In the next few parts of our journey through the solar system, we examine our world through the eyes of a stranger, seeing past the assumptions that blind us to the awesome complexity around us. Earth is a lot more than the birthplace and currently unique home of humanity, but a world of rich diversity where a number of cyclical processes keep a dynamic and precarious balance. One of those processes, life, may ultimately catalyze a transformation of the solar system through the continuing evolution of technological intelligence.
The progress of our adventure so far (current in bold):
1. The Sun
2. Mercury
3. Venus
4. Earth (Vol. 1)
5. Earth (Vol. 2)
6. Earth (Vol. 3)
7. Earth (Vol. 4)
8. Earth (Vol. 5)
9. Earth (Vol. 6)
10. Luna
11. Mars
12. Phobos & Deimos
13. Asteroids
14. Ceres
15. Jupiter
16. Io
17. Europa
18. Ganymede
19. Callisto
20. Saturn
21. Mimas
22. Enceladus
23. Tethys, Dione, and Rhea
24. Titan
25. Iapetus
26. Rings & Minor Moons of Saturn
27. Uranus
28. Moons of Uranus
29. Neptune
30. Triton
31. The Kuiper Belt & Scattered Disk
32. Comets
33. The Stellar Neighborhood
In volumes 4 and 5, we explore the most active, and catalytic layers known to exist in the solar system - the terrestrial biosphere and anthroposphere - two interlocking domains whose increasingly rapid, feedback-driven evolution is changing Earth and may eventually change the solar system as a whole. How exactly that plays out remains to be seen - it may ruin the terrestrial ecosystem, or it may become a spark that ignites life and intelligence throughout the solar system and beyond.
I. Context
II. History
III. Properties
1. Orbital and Rotational Features
2. Size and Mass Characteristics
3. Internal Structure
4. Surface
A. Geography
B. Hydrosphere
C. Biosphere
D. Anthroposphere
5. Atmosphere
6. Magnetosphere
IV. Natural & Artificial Satellites
V. Past Relevance to Humanity
VI. Modern Relevance to Humanity
VII. Future Relevance to Humanity
VIII. Future of Earth
IX. Catalog of Exploration
D. Anthroposphere
The phenomenon of emergence, as described in the previous volume, works in both directions relative to human existence - not only are we products of simpler processes (the self-replication of nucleic acid chains), but we ourselves are relatively simple processes that in association result in vastly complex systems. Everything we think of as "human intelligence" is largely the intelligence of human beings interacting with each other, rather than an individual property: We can be clever alone, but the results are only marginally advantageous (as evidence from feral children indicates). But in association, a network of human brains - i.e., a civilization - produces output that can awe or horrify its individual constituents.
i. Definition
Human beings as a species exert a profound influence on our environment, so it's worth distinguishing the human habitat from the rest of the biosphere. As noted, our main distinction from other complex mammals is in the fact that our brains are networked far beyond the herds and small, free-flowing associations of others: We maintain information across generations, and as a result "humanity" is actually something different from the individually-defined species H. sapiens sapiens (the redundancy is accurate - Neanderthals are H. sapiens neanderthalensis). Humanity, collectively, is not actually mammalian - in fact, taxonomy has not yet advanced to the point of classifying it, since there are no other living examples to work with. As a whole, it is fueled by combustion (burning of wood, coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas) rather than metabolism, and has been since the advent of the campfire by ancestral H. erectus hominids.
The birth of our fire-breathing species was an evolutionary jump not because it radically increased our intelligence, but because it merged an existing line - up to that point thoroughly mammalian - with a potent energy source that, as far as we know, was previously unavailable to the biosphere except as a transient disaster. Whether this symbiosis between fire and mammal is also a transient disaster remains to be seen, but there is at least a strong hope that it has served as a catalytic process toward a more sustainable and even more energetic symbiosis. In particular, I refer to the passive harvesting of environmentally available energy such as sunlight, wind, geothermal, and a host of more limited sources that together add up to far more energy than could ever be available through combustion.
ii. Extent
Everywhere that human technology exists is anthroposphere, but it overwhelmingly occurs on the terrestrial land surface within a kilometer of sea level, and is strongly concentrated on sea coasts and along rivers. The level of emergence depends on the number and density of individual humans, so at highest concentrations the environment "crystallizes" into highly complex formations we call cities, and at the lowest end resembles more ancestral forms - the hunter/gatherer village.
However, there are very high-energy but low-population "tendrils" of anthroposphere penetrating into brutally hostile environmental extremes where habitation is normally impossible: Beneath the sea in submarines, into unbreathably thin atmosphere in aircraft, and into the vacuum of space in Earth orbit. The furthest, most tenuous filaments of anthroposphere are purely technological, and extend as non-permanent robotic probes into the solar system: This series regularly makes use of their sensory data. Such probes are not combustion-powered, but their development and construction on Earth's surface was and largely continues to be. The terrestrial bulk of humanity, with darker shades indicating denser population:
iii. Process
As with all systems, the anthroposphere begins with an energy input. At the current moment in history, such inputs are dominated by mined fuels such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas, although wood is still burned as fuel all over the world, and nuclear fission provides a significant proportion of power. A small but growing proportion comes from renewably-harvested sources such as wind and solar, but regardless of the energy generation technology, the process always begins in the same place: Underground. Mines and drilling rigs are the deepest extent of human technology, where both fuels and inorganic materials are harvested. Coal, oil, methane, and uranium are mined as fuels, and silicon, iron, and rare metals prized for their electrical properties are sought as material components. Note that materials can be recycled, but fuels cannot. Deposit reserve maps:
A brief tour of mines and drilling equipment used in the harvesting and processing of fossil fuels:
Coal is both sold as it's mined, and also made into more energetic forms of the same fuel (such as natural gas), while crude oil is refined into various fuels - e.g., gasoline and kerosene - as well as organic feedstocks for plastics manufacturing. There are a multitude of niche applications for petroleum that go well beyond fuel and plastic, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Unfortunately, the burning of coal and petroleum fuels releases copious amounts of greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere, so the current underlying process of human civilization (combustion) is endangering its long-term survival. The transition to zero-emission renewables is proceeding slowly compared to the acceleration of the problem, but may yet catch up.
In terms of anthropic process, the next step from fuel harvesting is its consumption in the harvesting of materials - another area that is fed into from mining, although today a large proportion of basic materials are recycled from scrap rather than mined. Rare metals may be mined underground, but more abundant elements can be extracted in open-pit mines - basically just big basins carved out of the rock in large volumes, with the rock sent through processing machines that sift and refine it into desirable constituents. A brief look at metal refining:
Fuel and material are then combined to power electrical production, transportation, and environmental control (primarily heating) to ensure optimum conditions for human activity. In particular, the next most fundamental step in the process is electricity generation, whereby fuel is consumed at an electrical plant in order to turn generators that produce current and send it over wire networks to end-users. The breakdown of global electricity inputs is still roughly as follows, although the graphic is from a few years ago:
The following are all examples of electrical power plants. Oil:
Coal:
Natural gas:
Nuclear fission:
Hydroelectric:
Solar:
Wind:
Geothermal:
Wave/Tidal:
Electricity created by these plants is then transported long distances into the regional electrical grid - a vast network of high-voltage wires that are mainly carried overland on towers. The electricity then reaches local transformers where the voltage is reduced for end-users to safely tap and transmitted along lower-power wires to homes and businesses. Transformers may be concentrated in centralized substations if the area is densely populated, or else will occur individually near where it's used.
Fuel for machines, electricity, and building materials feed into food production: Gasoline-powered tractors and other farm equipment plant and harvest edible crops as fuel for individual human bodies, which increases both the numbers and density of humans, and that in turn promotes further combustion. There is currently a high degree of inefficiency in food production, as large quantities of produce are fed to cattle, pigs, and sheep who will then be slaughtered for meat, with a substantial proportion of the original energy lost in the process. The human digestive system, being omnivorous, is "tricked" into feeling like consuming meat is beneficial because it is so energy-dense and rich in protein, but the individual consumer does not see all the energy and nutrients that were thrown away in the process of producing it. Eating meat is ultimately unsustainable for a civilization, unless it is done entirely on a numerically-limited basis of hunting wild animals rather than farming.
Water, of course, is co-equal with food as a biological necessity (albeit more urgent), and humans consume fuel accessing and transporting it because it has to be fresh rather than saline. Energy is consumed pumping it from rivers, freshwater lakes, and out of the ground; reducing mineral and toxin content to safe levels; purifying it of potentially harmful microbes; maintaining it in reservoirs; pumping it through pipes to the end-user; and then treating waste water either for recycling or release into the environment.
Transportation is the part of the process where fuels and materials are brought to manufacturers, components are brought to companies that assemble them, food is delivered to warehouses and then grocery stores, products are delivered to retailers, and people travel between work, home, service/consumer areas, and recreation. There is no essential difference between a human transport technology and a cell membrane - it evolved from the same impulses, and accomplishes the same objective: Promoting survival and replication of the DNA molecule. "Natural" and "artificial" are meaningless distinctions - humans arise from nature, as does everything we do. The important distinction is between sustainability and unsustainability: In other words, between that which can continue as part of life indefinitely, and that which can only be useful to feed a transition to some other condition.
Large trucks, freight trains, and cargo ships transport commodities and consumer products, while automobiles, buses, passenger trains (including subways), and jet aircraft are largely the modes of human transport. At the present time, these are all overwhelmingly powered by petroleum-based fuels. Of course, humans still also walk and use their bodies to power bicycles, rowboats, and other simple modes (e.g., skateboards) where practical and/or enjoyable. But once again, all of it is simply in service to DNA replication - as complex as human motives get, on balance they all boil down to continuation of the species. Even when people act against the interests of humanity - e.g., war, exploitation, crime - the impulses that drive them to it arise from other instincts that normally promote it. Transportation modes:
The infrastructure that allows these modes of transportation to work is also quite extensive. With the exception of dedicated off-road vehicles, automobiles, buses, trucks, and motorcycles need roads; trains need tracks; bicycles need either roads or reasonably hard, level surfaces; aircraft need airports; and cargo ships need docks. And all of them need special structures that allow them to pass natural obstacles and coordinate with traffic: Bridges, tunnels, turnarounds, roundabouts, on/offramps, stoplights, locks, and so on.
And speaking of special measures, in some places the population density is sufficient that certain "procedures" are necessary to keep the transportation running smoothly:
Furthest down the line are humanity's sensory organs - the observatories and spacecraft, both crewed and robotic, that require a large investment and return only knowledge. They are densest in orbit around Earth - the only part of space currently occupied by humans - and second densest in Earth's solar orbit at Earth-Sun L4 and L5 Lagrange points (no human facilities there yet), but there are a significant number of active probes there and beyond, and even more failed or extinct probes wandering passively. Without their assistance, this series would be nothing more than speculation attended by a few blurry ground-based images.
iv. Primary Habitat
Humanity self-organizes along several overlapping lines, and it happens due to the same principles by which diversity occurs in the non-human biosphere: Namely, it is simply more efficient, and thus adaptively advantageous, for boundaries to occur than for the entire system to be completely fluid. As a result, we have different languages, physical appearances, and national borders illustrating past efficiencies - i.e., in the past, over multiple generations, it was more efficient for a group within certain geographic limits to keep largely to itself culturally and genetically.
Naturally the exact boundaries keep changing, and some of them disappear entirely while others emerge. This is why the concept of "race" is meaningless: There have undoubtedly in the past been countless associations of linguistic and physical traits that appeared, flourished, and then disappeared either through competition or merging with others. Very little of what exists now existed then, anywhere, except in bits and pieces that had yet to combine.
If you could travel far back in time, people would look very unusual to you: They would still look human, of course, and maybe even attractive, but they would not look like the people you had been seeing all your life. Their facial bone structure would be different - the set of their eyes, the expression on their faces, their lips and mouth, their nose, etc. And even if you spoke their language, which is highly unlikely even for an academic who studied them, their cadence, idiom, and emphasis would be alien. Thus the most basic set of large-scale boundaries are ethnolinguistic - i.e., denoting language and culture.
Below are ethnolinguistic maps for the present era. Some are quite detailed, so you may have to click on them to read the legend, but I wasn't able to find any useful maps regarding North America or Australia - apparently the dominant cultures in both haven't been around long enough to form much diversity beyond dialects and urban/rural divides, and indigenous cultures have dwindled rather than flourished. It must suffice to say that English is dominant in the US, most of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while French is spoken in Quebec and Spanish in Mexico.
But ethnic lines are fluid - culture, language, food, religion, these all flow organically into each other, even when adjacent groups are mutually hostile. Political boundaries, however, are relatively static (notwithstanding wars of conquest), and operate on principles that are internally rational. They are rigid structures that crystallize out of culture in ways that - at least under the original conditions - promote and reflect the local values and traditions while amorally serving its own interests.
The political maps below are somewhat inaccurate, as the names are all given in English - and in fact, if the English name is not used by the people who live in a place, the name is fictitious. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a map that reflected this fact, and it would take quite a long time to build one myself, so it must be sufficient to explain that there are no such places as "Germany," "China," or "Sweden" - only Deutschland, 中国, and Sverige (you're on your own with pronunciations). Compare the maps below to those above.
Political authority is, by its very nature, slow to adjust to the more fluid motions around it, so we shouldn't be surprised that there is virtually no evidence of national boundaries in images like this (I recommend going full screen on the video below):
Governments and national boundaries are necessary - I do not for a moment buy into anarchist viewpoints from either the left or the right, as they both romanticize what would essentially be global chaos, mutual predation, and universal desperation. However, it should be recognized that cities and economic regions are once again becoming important after many decades of being de-emphasized, and cities in particular are once again becoming architectural and artistic showcases after for many years being abandoned. Let's take a tour of some world cities Americans don't often see or hear about, since they're not typically used in movies and are relatively "uneventful" places - and yet thriving examples of the city in action:
Tokyo:
Seoul:
Beijing:
Shanghai:
Chongqing:
Guangzhou:
Shenzhen:
Singapore:
Sydney:
Melbourne:
Auckland:
And just for good measure, here's a fascinating view from space of cumulus clouds scudding over Manhattan:
v. Exploratory Habitat
Beyond the cities, towns, villages, and even isolated campsites are places - both on and above the Earth - where survival is anywhere from difficult to practically impossible without the backing of a modestly wealthy institution. On the terrestrial surface, these places are either in the middle of hot, subtropical deserts such as the Sahara, or else on the desolate continental ice shelves of Northern Canada, Greenland, and Antarctica. The former have proven far easier to deal with than the latter, and offer far less insight into conditions on other worlds. So while plenty of research is done in hot deserts, world governments and international institutions run dedicated research stations on the ice.
By virtue of international treaty, Antarctica cannot be occupied except on behalf of scientific research, so many nations operate research stations there both for the stated purpose and to maintain a sovereign presence as a matter of expediency. As part of that expedient, a number of territorial claims were made - some of which overlap - but those involved in the treaty, even if only as consulting parties, agreed to make no attempt at enforcement. The US and USSR (defaulting to Russia) made no specific claims, but with the understanding that future claims could be made - i.e., that if either wanted a part of Antarctica and deemed the military danger worthwhile, they would simply take it. Below is a map of the explicit claims, which unsurprisingly occur as radial slices like a pie chart, since claims are based on longitudinal extensions of existing territory. However, they overlap due to disputed territories and colonial possessions - e.g., the Falkland Islands.
Depending on the resources and commitment of the sovereign backer, research stations may be seasonal or year-round. A map of facilities:
The two most famous and significant bases are McMurdo Station and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - both US facilities. McMurdo is the largest Antarctic base by far - a permanent installation that is the size of a small town, and is capable of supporting over 1200 people simultaneously. It operates through the labor of contract crew who work in support of the US government's scientific objectives in the region, and (last I heard) the workers are managed by defense contractor Raytheon - although that information may be out of date, and I'm not sure where to look for an update.
While the crew operates the base, scientists are selected to make use of it and given requisite funding - a process similar in some ways (although far less rigorous) than astronaut selection. A researcher has to be quite physically fit, healthy, and have a reasonably stable personality to work in such an environment (e.g., 6-month days and nights; coldest place on Earth; bland scenery for the most part; exhausting physical drudgery coupled with boredom; etc.) for months at a time. Images of McMurdo:
Amundsen-Scott is the US-run facility located at the Antarctic pole:
If you're curious to know more about life in Antarctica, I recommend checking out a Werner Herzog documentary called Encounters at the End of the World. It's not exactly an educational film - more like a travelogue and philosophical rumination - but it's still worth it. Trailer:
The Antarctic research stations are not the end of the human-occupied anthroposphere - not even close. There is still one frontier that makes even the conditions at the South Pole seem tame and habitable by comparison: The vacuum, weightlessness, four-hundred-degree temperature swings between light and shadow, and hard radiation of space. To learn about extended survival in this environment, a coalition of nations built the International Space Station (ISS) over a period of two decades, and it is now Earth's second largest moon - longer than a football field in length, and at least half as much in width by virtue of its large solar arrays. Its crew compliment varies from time to time, but its sustainable capacity is 6 people at any one time. Launches of the Space Shuttle to the ISS:
ISS in early stages of construction:
EVAs:
And because the inside is as intriguing as the outside, here is a film tour of the space station by one of the astronauts living there (Warning: You may get nauseous as the viewpoint orientation is constantly shifting):
For now, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) - the region of ISS - is the extent of human habitation (notwithstanding our relics lying on the lunar surface), but I don't expect humanity to stay confined within that boundary for more than another decade or so. Launch prices are falling rapidly due to innovations in the commercial rocket industry, and the people responsible for those advances say they haven't even begun.
