Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Big History
and today we're going to talk about the Anthropocene. Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Anthropocene? What does
that even mean? That sounds like gibberish. No, Me From the Past, your tenth grade essays
were gibberish. The Anthropocene is a word derived from the Greek word for human. Like
you know how anthropologists study humans? Well, the Anthropocene is an unofficial
geologic era where humans have an immense influence over the biosphere. But I want to emphasize that it is unofficial
because geologists are a vicious and terrifying bunch and the word is not official until they
say it's official. But even if it's not yet a word, the underlying concept is very useful. So due to the intensification of collective
learning and the continued rise of complexity we've been talking about, you could argue
that more change has happened in the past century than in the previous, like, 250,000
years of human history. And it's all roughly within living memory.
You, your parents and your grandparents have lived in one of the most complex and interesting
times ever. [Theme Music] So, since 1800, we've had a Cambrian explosion
of innovation and discovery, like in the last few years alone we've discovered a fundamental
particle that weaves together the fabric of the universe - The Higgs Boson. We discovered
the largest ever black hole, which is about 17 billion times the mass of our sun, we found
preserved woolly mammoth blood, we even have electric cars that go more than 125 miles
per hour. Although, you should drive them more slowly,
obviously. We've grown to a population of seven billion
people and your phone has more computing power than all of NASA did when they sent men to
the Moon in 1969. And collective learning is increasing exponentially,
here's Emily Graslie from The Brain Scoop to help us understand the scale of that growth
of knowledge. As human populations grow exponentially, collective
learning is undergoing a snowball effect. In humanity's first 250,000 years as foragers,
about nine billion people lived and died. Thanks to agriculture in the last thousand
years, about 55 billion people have lived and died, and seven billion of them are around
now. This is great for rising complexity. We now
live in a unified global network of billions of brains. Communication is almost instantaneous
and we harness the power of the Earth and Sun on a massive scale. The potential for
new breakthroughs in technology or in our understanding of the cosmos is heightened
by all of this. It's all part of the continuous rising complexity in Big
History, a trend that has been preceding for over 13.8 billion years -- from gas clouds to stars to single-celled
organisms to trilobites to dinosaurs to culture. The beginnings of the Anthropocene weren't
all sunshine and daisies, however. The late 19th century was marked by an increase
in the destructiveness of weaponry, a number of colonial empires covered the entire Earth,
with the exception of a few non-European states which managed to maintain their independence,
and mounting nationalism and bigotry led to some terrible chaos in the early 20th century. World War I killed 15 million people, the
Spanish flu which followed it and spread largely as a result of the unified global system that
had previously been so valuable to collective learning killed off three times as many, and
50 million people were killed during World War II. Such is the devastating cost of increased
innovation and connectivity. Following World War II, a new wave of industrialization
entered East Asia, Central and South America, The Middle East and other areas. Newly developed
crops, especially strains of wheat and rice, helped places like India and China, which
in the mid-20th century still suffered famines. Their populations exploded for better or worse,
and we harnessed the power of atomic fission, putting immense power in the hands of humans
to be used for good or ill. It's the threat of nuclear holocaust combined
with the possibility of an asteroid impact or super-volcanic eruption that makes scientists
like Stephen Hawking encourage the colonization of the Solar System to increase the chances
of our species surviving. Coping with scarcity is the bottom line of much
of organic history encompassing all species,
including humans. So for most of human history the world
was separated into four isolated zones. The agrarian communities within those zones were
largely subdivided into separate social orders and classes and varying degrees of wealth. And the number of the wealthy, landed gentry
and aristocrats in the average agrarian civilization, whether it was Mughal India or Louis XIV's
France, was between ten and twenty percent of the total population. So, at most, twenty
percent of people were not poor. Today, in a united global system (I mean,
except for North Korea) if you earn more than roughly $20,000 per year, as most working
adults in the developed world do, you are in the top 20% of the world's richest people.
You are part of the global aristocracy. But I should note that a couple things definitely
have changed. For one thing, if you are part of the global aristocracy, you are enjoying
a standard of living better than what kings had only a couple centuries ago. You probably
have a refrigerator. You flip a switch and the lights come on. You have antibiotics,
at least for a few more years. I mean, admittedly Netflix doesn't have any of the good movies,
but that's still a better entertainment option than what Louis XIV had. All he had was public
executions. And hopefully the average person in the developed world today is a little more
enlightened about the challenges of poverty than an 18th century aristocrat would have
been, but the jury is still out on that one. I mean that's why "first world problems" is
a meme, right? But, how we behave toward the developing world in the next 100 years will
determine much of how we are viewed not only by them, but by the thousands of future generations
that come after us and read of our deeds in history. So, is human history a story of progress where
life has become better for most people over the course of 250,000 years and will life continue
to get better for most people during the Anthropocene? We're going to try to answer that by looking
at the Anthropocene in light and shade, which is basically just a list of pros and cons. Pro - Since 1970, manufacturing jobs have
lifted approximately 600 million people out of poverty, modern technologies can now feed
and clothe more humans than ever before. Con - More people in the developing world
are forced from traditional ways of life and into factory jobs with poor safety standards,
long hours and measly wages. And a lot of the goods that they produce go overseas to
enhance the standard of living of a prosperous and wealthy developed world. And while the
ratio of impoverished to wealthy countries in 1820 was about 3:1, today it's closer to
72:1. Standards of living may be increasing on average, but the wealth inequality gap
is getting wider and wider. But pro - we have managed to harness a lot
of energy, our use of coal and oil and nuclear power. These energy flows have allowed us
to generate an astounding amount of complexity in our little corner of the universe and improved
people's standards of living. Yeah, but con - current modes of production
rely heavily on non-renewable resources that are not great for the environment. Unless you've
been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years, you will probably have heard of climate change
and the potentially devastating effects it will have. Furthermore, as humanity continues to force
the environment to adapt to our needs, we are accelerating the rate of extinction of plant and animal species that don't happen to be useful to us. One of the reasons we call this period the
Anthropocene is, if humanity were to suddenly disappear and aliens were to land on Earth
500 million years later and start excavating, even if they saw no sign of the humans on
the fossil record, they would see a mass extinction event rivaling the five most devastating mass
extinctions in pre-human history. Pro - collective learning's advances in medicine,
agriculture and genetic engineering have in the past 200 years lowered the death rate
and freed billions of people from the cycles of starvation and famine that affected agrarian
civilizations. Con - the tremendous expansion of populations
in India and China have created a severe problem for the infrastructures of those countries. We now have seven billion people on Earth
and we'll grow to between 9.6 and 12 billion later in the century.
Yet, at our current rates of consumption and modes of production, the world could only
support a population of two or three billion people who enjoyed the same standard of living
as people in the United States do. China's population may level off by around
2050, India's might level off by 2070, but Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of the world
that already suffers from the highest levels of poverty and is least equipped to deal with
problems of overpopulation is set to expand enormously even past the year 2100. Add to this the likelihood that climate change
will reduce the amount of arable cropland on the Earth by 10-25% and we may have a severe
population problem on our hands. And as we can see from the population cycles of the agrarian
period, overpopulation tends to spark more violence. Pro - in the long term, development of a country's
economy tends to change demographic trends. While an agrarian civilization benefited greatly
from a farmer having half a dozen kids, first to combat the high infant mortality rate,
and second, because by the time they were twelve, they could help out at the farm, today, kids
take 18-22 years to educate and they're expensive. Also, adults end up having other
opportunities open to them. Fewer kids, more hours on the Xbox or pursuing a law degree
or a high-flying business career, whatever. Economic development can slow population growth. And many of the developed regions' of
the world populations are stabilizing, which is why it is important to foster
economic growth in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Con - but what drives a lot of the economic
growth? Energy production, and developing countries are more prone to use inexpensive,
fast and dirty forms of fuel to develop, rather than more expensive, eco-friendly alternatives.
This compounds the environmental problem, which in turn can mess up the environment
and compound the population problem. So it turns out, it's complicated and we are
a little bit ambivalent about the Anthropocene. In the next century, humanity's population
growth will continue, but it'll hopefully level off between 10 and 12 billion people
due to declining birth rates. If it doesn't, we might be in trouble. Well, we'll definitely be in
trouble at some point, we just don't know when. But even if it does level off, we've still
got problems concerning how to support all those people at a decent standard of living
and how to find the energy to fuel that process. I mean, we're talking about between
10 and 12 billion people? The first time the world's population got to
one billion humans was 1804. So right now, we're still heavily dependent
on non-renewable fossil fuels. Well, technically, they are renewable but
you need, like, a 100 million years. But there are a few possible future scenarios. One - we are miraculously saved by some technology
in the same way that the industrial revolution lifted humanity out of the recurring cycles
of famine in the agrarian era. Two - we collapse miserably into ruins and ashes.
I don't like "two," Stan, is there an option three? Oh there is, that's good news!
Three - we can guide human society into a "creative descent," a gentle decline of complexity
to more simple, subsistence living. Actually, you know what, I'm not crazy about
"three" either, I am all for "one." Now, at present, we don't know what scenario
will play out. We're acting as if we will be saved by some technology, and in fact,
that's the only way that leads to the continuing rise of complexity, but we can't just assume
that will happen. And as for the potential dangers of the 21st century,
there are environmental disasters, the rise of a superbug that wipes out millions upon millions
of people, possible global conflict or a rise in instability. The next fifty years will be fraught with
a lot of risk. But if we can somehow make it through what some
call the 21st century bottleneck, things start to brighten again. We'll be a stable population of 10-12 billion
increasingly well-educated and interconnected innovators, and that's great for
collective learning in the 21st century. Who knows where such massive potential could lead? It's important to remember that while there
are seven billion people in the world right now, many of them don't have access to good
education and that limits their innovative potential. If in the future we see less poverty,
as we've seen in the last twenty years, and more access to education, I'm kind of hopeful. As far as we know, we are unique in the universe,
and if for nothing else, it is our duty to our own innate curiosity to survive and to
see where this rising complexity leads. Our task as a species in this century is to survive
it. If we can just manage that, from the end of the 21st century, the universe may take
us in a thousand astonishing directions. More on that next time.
