Surprise Communique from Titan

This week Tom Prugh offers some unsolicited advice from aliens who have gone through their own planetary bottleneck. Certainly worth considering!

Go with Gaia (and Titan too)!

Erik

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The other day I stumbled across my old tinfoil hat in the attic and put it on just for a lark. To my surprise it was picking up a faint signal in the static. I rushed to my computer and started typing what I could make out. The result is below.

–Tom Prugh

Greetings, Earthlings!

Thlarbg here. I live on the moon you call Titan, orbiting the planet you call Saturn. We Titanians have been watching you for hundreds of years, since before you learned how to change the color of your skies. Our infra-ether telescopes can see your spreading cities and your shrinking forests. Our receivers can capture your radio and TV broadcasts. I must say that it’s been very entertaining! Beats anything on our own networks.

Every year for a while now the top-rated news stream about Earth has been your so-called Conferences of the Parties (COP meetings), even though the plot is always the same. Your scriptwriters are the envy of the Outer Planets—we are continually impressed by your creativity in saying the same things in different ways and yet never doing anything in response.

We’ve noticed something that should be obvious. In fact we’re baffled that you seem not to have noticed it yourselves. Way back in your year 1992 you had a big splashy meeting about what you were doing to your planet—which is still lovely, by the way, though here on Titan blue and white are rarely seen together except in a painful and rather smelly skin condition—and how to control your carbon emissions. Many brave things were said. Everyone seemed to agree it was a big problem, and that Something Had To Be Done.

The next year, your planet-warming emissions went up.

Not to worry, you said—if at first you don’t succeed, etc. You had the first official COP meeting in 1995. Even braver things were said. The year after that, emissions rose again.

Still not to worry, you said. But: same deal with COP 2 in 1996; emissions rose the following year. COP 3 was in 1997, and—you guessed it—emissions rose in 1998.

It’s time to worry. By now you have held 30 COP meetings. Emissions have risen after nearly all of them, except for 2020, when many of you got sick and stayed home from work, shut down your businesses, and stopped flying. That year emissions actually dipped about 6 percent. But this year they are on track to rise again. Even from a billion miles away, the lesson is clear.

Stop having meetings.

Judging by the evidence, the COPs don’t do much to actually reduce your planetary carbon emissions, from almost any source. They may actually increase emissions: for every meeting, tens of thousands of delegates, journalists, activists, and others jet to the host city from all around Earth, emitting carbon all the way. Have any of those meetings even slowed the yearly increase in emissions by as much as were contributed by all those delegates? In other words, has any COP meeting paid for itself in carbon terms? (The approaching COP meeting in Brazil ups the ante: not only will it draw over 50,000 attendees, the host government is cutting down a major swathe of “protected” rainforest so people can get to the site more easily.)

Meanwhile, all those flights have significant impacts. For instance, by one estimate, a single round-trip transatlantic flight is the emissions equivalent of driving a family car for eight months.

The declaration that came out of that 1992 meeting, to Do Something About the Problem, was called the longest suicide note in history. Since then you’ve only added additional paragraphs, sub-paragraphs, footnotes, codices, and annexes. There has been lots of talk and a great many earnest documents—statements, press releases, working papers, proposals, editorials, speeches, and even fictional depictions of what’s likely to happen if you don’t do anything.

With no results, of course. It’s obvious that what you should do is … do things.

That’s what we did—were forced into. As we discovered, a great place to start is with an attitude adjustment: paying closer attention to the planet you’re part of. It’s the only place perfectly suited for you, just as Titan is for us.

Also, we reduced our numbers, slowly, by design. Titan could support four or five times our current population, but after skirting the edge of disaster a few thousand orbits ago, we learned to keep our population well above the minimum required for genetic health but well below the number that strained Titan’s carrying capacity.

It wasn’t easy. We had absorbed the vision of perpetual expansion and kept chasing it until the bottleneck had us by our collective throat (we don’t have throats, but explaining our physiology would take too long), and it was almost too late. The accounts of the self-reckoning we went through are dramatic, even harrowing. 

Like us, you are an “opportunistic” species, but we’ve learned from hard experience to rein it in. We saw that we were approaching a crisis point that was going to slash our numbers or even destroy us if we failed to change. That’s where you are now. Your best “opportunity” is to do what we did before you reach the chokepoint of the bottleneck and your planetary ecosystem does it for you. If that happens, it will be quite painful. (You could ask the Martians too, but, well, they’re all gone.)

How many more seasons of Earth Follies can there be? We’ll be watching and hoping for the best. But at least we’ve recorded the first 30 seasons, so if the show is cancelled, we’ll still be able to enjoy the reruns.