Scatter, Adapt, And Remember: how Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz

Most of my way through this book, I was (wrongly) convinced that this book would be better than the usual fare of pessimistic, apocalyptic rants about the destruction of the world in which we live that serves as the standard fare for popular scientific works about our day and age as it relates to the state of the environment. For more than 50 years, readers in the West (and anywhere else unfortunate enough to get these books) have been treated to gloom and doom about global cooling (which, strange as it seems now, was popularly preached in the 70s as a fate to a world without an ozone layer destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons), and then, when world temperatures increased again, global warming, and then, the more amorphous and totalizing threat of climate change. This book does not engage in that sort of gloomcasting, which is a good thing, but instead of pessimism the author draws a sense of hope for humanity which starts off seeming like a welcome tonic from all of the bad news one reads about the subject, until you read what the author has in mind for solutions to the environmental problems that we face, and then one longs for the familiarity of pessimism that does not seek to endorse the abhorrent ideas that the author has in mind for the well-being of humanity.

This book is about 250 pages or so and is divided into five parts. After beginning with an introduction about the common fear that humanity is doomed, the first part of the book talks about the history of mass extinctions on the earth (I), which includes a discussion of the extinction that followed the development of life (1), two ways to go extinct (2) via global warming and a snowball earth, the great dying (3), what really happened to the dinosaurs (4), and the question as to whether a mass extinction is going on right now (5). This is followed by a discussion of how humanity almost didn’t make it, with chapters on the African bottleneck (6), our encounter with the Neanderthals (7), the great plagues (8) of history, and generations that struggled with famines (9). After this the author discusses lessons from survivors, such as the importance of scattering in a diaspora (10), adapting like the world’s toughest microbes (11), remembering from the past (12), and engaging in pragmatic optimism by cultivating stories of survival (13). After this, the author turns her attention to building a death-proof city, in looking at the changing metropolis (14), disaster science (15), using math to stop a pandemic–which sure worked with Covid (/sarc) (16), discussing cities with hiding spaces (17), and making every surface a farm to help with food needs (18). The author then ends with a million-year view that includes terraforming earth (19), looking to the stars (20), taking a ride on the space elevator (21), examining the possibility of leaving the body behind (22), and traveling to other planets and moons (23). The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, illustration credits, and an index.

What is it that makes the author’s ideas so bad? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that the author, who herself is a cultural Jew (unfortunately, this matters), feels that the well-being of mankind depends on making government out to be like God and seeking for the people who rule over that global one world government to be like the author in being beyond concerns of morality. Whether it involves the author’s interest in having people eat bugs (Why is it that these one world government types are obsessed with getting people to eat bug protein and fungi anyway?), or the way the author blindly assumes that unaccountable globalist elites know the best interests of others and are the only way for humanity to survive. The book is far better when it is praising man’s adaptability as a means of avoiding extinction, including, eventually, the likelihood that mankind will want to make its home in the heavens and escape the earth. This book is a clear example where less is more, where it would have been wiser to have a shorter book that praised mankind’s adaptability without revealing the source of the writer’s optimism in the belief of her corrupt elite’s skills at managing earth and the people on it for their own benefit.