Stayin’ alive on a dying planet

MY 5-year-old was recently fixated on the idea of good and bad bacteria.

He would ask “Is the bacteria in this thing good? Is the bacteria in the other thing bad?”

I tried to explain to him that bacteria are not good or bad. They do not have any intention of malice or benevolence. They only have one goal, which is to survive. Sometimes their survival means the illness or death of the humans or animals or plants they inhabit—like when we catch a bug that makes us sick. Sometimes their survival becomes useful to others—like the bacteria in his favourite yoghurt drink.

What is clear is that everything alive on Earth tries to survive, and sometimes it means they have to kill others. But even as I tell him this, I found myself challenging my own explanation. As a species, humans have long justified various things we do as being driven by survival. But although our biology has not evolved so much (biologically, we still need to consume other living things for our sources of carbon), our lifestyles have changed dramatically. With this change in lifestyle, we are clearly changing the home we live in.

The home is old, but not so old compared to its neighbours. But it is clearly special. Despite our fantasies and a yearning to find inhabitants of other homes to pay us a visit, decades of research have only confirmed what many have always suspected—around this block, we are the only ones who live here.

But our home is not special because we live here. We live here because our home is so special.

Our closest neighbours Venus and Mars, roughly the same size and distance from the sun, are vastly different. Beautiful as she is, living on Venus sounds a bit like living in hell. Instead of air, we would be breathing in toxic clouds of sulphuric acid and feeling pressure as if we were 2km deep below the ocean. That is if we do not first burn and melt under her surface temperature of 475 degrees Celsius.

In contrast, Mars is dusty and bitingly cold. But her surface is much less stormy and corrosive than Venus, and being the most observed and researched planet besides Earth, Mars seems to be our only hope at possibly finding those neighbours we so desperately want to meet. There is an amusing albeit sad story captured in Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ about Percival Lowell, who despite his significant contribution to astronomy, also contributed to some very wild ideas of anthropomorphic Martians. He spent 15 years observing the surface of Mars with his telescope and sketched what he believed were ‘canals’, built by intelligent Martians, which captured the public imagination. These canals have now been disproved by NASA’s Mariner missions, and Lowell’s observations have been explained to be optical illusions—the product of a human psychological tendency to connect dots and see patterns. But even though Lowell’s canal engineering Martians have been disproved, we have not given up hope of finding alternative signs of life—or at the very least, signs life once existed on Mars. This is the mission of rovers like the Perseverance, who will continue to look and send back samples from their new home on which they will remain indefinitely.

While the rovers are stuck on Mars, their compatriots Voyager 1 & 2 cannot stop moving. Launched in 1977, the interstellar probe duo passed the heliopause (the limit where particles released from the sun are briefly interrupted by the matter between two star systems) in 2012, still travelling further in the solar system on generators powered by plutonium-238 that have been decaying and providing heat and energy for over 40 years.

Some of the probes of Voyager 1 have been shut, but remarkably both spacecraft continue to function well. Thinking of iPhones that are considered old after three years of use, and various laboratory equipment that tend to degrade over time, with or without use—it is amazing that these space-bound instruments do not seem susceptible to the same fate.

A paradox emerges. Where our home uniquely facilitates life, it inevitably is tied with decay and death. Everything that lives must die.

In space, where nothing we know of for now is alive, there is the allure of immortality.

Here on Earth, our lease is finite. It has been a long lease, beginning 3.5 billion years ago when special bacteria, among the already special species that could survive early Earth’s environment, catapulted her into a new phase termed the Great Oxidation Event, which eventually changed the atmosphere into one that could support even more complex and diverse forms of life. Some of these organisms, specifically over 300,000 species of plants, transformed Earth into becoming even more habitable—providing habitats, food, materials, a sense of peace, and most critically, climate control and oxygen. But as our species and the number of humans living to survive continue to grow every year, our lifestyle now threatens the very things that have allowed us to begin our lives in the first place.

But perhaps it is not too late to delay the inevitable. The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference ‘Cop26’ - nearly three decades since it first brought world leaders to commit to climate action - signalled the strongest commitment to stop deforestation and restore damaged land to date, with wardens of tropical forest and biodiversity hotspots such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo among the 100 signatories (hopefully Malaysia will follow suit). This is a great sign, even if the road to materialise these commitments is still paved with challenges. Because even if we can never fully conserve forests to the extent they need to be conserved, at least we now agree, that we must do something to buy us more time.

Perhaps that time will allow us to find and adopt better and smarter solutions to support some of the modern necessities that we have come to rely on - from plastics to vegetable oils to vehicles and electricity - solutions like smart farming, circular economy, and renewable energy. Perhaps it will even give us time to realise that we do not really need so much, that there is plenty to go around if we managed and shared our resources better. We can walk or take public transport instead of driving short distances, plan and portion meals, refurbish and reuse everyday items, and consume thoughtfully.

Ultimately, what we truly need we mostly already have (and no one else in the whole galaxy can claim this)—we have a really good home.

But it is not a permanent home, it is a borrowed one. A home we share with a myriad of other living things. All trying to survive. And there is nothing bad about trying to survive. Even if you are a bacteria that makes someone sick.

But stayin’ alive while helping others to survive—like friendly gut bacteria-- is something we can all aspire to do. It might be the thing that saves us.