Lifespan

Death by death, the world sheds ideas that need to be shed. Ipso facto, birth by birth, the world is offered an opportunity to do things better. Alas, we don’t always get it right.

Compassion and common sense can move nations.

much, it’s that hundreds of millions of other people consume and waste as much and in some cases more,18 and billions of other people are moving in that same direction. If everyone in the world consumed as Americans do for one year, the nonprofit Global Footprint Network estimates it would take the Earth four years to regenerate what has been used and absorb what has been wasted.19 This is textbook unsustainability; we use and use and use, and return little of value to our natural world

problem is not just population, it’s consumption. And it’s not just consumption, it’s waste. In comes the food; out goes the effluent. In come the fossil fuels; out go the carbon emissions. In come the petrochemicals; out goes the plastic. On average, Americans consume more than three times the amount of food they need to survive and about 250 times as much water.14 In return, they produce 4.4 pounds of trash each day, recycling or composting only about of a third of it.15 Thanks to things such as cars, planes, big homes, and power-

Echoing Fenner’s warnings, Hawking believed that humanity would have 100 years to find a new place to live. “We are running out of space on Earth,” he said. A lot of good that will do; the Earth-like planet that is nearest to our solar system is 4.2 light-years away. Barring major advances in warp speed or wormhole-transit technology, it would take us ten thousand years to get there.

November 2016, the late physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that humanity had less than 1,000 years left on “our fragile planet.” A few months of contemplation later, he revised his estimate downward by
90 percent.

final act of forewarning came just a few months before his death in 2010, when he told the Australian newspaper that the human population explosion and “unbridled consumption” had already sealed our species’ fate. Humanity would be gone in the next hundred years, he said. “There are too many people here already.”1

What if giving billions of people longer and healthier lives enables our species to do greater harm to this planet and to one another? Greater longevity is inevitable; I’m sure of it. What if it inevitably leads to our self-destruction?

Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, who has a better
track record than most at predicting the future, has a golden rule: “E

Embrace things rather than try and fight them. Work with things rather than try and run from them or prohibit them.”3