Climate change lessons from the twin planets of fiction and the real world – can we pull together, or are we programmed to tear ourselves apart?
This article takes a step back from ‘earth-shaking’ AI breakthroughs and other existential threats, sifting recent history for reasons for optimism as the climate crisis deepens.
Sputnik Crisis Then, DeepSeek Crisis Now
The Space Race
Scene: Planet Earth 1957.
- Eisenhower beams as America booms. Every home has a TV, washing machine and automobile.
- Kruschev scowls as the USSR struggles, increasingly hobbled by sanctions and isolation, concealing queues for bread and meat on every street corner.
- Suddenly, a bolt from the blue. A Soviet satellite changes everything.
- Sputniks beam a signal heard around the world and sends a dog into orbit.
- The Space Race is on.
Moral:
- (for US) Never drop your guard
- (for USSR) Aways lull them into complacency
- (for the rest of us) Thanks for the satellite TV and Teflon, but So What?
The Vie for AI
Scene: Planet Earth, 2025.
- Trump gloats as America gains. Every home has screens controlled by its trillion-dollar tech giants.
- Xi shivers as the PRC slows, increasingly hobbled by sanctions and isolation, suppressing online discontent on every street corner.
- Suddenly, a bolt from the blue. A Chinese large language model changes everything.
- DeepSeek’s app is downloaded around the world and sends tech stocks crashing to earth.
- The Vie for AI is on.
Moral:
- (for US) Never drop your guard
- (for PRC) Aways lull them into complacency
- (for the rest of us) Thanks for pictures of puppies in funny hats, but So What?
How will this story end?
First, a couple of stories from the in-between times that took place, largely ignored, in the lull between these two superpower storms.
Space Stations and Robot Typists Then – What Now?
Being much less well-known, these two scenarios need a bit more explaining.
They’re also considerably less dramatic, so need a bit more concentration.
They’re a bit techy, but we’ve done our best to prune back the jargon to reveal the fruit in all its glory.
We must, after all, seek hope where we can.
You never know, The Space Station and Robot Typists might turn out to be more significant, important and positive for the future of human civilization than the Space Race and Vie for AI.
Both stories start with the same set-up:
Scene: Planet Earth, 1980s.
- Reagan enriches the rich so that bounty can ‘trickle down’ to the rest.
- Gorbachov restructures communism so that bounty can flow from state to the masses.
- Gradually, the mighty superpowers grapple for dominion relaxes, as the Space Race winds down and the Cold War thaws.
- The USA and USSR, wrestling to exhaustion, face the same problem. After decades of trying to outmuscle each other, they search for new strategies.
- Each wonders if it might be smarter to try winning hearts and minds by non-nuclear means.
- Out-computing each other is a low-risk strategy.
- It could even end in a draw, rather than annihilation.
Like a tuning fork, our two stories now take different, but ultimately parallel, paths.
The Space Station
- The White House and The Kremlin direct their scientists to collaborate in space, in particular to build an International Space Station (ISS).
- For years, working in isolation, separated by National Security, computing boffins on either side of the Iron Curtain tackle the same task – writing code to get their spaceships to safely dock with their space stations.
- Their common goal, working out a protocol that would permit both US and USSR spaceships to dock with the ISS.
- The US coders whump down weighty ring binders containing their thousands of lines of docking code on their side of the ISS table.
- The USSR coders place on the table a single sheet of paper containing their few dozen lines of docking code on their side of the ISS table. Their solution is much more succinct, way more economical, and equally effective.
- The humbled US scientists realise their abundance of computing power made them profligate in their use of it. Like the Space Pen vs the Pencil, only true.
- Their Soviet counterparts, used to making best use of limited available resources, realised that less could sometimes result in more.
- The ISS still operates to this very day, serving astronauts from Belarus to South Africa, a model of international cooperation.
Moral:
- (for US) Never drop your guard
- (for USSR) Aways lull them into complacency
- (for the rest of us) Thanks for the satellite TV and Teflon, but So What?
Robot Typists
Scenes 1-8 as per The Space Station. Here’s where the tuning fork tines diverge…
Scene: Planet Earth, 1980s.
8. The White House and The Kremlin direct their scientists to work on Computer Science, in particular to build Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
9. For years, working in isolation, separated by the languages their papers were published in, computing boffins on either side of the Iron Curtain tackle the same task – writing code to get their computers to accurately transcribe human speech.
10. Their common goal, working out a protocol that would permit automatic transcription of any human speaking in any language.
11. The US coders whump down weighty ring binders containing their thousands of lines of transcription code on Western academic publishers’ tables.
12. Ukrainian coders place a single sheet of paper containing their few dozen lines of automatic transcription code on Soviet academic publishers’ tables. Their solution uses Hidden Markov Model (HMM): much more succinct, way more economical, and equally effective.
13. The humbled Western coders realise their abundance of computing power made them profligate in their use of it.
14. Their Ukrainian counterparts, used to making best use of limited available resources, realised that less could sometimes result in more.
15. HMM still operates to this very day, serving platforms from Siri to Duolingo, a model of international cooperation.
Moral:
- (for US) Never drop your guard
- (for USSR) Aways lull them into complacency
- (for the rest of us) Thanks for the smartphone apps, but So What?
So What’s The Point? 1
The parallels between our first two stories, The Space Race and The Vie for AI, are as obvious as the pat, cynical Morals we appended.
What about the realpolitik? Is that any more illuminating, or hopeful when it comes to our odds of tackling climate change?
The Space Race Gargarin started in 1961 effectively ended with Neil Armstrong in 1969. After the moonshot, there was nowhere to go. Six decades on, humans on Mars remains firmly in the realm of Hollywood, not NASA.
Once they’d planted their flags on the Moon, each passing year brought the USA and USSR less propaganda bang for their buck/rouble.
Going it alone in space had become ruinously expensive, and Europe and Japan were catching up. Pooling resources and results to mutual benefit – making the space race a noble aspiration, like modern school sports days with no winners or losers. Like a gymnast styling out a dodgy dismount with a triumphant twirl, the ISS turned a superpower problem into a solution for humanity.
By the 80s, the US and the USSR remained locked in their mutually assured destruction embrace, but economic reality was starting to loosen ideology’s grip. The realpolitik impetus behind the ISS was superpowers concluding they could no longer afford geo-political grandstanding, but could risk a gesture of species-level collaboration and see what happened.
A space-based joint venture, they calculated, could be a win-win with very limited downside. Both Washington and Moscow reckoned low-orbit hand-holding would make them look good, save them tons of money, and – let’s not be too cynical – contribute to the advancement of human endeavour.
In 1972, a similar gesture, the ‘Chess Match of The Century’ between Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassky, had taken place at the neutral location of Iceland, a rocky blob midway between Washington and Moscow. By the ‘80s, outer space seemed an even better remote neutral location for a tentative joint venture, a token one small step to take a giant leap for all mankind.
Sixty-eight years after Sputnik threw America from technological complacency into panicky catch-up, history is repeating itself.
This time it’s Silicon Valley, not the Pentagon, that’s been thrown into conniptions. It’s not Laika, the Moscow stray dog that made it into (but not back from) space and triggered a global crisis, but a Chinese large language model (LLM) that worked out how to make AI lemonade from US sanction lemons.
Silicon Valley – and The White House – had assumed restricting Chinese access to the best, fastest, latest GPU processors would hobble them and assure American dominance. Instead, it created a ‘mend-and-make-do’ approach that has convinced the financial markets, to the tune of a trillion dollar overnight sell-off, that DeepSeek has indeed worked out how to get better results with 5% of the processing muscle required by Meta, Amazon, Google, X, Oracle, OpenAI, and all the other AI tech bros.
More galling – and even more financially damaging to Silicon Valley’s uber-capitalist model- DeepSeek is authentically open source, and not hidden behind a paywall. This is what enabled hundreds of developers to produce DeepSeek-based apps so quickly, and so spooked the market valuations. Hedge fund managers, it turns out, are not fooled by labelling proprietary software ‘OpenAI’.
It’s too soon to know how this one will play out in the long term – insofar as the breakneck development of AI can be said to have a long term. The fear, greed and panic generated by DeepSeek, however, are instructively familiar.
This time the battleground isn’t an ideological Clash of the Titans, pitching democracy against communism, fought using space rockets. Today (at time of writing, at least) it’s democratic-badged capitalism vs. authoritarian-badged capitalism fought via bleeding-edge AI.
Non-billionaires may be indifferent to these billionaire battles, but few people on the planet are unaffected by them.
Does recent history offer any hope that current superpowers USA and China, might one day work together, using AI to compute our way out of our climate crisis, rather than accelerate it?
Or do these stories prove we’re condemned to scamper for cover as our Silicon Valley Overlords fight to the death, space rockets on standby, while we drown, burn and shrivel?
So What’s The Point? 2
What about the second pair of stories, The Space Station and The Listening Robot?
The morals we mentioned at their conclusion are just as bleak as for the better-known pair.
Might their less spectacular embers harbour a more subdued spark of hope?
On the face of it, the International Space Station now serves as a painful reminder of the ultimate failure of this lofty mission.
Equipment failures leave astronauts who left for a week-long round trip stranded months later. Their fellow-humans are now too distracted by earthbound concerns to stump up the money, motivation or ingenuity to bring them home.
More Castaway than Apollo 13.
As for speech recognition, it’s hard to claim that those Ukrainian computer scientists’ elegantly parsimonious HMM solution has been a net benefit, all these decades later, when it comes to climate change.
For every wonderful human connection between foreigners separated by different cultures, but united via Duolingo or smartphone translation apps, there’s a rather obvious climate downside.
Those uplifting ads showing strangers beaming as they communicate via their smartphones don’t highlight the tonnes of additional emissions that come from all the ‘cloud’ number-crunching. Nor do they show the CO2 belched from the jets ferrying us around the planet to enjoy such magical moments.
More Skynet in Terminator, or Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey than Wall-E or The Iron Giant.
Not long ago in a galaxy close, close to home…
So are we in a disaster movie? Or an uplifting human triumph against the odds?
Hollywood hires the world’s best storytellers to imagine the best and worst of our species. They may be paid to produce blockbusters, but expert storytellers peer deep into our souls.
Let’s take a brief detour to Hollywood to consider what The Dream Factory creates when it speculates on our collective response to an existential threat that would wipe us all out, rendering our petty trivial bickering irrelevant.
Screenwriters may shine a light where politicians, analysts, journalists and professors remain in the dark.
- Optimists can be inspired by the fantasy that Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and their crew of blue-collar miners would save the planet from a giant asteroid (Armageddon, 1998).
- Pessimists might prefer to be proven right by Don’t Look Up (2021), in which our leaders ignore the Cassandra-like warnings of Leo de Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence, preferring to profit from the potential mineral riches an asteroid might bring.
Hollywood, understandably, favours binary triumph/disaster outcomes, and leaves calculations of odds, complex nuance, and boring stats to the boffins interviewed in the documentaries no one watches.
Meanwhile, back on Earth…
Those who seek answers from scientists, rather than screenwriters, might pay more attention to Asteroid 2024 YR4.
The DeepSeek panic pushed Asteroid 2024 YR4 out of the headlines, but this real-life football-pitch sized asteroid may tell us more about our fate, and our ability to act together at a species level to avert collective disaster.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 is currently calculated to have a 1.6% chance of hitting Earth in 2032.
We’ll be able to calculate the odds better in 2028, when scientists can also reassess its score on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale.
This rather terrifying 1-10 scale is designed to alert us to the potential severity of such things as asteroids smashing into the surface of Earth.
3, in case you were wondering, is: ‘A close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers’
10, just so you know, is: ‘A certain collision capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean’.
Maybe we’d pay more attention if the boffins re-labelled 0 as ‘No Sweat’ and 10 as ‘Kiss Your Ass Goodbye’. Maybe.
So much for asteroids.
What can those of us, back on planet Earth, who think about real-world planetary risk learn from real-world examples of our species being challenged by other extinction-level risks?
The Extinction-by-Virus Test
Covid was a timely test of humanity’s ability to act collaboratively to tackle a pathogen threat that’s indifferent to our trivial tribal squabbles.
We failed that test pretty comprehensively. Let’s be generous, and give ourselves 2/10 for the boffins pulling a vaccine out of the bag, just in time for that one, at least. The boffins do keep warning us there are more to come, and we may not get so lucky next time.
But that’s not a fun story, is it?
The Extinction-by-Robot Test
The algorithm threat evolves a bit slower than a coronavirus, but is equally indifferent to our trivial tribal squabbles.
This means we’re yet to test Stephen Hawking’s warning that ‘the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’.
We do, however, appear to be in a great hurry to find out.
We’ve just discovered that when one AI model proves more efficient than another, tech companies can ‘lose’ a trillion dollars overnight, invoke a flurry of flag-waving, and prompt a ‘godfather of AI’, Yoshua Bengio, to warn It’s going to mean a closer race, which usually is not a good thing from the point of view of AI safety’.
Panics about possible future annihilation, when connected to huge sums of money and superpower rivalry, are much more attention-grabbing than boring old humdrum, slow-motion atmospheric physics.
Just ask NASA.
The Extinction-by-CO2 Test
Even though emissions continue to rise, and the long-predicted consequences occur sooner, more violently, and more frequently than feared, global heating remains the ignored poor relation of species-level existential threats.
The Greenhouse Effect is, however, as indifferent to our trivial tribal squabbles as Covid-19, Chat-GPT or Caesium 137.
The Hope Bit
Hollywood screenwriters, and their storytelling antecedents illuminated by cave fires, have conditioned us to expect Endlings, usually Happy.
Atmospheric physics, on the other hand, doesn’t do The Hope Bit. It leaves us to work things out for ourselves. Or not. Carbon don’t care.
Any hope we have of digging ourselves out of our fossil fuel hole will likely have to combine sophisticated storytelling with hard science.
Grim though our track record has been, past failure doesn’t guarantee future failure. Humans have the capacity to tackle the climate crisis, if we choose to confront it rather than wish it away.
Homo sapiens is, so far as we know, unique in possessing a triple-whammy of superpowers, unique in life on Earth:
- the power to change our atmosphere within a couple of centuries
- the ability to realise how and why
- the capacity to change our behaviour
The International Space Station was, at one point, an authentically inspiring moment in modern history. It, and other international collaborations, like the one that came up with the Covid vaccine, still could be.
Rather than offer false hope, or gratuitous despair, here’s one last story that encapsulates all three of our infuriating superpowers.
Thank Heavens for Jevons?
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) was a particularly astute observer of the Industrial Revolution he grew up in.
From his Lancashire birthplace, Jevons moved to London to study botany and chemistry, put his studies to practical use finding metal for the Mint in Australia, before returning to Britain, and academia.
As Victorian science and technology drove on full steam ahead, Jevons rode its bow wave, navigating uncharted waters. As he applied mathematics and logic to the world he saw around him, Jevons shed the venerable label of ‘Natural Scientist’, and donned the new garb of ‘Economist’.
His particular obsession was for the black stuff powering the Industrial Revolution. His observations in The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865) attracted great interest at the time from coal mine-owners concerned the source of their wealth might disappear.
Jevons was instrumental in founding the field now known as ‘Marginal Utility Theory’, but nearly 200 years after his birth, he’s best known for his eponymous paradox, which has never been more relevant. Jevon’s paradox
‘occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise.’
In other words, the smarter we are, the stupider we act.
- Save coal by inventing a more efficient combustion engine, and we end up making more engines that burn more coal.
- Work out how to automatically transcribe human speech with less wasted effort, and we stop bothering to learn languages when we fly around the planet.
- Realise we can dock a spaceship to a space station with only a tiny fraction of the code we thought, and we can fill the sky with space junk.
- Find a way to do cloud computing with 5% of the power, and we’ll need 95% more data centres to meet the exploding demand for AI-generated pictures of puppies in funny hats
Jevon’s paradox is mathematically precise, psychologically profound, and holds the key to our species long-term future.
Whether you see this as The Hope Bit, or cause for Despair, says more about you than Jevons.
Good luck, everyone!
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If you’d like to join See Through’s pro bono global network of people combining sophisticated storytelling with hard data to nudge us towards The Hope Bit, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org