The Human Age Read Free Page A

such as: Why does the world seem to be racing under our feet? Why is this the first year that Canada geese didn’t migrate from many New England towns, and why have so many white storks stopped migrating in Europe? The world is being ravaged by record heat, drought, and floods—can we fix what we’ve done to the weather? What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be? What will it mean to travel when we can go anywhere on our computers, with little cost or effort? With all the medical changes to the human body—including carbon blade legs, bionic fingers, silicon retinas, computer screens worn over one eye with the ability to text by blinking, bionic suits that make it possible to lift colossal weights, and a wonderland of brain enhancers to improve focus, memory, or mood—will adolescents still be asking, “Who am I?” or “ What am I?” How will cities, wild animals, and our own biology have changed in fifty years?
    Without meaning to, we’ve created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being. Yet despite the urgency of reining in climate change and devising safer ways to feed, fuel, and govern our civilization, I’m enormously hopeful. Our new age, for all its sins, is laced with invention. We’ve tripled our life span, reduced childhood mortality, and, for most people, improved the quality of life—fromhealth to daily comforts—to a staggering degree. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
    If we could travel back to, say, the Iron Age, few of us would go without packing certain essentials: matches, antibiotics, corrective lenses, compass, knife, shoes, vitamins, pencil and paper, toothbrush, fish hooks, metal pot, flashlight with solar batteries, and an array of other inventions that make life safer. We wouldn’t travel light.

BLACK MARBLE
    A s our spaceship enters the roulette wheel of a new solar system, hope starts building its fragile crystals once again. Disappointment has dogged our travels, but we are nomads with restless minds, and this sun resembles our own middle-aged star. Like ours, it rules a tidy jumble of planets looping in atypical orbits, some unfurling a pageant of seasons, others hard-hearted, monotone, and remote. They’re a strange assortment for siblings, with many small straggling hangers-on, but we’ve encountered odder night-fellows, and variety is their lure. One fizzy giant trails dozens of sycophantic moons; another floats inside a white cocoon. We weave between rocky, hard-boiled worlds, swing by a blimp tugging a retinue of jagged moons, dodge the diffuse rubble of asteroids, skirt a hothouse of acid clouds and phantom light.
    Slowing to a hyperglide, we admire all the dappled colors, mammoth canyons of razor-backed rust, ice-spewing volcanoes, fountains fifty miles high, hydrocarbon lakes, scarlet welts and scourges, drooling oceans of frozen methane, light daggers, magma flows, sulfur rain, and many other intrigues of climate and geology. Yet there’s no sign of living, breathing life forms anywhere. We are sucha lonely species. Maybe this solar system will be the harbor where we find others like ourselves, curious, questing beings of unknown ardor or bloom. Life will have whittled them to fit their world, it doesn’t matter how.
    One more planet to survey, and then it’s on to the next port of call.
    On a small water planet flocked over by clouds, sequins sparkle everywhere. Racing toward it with abandon, we give in to its pull, and orbit in step with nightfall shadowing the world, transfixed by the embroidery of gold and white lights—from clusters and ribbons to willful circles and grids. Crafted lights, not natural auroras or lightning, but designed , and too many, too regular, too rare to ignore.
    IN 2003, ABOARD the Space Station, Don Pettit felt his heart pinwheel whenever he viewed Earth’s cities at night. If only everyone could see Earth like this , he thought, they’d marvel at how far we’ve come,