Michael Tennesen

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“Interplanetary Travel Would Be A Major Evolutionary Force For Earth-Born Settlers On Mars”

June 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk and other billionaire tinkerers want to go to Mars to save our species from extinction, but, of course, what we rescue won’t be us but a variant of us. And perhaps not one that seems so familiar.

Colonies on other planets will force evolution, perhaps not on the scale of gene editing, but pretty markedly. Or perhaps in addition to terraforming Mars, we might use genetic engineering to abet Homo sapiens’ survival on our neighboring planet. Of course, if that option becomes available, it won’t likely be soon. We’ll have to remake ourselves in a blunter way in space for the foreseeable future.

From Michael Tennesen’s fascinating The Next Species:

Biosphere 2 is an example of how long-term occupancy of a space station on a planet that is millions of miles from Earth could be extremely dangerous and fraught with perils that science may not yet know enough about. 

On the positive side, if we can overcome these hazards, then a Mars space station might offer a place where Homo sapiens can truly differentiate–becoming a new species. Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist at Ames Research Center, envisions a permanent research base of closed environments on Mars as the next most logical place to live outside of Earth. Still, she claims a child who grew up on the Red Planet, with one-third of the gravity of Earth, would never have the physical of skeletal structure to survive on our Blue Planet.

“It is likely that a second-generation Martian would be physically unfit to walk unaided on Earth, at least without intense weight and strength training,” says Stoker. “Just imagine if you suddenly weighed three times what you weigh now. Could you walk? Would your deconditioned heart be able to pump the blood volume needed? Whether we know it or not, we are constantly doing a lot of work against gravity.”

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Interplanetary travel would be a major evolutionary force for Earth-born settlers on Mars, and frequent travel between Earth and Mars would be unlikely because of the expense. Living on Mars could produce long-term biological changes that would make a return to Earth ultimately impossible. With isolation a natural part of the job, the gradual push of evolution toward becoming another species could happen in outer space just as well as here on Earth.•

 

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Old Print Article: “Storm Of Dust Traps Autoists,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1935)

June 1, 2015 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was situated in the American prairies, but the ramifications of the poor farming methods were wide, and the storms soon swept east and obscured the sun over the entire Atlantic seaboard. I thought of what was known as the “Black Blizzards” because I just read Michael Tennesen’s The Next Species, a very interesting book about the potential end of us. The author draws an analogy between the Depression Era dust storms and what may occur in Las Vegas if the crust of the nearby desert floor dissipates, something that’s possible because of the havoc we’re playing with the environment. The difference between boom town and ghost town can be decided by the tiniest particles. A year after the first wave of the storms in 1934, mayhem was still the order of the day, as this article from the April 15, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle can attest.

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“It Will Fundamentally Change The Human Race”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

People will eventually be able to engineer people, and then what?

It may be necessary for the survival of the species, but the games will be messy and so much could go wrong. But if, say, China started doing it, how would other nations not?

I’m pretty sure it was David Epstein who discussed how this type of human alteration is not realistic in the short term because genes have such complicated, multifaceted functions. But there’s nothing theoretically impossible about it given more time. If we don’t do ourselves in, eventually we’ll be making ourselves over.

From Michael Tennesen at Salon:

We’ve proven we can change the genetic makeup of plants and ani­mals, so how about us? We don’t need to wait for natural selection: we can start selecting right now. The cost of genomic sequencing, the key to moving modern medicine from reactive standards to per­sonalized prevention, has fallen astronomically. When the Human Genome Project was announced in 1990, deciphering the genome of one man was budgeted at $3 billion. By 2001 the cost was down to $3 million. In 2010 it was below $5,000. By 2012 it was below $1,000. At this rate, in ten years a fully sequenced human genome should cost about $10.

As genetic screenings become more common, designing the body to alter genetic weaknesses will be more common as well. Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a gene in her body that makes her more susceptible to breast cancer is just the start. It may one day be possible to change the gene rather than the result. The negative aspect is that many genes perform more than one function. Changing a gene to match a given result may have unintended conse­quences. Trial and error will be necessary here.

What will be the big forces behind genetic manipulation? The University of Washington’s Peter Ward sees parents as strong se­lective forces, since many will want their offspring to live long, look good, and be brainy. “If the kids are as smart as they are long-lived— an IQ of 150 and a life span of 150 years—they could have more chil­dren and accumulate more wealth than the rest of us,” wrote Ward in a January 2009 article for Scientific American. Socially they would be drawn to others of their kind, which could lead to speciation.

Parental desires could provide the big necessary push for the cre­ation of designer genes if only to ensure that their children will be talented, the right height, or the right weight. Such considerations could be a major force for not just designer genes but designer chil­dren. Stanford University’s Rob Jackson speculates, “What would happen if women could order Brad Pitt’s sperm from the back of a magazine? Even better, what if they could mix Will Smith’s smile and George Clooney’s eyes from a catalog? It will fundamentally change the human race.”

What if we could alter male genes to make the perfect soldier? Ac­cording to Henry Harpending, “The Chinese talk about that often— without batting an eye.” The perfect soldier . . . what about the perfect nuclear physicist?•

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“Homo Sapiens Has A Limited Lifespan”

March 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A little more about The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man, Michael Tennesen’s new book about the end of us. In a episode of The Point of Interest podcast hosted by Lindsay Beyerstein, the environmental journalist says this near the show’s end:

What we’ve created is the false promise that we don’t need the environment anymore, we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t need nature anymore, that these ecosystem services are not critical. That’s basically what’s happening. And as we lose these species and they disappear, we learn the importance of them, how disease spreads…We’re getting into a world that’s a depauperate world…We have an inflated ego of who we are, and we think we’re going to last forever. Homo sapiens has a limited lifespan, and we should try to coexist and try to stop thinking we’re the be all and end all and that we’re the dominant member of the natural society and start playing a part of that society. Maybe we could last longer and enjoy it more.• Listen here.

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“In An Extinction Event, You’ve Got A New Playing Board”

March 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Michael Tennesen is a glass-half-full kind of guy. The author of the newly published The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man tells Lindsay Abrams of Salon that something may extinct humans (his guess: overpopulation), but it’s not that big a deal. Maybe something less shitty will come along and replace us. 

A tangent before the interview excerpt: I’ve heard a million times that no one reads anymore and that Amazon has destroyed publishing and that books are dead, but have you noticed how one great title after another keeps emrging, almost more than it’s possible to keep up with? Something there doesn’t compute.

The interview excerpt:

Question:

A lot of us look at these studies about pollution and climate change and extinction on a very day-by-day, headline basis. What was the value for you of stepping back and taking a more pulled-back, planetary perspective on these issues?

Michael Tennesen:

I was influenced by a paper that Anthony Barnosky from the University of California at Berkeley wrote, about his idea that we are entering a mass extinction event. People who study life on Earth think that extinction has a dual side: it could be a catastrophe or it could be an opportunity. The comet that fell out of the sky at the end of the Cretaceous period knocked out the dinosaurs, but made way for mammals and man.

So I’m trying to look at what can happen next. And to get an idea of what can happen next, I kind of had to pull back and look at the history of life on Earth with the idea: how does life recover from catastrophe? What things can you see in both events that might possibly be repeated in the future?  I wanted to look at the whole concept. There was a book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, where he talked about what it would be like tomorrow if man disappeared and how long it would take for man’s infrastructure to come down, for New York to fall.  I just wanted to look at it from more of a reality standpoint: What would the biology be like in such an event?

Question:

When you’re looking back at some of these lessons we can learn from past mass extinctions, what are some of the most important things you came across, that we should be paying attention to?

Michael Tennesen:

If you look at the past, the driver of four out of the five mass extinctions has been carbon dioxide. I went to Guadalupe National Park and took a hike with the national park biologist Jonena Hearst to Capitan Reef, which was just this explosion of life that existed back in the Permian Era, 250 million years ago, just before the Permian extinction. It showed just how susceptible life is to chemicals in the environment, and the litany of things that was going on during the Permian extinction, which was the greatest extinction we’ve ever had: 90 percent of life was knocked out of the ocean; 70 to 75 percent on land. The high CO2 content and greenhouse gases and other problems — sulfur dioxide release, major changes in the ocean currents — these are some of the things we’re dealing with now. I don’t know if we’re going to be heading into that massive of an event, but there are lessons there. A lot of people want to go, “Well, what’s CO2? What’s the big deal?” It’s 400 parts per million. That’s a lot.

Question:

As you said, there is sort of a more optimistic way of looking at mass extinction, because there are some positive potential outcomes…

Michael Tennesen:

In an extinction event, you’ve got a new playing board. I went up to Mt. St. Helens and looked at the land around that volcano. They’ve actually separated a portion of the volcanic area as a natural experiment to see how life would come back. Nature actually does a pretty fabulous job pretty quickly.•

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