how stupid. There was a lot of glory and
money to be had as technology advanced, so there was no shortage of bright people armed, as they
thought, with virtuous reason and strict objectivity, poised to fill any unoccupied intellectual space.
Education, an important part of the economy, seemed tightly aligned to this. During the last years of the
human cultural evolution/ revolution, kids were umbilically attached to the virtual world throughout the
formal period of their education. Consequently, insulated by a blanket of the truly trivial, a significant
portion of our young was incapable of recognizing how close we were to the abyss. The top end of the
education process, the place where you win your PhD, your Olympic gold, or a first prize in the
International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, had become a kind of world-wide educational arms race.
This was especially true of the bifurcating disciplines of science and technology. Each year the United
States remember them? produced more newly minted PhDs than the last, in an ever-expanding
array of specialties. Since China another once important division of human geography seemed
always to be numerically ahead in PhDs, the hope was that with ever more rigorous management of
higher education, the States might stay on top.

What did these brand new, extremely adapted PhDs do? They did exactly what they were trained to do:
they pushed cutting-edge technology as far as they could, invariably at the expense of Nature, who
was thought to be too dangerous to be left to its own devices. And here we are, or arent.
Before the Death there were many of us without PhDs. Around the moment when science discovered
how to make artificial life as if we needed more! our numbers reached seven billion. All but a tiny
fraction of that vast statistic was either blind or in denial. But there were promising signs that the
population explosion was slowing. Much of the developed world, along with some economically less
fortunate places such as Iran, was below population replacement values. However, when you start with
such huge numbers, when the overall birth rate is even a tiny percentage above replacement, then the
total number increases rapidly. Six years later we had already passed the halfway mark on the march to
eight billion. Where did those five hundred million embodied souls go? Into the crowded urban spaces
that absorbed them like a sponge, tempting fate to bring on a plague among the crowds.
Worst of all, the rich and powerful did nothing except everything possible to shore up their fortress
hold on the resources of the world. That meant, among other things, profiting from the most advanced
technology as hard as possible, making sure that nothing stood in the way of its continued
technological evolution, which was simple-mindedly equated with progress. Where colour films had
once supplanted black and white in the race to virtual reality, a few years ago three-dimensional
projection overran the two-dimensional screen. Now, for a little extra, you could pay for the digital
sensation of synchronized motion in your seat. Since virtual reality was now so much more satisfying
than a walk in whatever woods you might still find, could virtual smell and touch be far behind?
Technology had become the measure of human advancement. Political leaders everywhere either chose
to follow the lead of the United States, taking the economic approach by selling their countries to the
corporate lobbyists, or they opted for brutal totalitarianism. Some went the route of hooliganism
wherein, as in Mexico, civil government was usurped by criminals. All this was in the name of
maintaining the disastrous status quo, mostly in the interests of the same privileged part of society
whose offspring seemed now to be permanently wired to the Internet.
So it was that starting with the summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, every year fathered another summit
on climate and environment, offering pious promises to deal with carbon emissions. However, per
capita, they just kept on climbing even in 2016, when only those with stone for brains still refused to
acknowledge that climate change was gathering a frightful momentum. Pictures of crazy forests were
everywhere on our screens as trees sunk into the melting permafrost of the Arctic, presaging the
imminent release of catastrophic quantities of methane, formerly trapped by the frozen ground. By
then, students of climate were terrified, telling us that the biosphere would likely not survive such a
massive release of greenhouse gasses. Was anyone listening? Even then we continued along the same
path of doom, unable to agree on who should pay for the remedies and the cleanup. Everyone hoped for
a miracle. A diminishing number, mostly among the less privileged, prayed to their many gods for the
miracle of salvation; most simply put their faith in science and human ingenuity. And here we are, or
arent.
Although a great many, maybe even most of us, were able to carry on up to the Death as though
nothing had changed, the world was in sorry shape, awaiting something sinister. So Nature simply said
Enough, as it had in the past with other plagues, and shut us down. Think of the carrier pigeon, or
even more compelling, the Rocky Mountain locust. At the height of its infestation, that species must
have numbered tens of trillions of individuals. There are reliable reports of them forming clouds large
enough to cover the state of California. Thats a lotta bugs! The seven and a half billion of us before the

Death, wouldnt have come close to covering the state. However, if you took us along with all our stuff,
wed cover the whole U.S.A. and then some. The infestation of locusts mysteriously suddenly
collapsed, with the last individual sighted in 1902 in southern Saskatchewan.
Now it has been the turn of PoHs to crumble. When you think about it, what choice did Nature have? If
a nuclear war seemed imminent, as it did, given the increasing chaos of deterrence, even a so-called
limited war taking place in an atmosphere already supercharged with greenhouse gasses could mean
that the biosphere would not survive. Humans showed neither inclination nor ability to control either
their population, or their appetites, most importantly including the thirst for new knowledge.
Remember that the last time greenhouse gasses reached as high as they will by the end of the century,
252,028,000 years ago, the Earth was that much younger, the suns radiation a significant 2% weaker.
PoHs would have achieved, in the space of the century between the two great pandemics and about
fifty years more at most, what it took Nature, through such things as intense volcanic activity, tens of
thousands of years to bring about.
Nature cannot adapt to change at that speed!!!
Nature must have resented our attempts to take over its role in evolution. A new bug with 100%
lethality and 100% transmissibility among humans was her solution to the problem of PoHs. Since
most (dare I say all?) microscopic pathogens are highly species-specific, the Death has probably left the
rest of the biosphere intact. Only the animals that we have forced into the organized predation we
called animal husbandry may be trapped by our demise. A cow can make no use of preserved semen.
What she needs is a bull; that, our science has denied her. Other species previously in danger of
extinction, without us around to destroy their habitat and to overharvest them, will re-establish their
appropriate numbers that is, if the climate somehow manages to stabilize, now that we are mostly
gone. In the presence of so much available carbon, warmer temperatures and increased rainfall in many
parts of the world, plant life will start to vigorously draw down carbon from the atmosphere. Maybe
this will be enough to cool the Earth sufficiently to stave off a biosphere-destroying release of methane.
But Nature has cut it breathtakingly fine. It will take maybe 50,000 years for it to cool and heal itself.
Like the scars of small pox, those left by PoHs will never clear up completely; Nature will pass away,
around two billion years hence, still bearing them.
What about Mother Nature? Before the Death, science was beginning to accept the notion that the
biosphere was a living whole that had evolved to protect itself in an unfriendly universe. It was okay to
use Gaia as shorthand for the interconnections of life. But Mother Nature was a folkloric term,
associated with primitive animism that smacked of nature worship. Arrogant, resourceful, technological
human society was above and separate from nature. It had its own things to worship. Money, power,
sex, . . . to like . . .
By 2016 most of us had become thought-relatives of the classical Greeks. We were obsessed with
death, racing to change ourselves and the world in order to outwit it. But death was natural; therefore,
Nature had to be subdued. Nature could not be human-like; it was not self-aware. On the other hand, it
was perfectly fine to make, mostly in our own image, puerile abstractions of a self-aware higher
power that was supposed to make everything work. It was just that, an abstraction: corporate
leadership, religious leadership, political leadership, intellectual leadership. God could punish us, but,
by following the rules, we hoped to make it through. With him as our protector, we could construct
excuses for doing whatever we wished to Mother Nature. The irony is that it/she did not require
worship, only co-operation. I am angry. I deplore the stupidity that led to this; I decry the misplaced

veneration of intelligence. Nothing more than one of countless strategies for survival, it nevertheless
tempted us to the supreme stupidity of imagining that we are special, and that led us straight to the
Death.
Now that we are almost gone, maybe down to fewer than twenty of us here just below the Arctic Circle,
from the teeming billions who until a year and a half ago swarmed over the suffocating tarmac and
concrete spaces of the world, I see things more clearly. The last few pages draw a picture of
indecipherable folly, even though nothing is exaggerated. The question cries out, How could we have
been so stupid? Maybe, we were meant to be, free will be damned. Maybe we were merely one of
innumerable failed experiments of Nature. Will it try again to evolve intelligence capable of
engineering itsescape from planet Earth? On its terms, evolution is an exquisitely slow process, so it
will not have much time. Remember that to reach the point where something in the biosphere could
conceive of moving beyond its earthly home, life had been evolving for more than four billion years. A
mere 500 million years on, the sun will be so hot that the biosphere will pass into the long, blazing
twilight of the extremophiles, lasting possibly a billion and a half years more. After that will come
another three billion years of silence before the inexorably expanding sun finally engorges our
marvellous hunk of rock.
Scientia potentia est (knowledge is power), the truth shall make you free, enlightenment, education:
dont these add up to unassailable virtue in western thought? They do, of course, but they need to be
reconsidered. The pursuit of truth in our own interest has brought on cataclysmic disaster; perhaps our
brains were infected with a virus that made us unafraid of exactly that which has consumed us,
knowledge. It happens elsewhere in nature; why not to us? Maybe something as genetically
uncomplicated as a prion, a quasi-life form simpler than a virus, benefitting in some way from human
inquisitiveness, has evolved a way to dampen our fear of investigating the unknown.