The longer that we are confined to earth the greater the chance life will be snuffed out. Therefore a sense of urgency for getting off planet is a good thing.

The problem is that the majority think like turkey’s and this imperils all life. My goal in this post is to evolve you past turkey in five minutes and get you thinking at humanity scale.

So what is Turkey Thinking?

Turkey Thinking is Everywhere

The turkey has a wonderful life. Every day it is fed and protected from predators. Based on this life experience it anticipates a happy life. But one day, in November, the turkey is murdered, plucked, and roasted.

Sadly, the turkey didn’t account for unknown events — these unpredictable events are called Black Swans — because they were outside of its training distribution (AKA life experience). Because of that they didn’t think about what happened to grandpa or why the humans are so nice.

We are just like the turkey; we scoff at global pandemics, super volcano’s, rogue asteroids, and numerous other human versions of Thanksgiving. And these are just the events we can see!

These unknown threats are a shotgun barrel from the closet pointed at the head of life itself. Our turkey mindset works well for our daily lives. But we need foresight at the collective level so that we can plant seeds and create reserves ahead of global disaster.

Many extinction events require massive preparation to survive — like preparing for winter but orders of magnitude greater in scope. You can’t solve problems like a super volcano erupting by waiting for it to happen and then reacting — despite how predominant that strategy is today 😛.

If we are to level up as a species we need to come together and think on geologic time scales — Time scales the universe operates on — so that we can truly appreciate tail risk. And we need to do it now.

A Sense of Urgency

Fact: Earth could die at any moment.

This is indisputable. We have no idea when the next major extinction level event will happen on our own planet i.e. WW3, super volcano, etc. and have no hope of knowing — that’s a problem when it only takes one event.

10% of species are lost every million years, 30% every 10 million years, and 65% every 100 million years. This big time scale gives us the illusion that we have plenty of time, but thats not how statistics work. Every day we spin the roulette wheel.

What we do know is that every moment of peace causes an uptick in probability of these events as instabilities accrue.

The Death of Earth is Inevitable

Fact: Earth is default dead.

Outside of geologic and social disaster, which we could conceivably mitigate, there are many ways that Earth can end suddenly. Events like a rogue neutron star, asteroid, or a giant solar flare. If nothing else, in a few billion years the sun will expand and roast the planet.

Chaos Theory tells us that it is impossible to predict domino effects in complex systems like sand piles, earthquakes, wars, and avalanches. So, there is no way to prevent this long tail of risks. We could minimize war by providing abundance to all. We could deal with super volcanoes with massive projects to release pressure in a controlled way and so on. But it’s impossible to prevent all disaster.

It only. Takes. One.

At the end of the day a planet is a a cradle. A good place to grow up but not the endpoint. It’s simply too vulnerable to be a good long term spaceship.

Conservation is a Bridge

Should we sacrifice all in the pursuit of progress? Poison the planet, ignore emissions, slaughter the penguins?

No of course not. Space is simply long term conservation. In other words, while we prepare for winter (domesticating space) it’s necessary to drive off the wolves in the sheep pen (safeguarding earth).

Space won’t be developed overnight and any extinctions now are forever. We need to protect life and 99% of mankind should be dedicated to this mission.

But given the torch of life in the universe could be snuffed out at any moment, sooner is better than later.

Final Words

Let’s stop thinking like turkey’s — we are better than that. Let’s start making global multi-century plans. Perhaps we can start by putting more resources into going to space — it’s a tiny amount right now, on the order of 0.1% of GDP. Let’s put it to 1%. A marginal impact on the world and likely to drive progress and therefore abundance.