Half way through her book “Scatter, Adapt, and Remember”, Annalee Newitz states that her goal “is to get us off this crowded planet and into space.”  I don’t think she achieves her goal.  I wasn’t convinced we need to get off our beautiful blue world (at least for the next billion years or so), but it’s a fun romp and worth reading.

Newitz starts with a review of the history of mass extinctions in the last 2.5 billion years, such as the Oxygen Apocalypse (which may be unfamiliar to readers), the Permian Great Dying, and the famous demise of the dinosaurs.  She notes that mass extinctions are usually defined in terms of species going extinct.  Even with such a drop in diversity, the number of individual creatures may (or may not) remain high.  Reasons why some genetic lines survived are often speculative, but if you enjoy natural history, this is an interesting section of the book.

In the second part of the book, Newitz gets closer to home.  She discusses the human genus, theories of how early human species migrated, whether modern humans interbred with Neanderthals or killed them off, and the effects of plagues in historical times.

Survival involves “problems that we’ve been trying desperately to solve for hundreds of years.  How are we ever going to survive over the next several hundred?”  The answer will involve “a tangle of social and environmental factors.”

She explores survivors, from how the Jews have survived as a people to the 3.5 billion year career of cyanobacteria.  She derives inspiration from science fiction authors.  I liked the phrase “terraforming Earth” as a way to describe geoengineering to solve environmental problems (though Newitz notes unintended consequences can be scary.)  The book ranges from near-term survival to million-year survival when our progeny would no longer be recognizable as “us”.  Speculating about future technologies is fun.  “One million years ago, our ancestors thought it was pretty fantastic to have fire and flake tools.  One million years from today, humans could be living in lakefront communities on Saturn’s moon Titan, using technologies that make [today’s technology] look like a Homo erectus tool kit.”

Newitz says she is pragmatically optimistic.  “As long as we keep exploring, humanity is going to survive.”