 The Common Lighting Stream, the MD-Walk, the Anthropocene is now, it is our age in which we humans have become the dominant geological factor. It is an age with several different, maybe independent environmental crises, and Theodore is an PhD microbiologist and computer scientist, and will take a closer look for us and pick all these crises apart for us. Are these crises actually tied together? How much impact does each of those crises have? What do some of the solutions look like, and which of those have no solution? So without further ado, these of those crises are just problematic, only catastrophic, and which are just apocalyptic. Hi everybody, good to have you. I'm Theo, and I'm pre-recording this talk from Arbok, where I'm doing my PhD as a bioinformatician, and I'm working on the ecology of microbes in lakes. As I'm pre-recording this, I'm really looking forward to the conference that we're having right now, when you're watching this, or that we had when you're watching this after the fact. I'm really looking forward to the conference, and I really want to thank the organisers for putting together something under this banner, where we can talk about all the problems we are facing with the environmental crisis. So if you see any jump cuts here, that's because I cut out some of the errors I made during the recording of it. My talk will be about problems and solving problems, but not really in the way that you might think about, and you might be disappointed when you think that I'm really giving you some solutions. It will be not really scientific as in hard science, natural science, and it will not be really political in a sense of what can we do politically, but it still will be both of them. And also, I will cut some corners, I will make some arguments, leave out some details, which you will see, I think, just to make my argument. So to start, let me tell you that when I started to study, I studied biology, and only after quite a while, I started to get into contact with computer science and programmers. And I was very interested, it was really strange, to see how programmers talk about problems a little bit differently. So I think that regular people, they think about problems as something that you can just solve, and then it's gone, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. But programmers, I found, when you bring them a problem, and I think I'm talking about algorithmic people here, they don't really think, okay, now how can we solve this? What's the answer to the problem that you posed to me? But they rather think, can we solve this in limited time? Is this binomial? So the question is, rather, you give me a problem, can I give you an answer for every possible set of inputs in reasonable time? And then they go through it, they formalize the problem, they maybe simplified in some places, they find bugs in their thinking or in their code, and they might sometimes be surprised. So the nicest pieces of algorithms are full of interesting surprises. And then maybe they start to work on something that regular people would call a solution, but sometimes it's fun enough to be theoretically possible to solve the problem. And then solving problems always meant something different. So when you solve problems for programmers, again, I overgeneralize, it's like chess. You know that there is a program that is able to play chess better than a human, but still you play chess. Like it's solved, but it's not solved as in solved solved. So maybe let's make that distinction between solved as in chess and solved solved as for regular people. And then there's this other class of problems, which are not solved yet, question mark, and usually programmers solve it by finding a way of mapping parts of problems to solve problems. And this way then the problem is solved. So the main thing for this conference, which I'm very happy that a conference like this happens right now, especially, is that we really have to solve the environmental crisis. And I don't know what the environmental crisis is the right term. It's really hard for me to think about what the right term for this might be. But you know, we have all of these different issues or problems, which come together to one big hole, which for now I would call environmental crisis. So what I suggest for this talk is that we go through some of these details of the environmental crisis and take this idea of solving problems from a programmer's point of view and apply it very aggressively and let's see where it gets us. So as a first example, let's take a climate change and I really don't need to go into any of the details. You know everything about it. I think because it's really a topic that we talk a lot about. And you know also this figure that is the warning stripes that shows you how the medium temperature is rising very strongly in the last few decades. If we think about now what the problem is with climate change, then we might formalize it like this. We need to minimize the delta of temperature, the increase of medium temperature of the whole earth. So there should be no more climate change in terms of temperature. And then we can take this problem and think about it, go to some scientists, ask them, climate scientists for example, ask them what they can say about it. And they will say, look, we have all of these models, we have all of this data. We can easily tell you that at the core of the problem there is CO2 and equivalence of CO2. So that's CO2E. And then the problem is solved. Of course then the work begins and that's the work that we're in right now as a society or in this conference to figure out how to minimize CO2E. But let's say as a naive scientist, for me this problem is solved and I really don't understand why it's not solved, solved yet. There is a second example that's very close to this and actually something that we have solved, solved more or less and that's the ozone depletion. Here we can formalize it like minimize the reduction of ozone in the ozone layer. And again going to scientists and so on we found out that you have to minimize the emissions of certain chemicals into the atmosphere and that way the ozone depletion was solved, solved again more or less but let's say it's solved, solved. If we now take a third example, let's take species extinctions. So you know that in the last decades more and more species go extinct. And this is getting closer and closer to a level where ecosystems will collapse if we don't do anything about it. There are a lot of problems involved in this and I don't want to go into those details but I want to think about how to formalize this. And again as a starting point we might say okay we need to minimize the number of extinctions to a minimum level, best case zero. No more species should go extinct because of anthropogenic impact. So if you take this and go to scientists with this ecologists and so on they will not be able to give you a good model for that because it's really hard. Ecosystems are complex systems and there is not just one system like the climate system that's one global system but there are many different ecosystems all over the place and it's hard. And it's really no surprise then to see that there are a lot of reasons, different reasons for extinctions that don't overlap. Some of them do and you could go at them but it's not as easy as climate change. So if we encounter a problem like this in programming one of the things we might think about is do we think about the problem the wrong way? Do we need to zoom in maybe? Do we need to zoom out? And the bigger picture is called Anthropocene and as the geological period where humans or humanity or we have changed the face of the earth to such a degree that it's causing significant changes we are approaching a lot of tipping points in all of the environmental systems that are out there. So the Anthropocene has started only around 1950 because that's where we see in all of these variables that are here in these great acceleration graphs a strong increase hockey stick like in many different variables both on a societal side or anthropogenic side as well as in the earth systems. And it really looks like a switch got flipped and all the dynamics are different. And that's what the Anthropocene is in essence is that the earth system has entered into a new dynamic which does not both well actually for us. How can we think about this in the terms that we know before as problems? And when you try to think about what we should minimize in the Anthropocene we will not find something to do. And we can really think a lot about it and many people have done and some of them have come up with good ideas. Some of them have come up with bad ideas. Some of them actually have thought about the Anthropocene as a problem and their solution is to just fly away and live on Mars or something like that. So maybe what we need to do here is to abandon the idea that this is a problem and to think about it differently. So I want to suggest a different class of problem or issue or something. And all of this nomenclature is a little bit problematic. So let's call the other thing that is not a problem a catastrophe. And let's define it like this. So problems on the one hand can be solved and then they go away. That's like problem solution. Everything's fine. And by that they are external. They don't really belong to you in any form of identity. Catastrophies on the other hand, they don't go away. You have to learn to live with this new situation that came about with catastrophe. And in this way they are internal to you in a sense. This leads to something that will come up later that for catastrophes problem solving might be and I would argue is a dark pattern. So by catastrophe I mean something more or less specific. And I cannot really define it more than that. So I will give you some examples and then hopefully you can understand what I mean. So for example, let's say you lose a leg or an arm in any sort of accident. Losing an arm or a leg is not really a problem. You cannot solve it. Of course you can get some sort of mechanical technological replacement, but it will not solve the problem. You still have lost your arm or your leg. You will even with this help, you will have to learn how to live with your new situation. So this is a catastrophe. But catastrophes, the name sounds really apocalyptic. So another example would be maybe falling in love and like the big way of not being able to sleep, not being able to eat and so on. Something that really changes everything and it does not go away easily. In some movies, you know, there are these situations where a character comes up and says, you know, I have fallen in love. What can I do? And the other person says, yeah, just wait, it will go away. But this is not how to handle love. It is not a problem. It cannot be solved. It is a catastrophe. You have to learn to live with this change. But it's of course not apocalyptic and falling in love not always means the end of the world. Maybe if we want to have a motto of how to cope with catastrophes, it is this title of a Donna Haraway book, staying with the trouble, not run away with it, stay with the trouble, live with the trouble, accept the trouble as a new form of identity, maybe. Sadly, the book is not really about this. It is not a bad book, but it's really not about this. But I really like the title and I had to include it here. So as I said, I think problems might be a dark pattern and we tend to focus on problems instead of catastrophes. So for example, in the political discourse, we're talking a lot about climate change. We're not talking too much about either species extinctions, which we are talking about, but still not that much. And we're really not talking enough about the Anthropocene. So why is that the case? And I have two ideas that I want to present to you and you can disagree with me and you can come up with your own ideas. But I think there is something here why problems are so attractive to us. And I think one is narratives. So for example, in Godzilla films, and I think they're really a good example here, you have a problem and that is a monster arrives, either Godzilla or some other kaiju that just shows up and destroys everything. And this is a problem and solving the problem is to make this go away or wait until it goes away or support the right kaiju so that all of them go away. And then the problem is solved. However, in all of these movies, there are countless catastrophes. People lose their homes. People lose their loved ones. But the movie is not about them and the movie cannot be about them because the movie has to end and by the end of the movie, the problem has to be solved. That's one of the most unrealistic things about movies in general. They end. The real life does not really end with the end of the problem, but a movie does end right after the problem is solved. So maybe we should think about how to have narratives that don't end when the problem is solved. And I know that, for example, in old scripture and so on, there are many narratives that just don't end when the problem is solved, but these narratives stick with you and you take them with you in your life. Maybe this is one of the reasons why we like problems so much because they make really entertaining narratives. But I think there's a second reason and that is with problems, you can sell stuff that solves the problems. So solutions as a service, coding solutions, whatever solutions. If someone has a problem, you can sell them an app that will solve their problem or you can try and sell them, I don't know, blockchain that will solve their pandemic or something like that. As long as someone has a problem, you can sell them stuff that will solve that. It's much harder to sell something that helps people to live with their catastrophes. I know there are also things like that. There are actually apps that do that, but it's easier to sell solutions as a service. So the Anthropocene is not a problem, but a catastrophe. It is a catastrophe in which humanity or humans or us have become a natural power, a natural disaster, you might say, but it is here and it is here to stay. So how to live with it now would be the question. And sadly, I cannot really tell you how to do that, but we should not fall into the trap of being sold something that will just make the Anthropocene go away. And I think very broadly speaking, there are two sides to this. The one is the techno-optimist-solutionist side that will just require us some new techniques, some new progress and this new progress, this new machine will then make everything fine. This will not be possible for the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene will require us to change as humanity, as humans, to adopt a way of living in accordance with this catastrophe. But the other way of mistreating this catastrophe is to be too optimistic in a sense of, well, we can still go back of being techno-pessimists of saying that we should just try and go back to a way of living before the Anthropocene and then everything will be fine. No, this is a catastrophe. This will stay here. We have to learn to live with it. We have to deal with it. And this excludes both of these ways of mistreating a catastrophe like a problem. We now have to think about this and this is a political job and also a job for almost all disciplines of science of thinking about how we can do that. In this way, the Anthropocene is really, really scary for me as a scientist, as a biologist, or as a programmer or whatever because as a scientist, I really like to have all the disciplines clean, separated to know what I am studying and someone else is studying something else. But here everything comes together and we need to combine the views of us, of system scientists, geologists, biologists, climate scientists, what have you with political scientists, sociologists and so on and so on. We need to think about narratives. We need to think about how we think about ourselves. So I know that I might disappoint you here, but the only thing I have left for you are some theses. And the main thing is that we have to learn to live with the Anthropocene, in the Anthropocene without destroying everything. We have to come to a place where humanity and our environment is able to live on in this catastrophical world. One thing that we need to do towards this goal is to identify as many sub-problems of the catastrophe as possible and also solve them and also solve solve them. Again, it's not really understandable why climate change is not something that is being solved, solved right now, but still so many things are holding us back. But then on the other hand, we should not turn catastrophes into problems. We should not mistreat catastrophes. We also have to identify catastrophes as such and act towards them as such. Another of my theses is that for a humane Anthropocene, we need to create a humane humanity. This is the point where social issues and environmental issues overlap. And we cannot live with the environment in a way that does not turn this catastrophe into an apocalypse if we mistreat humanity like we do now. And I think that this has something to do with capitalism, but I just want to leave it like that. It would need a really deep dialectical Marxist analysis to do that in the context of the Anthropocene. And I cannot do it here in this talk and I cannot do it as a biologist. And with that, I want to introduce you to Niels Richter, who discussed with me through all of these details and who was instrumental to this talk. Without him, this would not have happened. If you want this analysis of capitalism in the context of Anthropocene, maybe you should talk to him on Twitter or something like that. And then I want to thank you. I want to really give a big thanks to the organizers who set up this conference. And I'm really happy now to take your questions. And actually, it's not really now, right? It's in a week. I'm pre-recording this, so I don't know. But if you have any more questions after this, write me on Twitter or something and see you. Yeah, thank you, Theodor. Thank you for this nice talk. Thank you, Theodor, for this nice talk. Yeah, should we go to Korea and A right away? So there are a few questions in the pad from the audience. And the first question I want to pose to you. What is the difference between the Anthropocene age and other ages which are named after what humans did? So I don't really know what the question asker means. So maybe here she refers to cultural ages, but this is a geological age. So this is like the Jurassic or the perm or something like that, which is not all of the other geological or rather geological ages are defined by geology. So what you need to do is you need to go out and find a place of Earth where you can really see in the order of soils or of ground. You need to see a certain strata, a certain place where something changes significantly. So for example, at the end of the age of the dinosaurs, there was a change in the geological age because a giant meteorite hit Earth and you could see that all of the Earth. And similarly now we can see in geology changes that are made by humans. And the one thing that science seems to focus in on is nuclear. How do you say that? Could you help me? Like a nuclear... The nuclear age or the nuclear... No, it's bronze. No, what you can see is that there is... Yeah, you can see the effects of nuclear testing and nuclear bombs around 1950. And this is something you can measure and will be able to measure in centuries to come. So in contrast to, for example, the Bronze Age where you can say, look, some people there have found something new. This is really connected to the Earth as a planet. And also it's global. So cultural ages happen at different places of Earth differently. So some groups of people go through the Bronze Age, for example, quicker than others. So I assume this also answers the question why the Anthropocene starts in 1950 because it's due to the measurements of global nuclear testing. So actually there is a huge amount of discussion about this and there are like four different places where the Anthropocene could start. It could start with people starting agriculture like way back. It could start with the beginning of the industrialization. This would be 1850 or something. It could start with when Europeans started to spread in North America because there are also some geological things happening there. But 1950 because of the atomic testing and of these great acceleration graphs that I showed in my talk, this is the date where all of the evidence comes together. So it's really not driven by discussion but scientists looking at the data and saying, really being surprised that a new epoch has begun around 1950, which is strange. I mean, my grandma was alive in the last one, right? I think the audio is gone. Can you check? Ah, yeah, that's better. So yeah, I can just imagine as a scientist, you just look at these graphs, you see they want to check out the areas and you're like, oh my God, it's 1950 and we did that. We did that and we just put our fingers on Mother Earth and left a mark. And usually as a natural scientist, so to say, or exact science or whatever, you don't really think about humans, right? I mean, as a biologist, as a microbiologist, I really care nothing about humans and I really don't think about what humans or what I do to my study object. There is always a distinction between me as a researcher and my study object. And this just breaks down in the Anthropocene, which is even mind boggling. Yes, it's like the subject has been influenced by the measurements. But we are measuring ourselves now. So why do you think that we managed to solve the ozone hole issue in a relatively short time? So after discovering F2P Ray and then banning it, and it's still in the process of being solved, but being better. But why are we struggling to do anything meaningful about climate change for decades now? So we're talking about the decades, but really it feels like nothing has happened. Nothing meaningful. Yeah, so I don't I don't think that I'm the best person to ask this because I don't know, I can just imagine. And I think one of the things is that it's easier to ban this class of chemicals than to ban CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions play in almost every process and carbon fluorine. I don't know how to pronounce them. This this class of chemicals that causes the ozone hole that sounds easier to ban on a on a political level. But I don't really know. So what you would need to look into would be, of course, the dynamics like the political dynamics at the time. So what happened where the huge demonstrations about this are not and so on. Then maybe it was an issue, one more of it's an easy problem to solve. Just just one problem versus a bunch of problems that make up a catastrophe or something that happens gradually. Constantly and it's just background noise to many people. Also, those processes that create CO2 emissions, they feel natural in contrast to this chemical. You know, this ugly chemical, we shouldn't really use this chemical that feels artificial and evil. But everything almost all all processes produce CO2 and it just doesn't feel bad. It feels like in our everyday life driving a car doesn't feel like you're destroying. But again, I don't know. This is all a conjecture. Yeah, of course. But that's what we're here for, thinking about it as everybody should. So I think there's another question. And I think it's a good follow up. We as humans love to solve problems. So how do we stop starting catastrophes? Should we just think ahead more? Or is there some kind of technique that we should teach in school? Oh, can you repeat that? This is very interesting. So yeah, so we as humans, we just love to solve problems. But how do we teach ourselves to stop starting catastrophes? So how do we how are we? How can we be more forward looking of the impact we are having? So so at first, I don't know. I don't know why I got darker now. I don't know what happened. But I don't know if whether we as humans are so interested in solving problems, you know, we should always be very careful when saying something about humanity. It might just be that I don't I don't want to assume anything. But maybe people that work with computers really like solving problems. I can imagine that many people really hate problems and solving them. They just want to be left alone. And that's fine, right? But the other part is how do we make? How will we be able to have no further catastrophes take place? And if we follow what I said about catastrophes, I don't even know whether that's possible, because that's just living life is getting into problems and also into situations which are which are catastrophes in my sense. So I don't know whether we can really it sounds too easy to say we can just do this and this and then we'll never get into any catastrophes again. I think that's something that we need to take seriously as part of living. That we will cause catastrophes in my sense. Again, not apocalypse, but like every day, like the problems that you have with your neighbor or something like that, that just takes place because you want to, I don't know. But surely we can we can do something to head off problems or I mean, more humans, more technology gives us a larger level to impact the world. So maybe we also need more far sides to look what's on the other end of that level. I mean, I think it needs to be talked maybe. I mean, of course, foresight would be helpful as well as understanding what how the other functions, right? For example, you can you can have a happy life with your neighbor if you know what he or she or they dislike or like, and then you can manage. But it will always be managing. It will not be printing out a piece of paper saying, dear neighbor, I will not get into your in problems with you and then it's solved. And of course, that means not only that means knowing more about nature or whatever and how that functions, but it always will be like this idea that my freedom ends at that point where I start to inhibit the freedom of others. That's more or less the thing. And this boundary is not fixed. It always needs to be figured out every day again. And I think something like this, there is the point of catastrophe in this figuring out how far you can go. It will be a process though. It always is. So we said that CO2 is solved, but not solved. So which is kind of weird, but what are the obvious solutions? So this is one of the corners I cut because I don't want to go into all the things that you can do. But also, I think they are just obvious. I think we have like Fridays for Future started around two years ago. And everything they say is like true. So it should be obvious and I should not need to repeat it. You know, I mean, obvious. It's obvious we need to cut or replace all processes that produce CO2, all of them. And then all the details that follow, that's hard. That's like really hard. And all the politics that is involved is especially hard. There's a point to Fridays for Future's goal. Look at what they're doing, go what they're saying and let's go. Yeah. And I think this is also an interesting question. Like maybe it is representative of what many people in the world are thinking. Can't we just run away from this problem? I mean, what if we do nothing? Can we just go tomorrow? So maybe it will solve itself or maybe it will solve us by making us go away. I mean, if you look into history or how you cope with other catastrophes, sometimes it's a good idea to start worshipping some sort of idol. And this way you can resolve your problem with this stuff. That's a possibility. But but we have decided to to solve solve it more or less. And we believe that science is the way to do that. And then politics, of course. So so that's a different we cannot really like running away is like starting to pray to an idol. We the the the catastrophe will follow us, of course. I mean, that's how how can you if you can promise me that we will not do the same to Mars that we will do to Earth. And if you can promise me that there will not be too much like people dying or people left behind on Earth or something like that, I might be able to to agree. But I don't believe that. Yeah, maybe we need to do the opposite first because Mars isn't really habitable. So so rather than not destroying Earth, we first would have to learn how to make another planet habitable, which is maybe a good exercise. And from a technical point of view, this might look like the same problem, right? Yes, absolutely. But is it? I don't know. I really don't. I mean, I guess people might argue that if you can ever bring back and plan it back to life like Mars, then we can easily destroy ours and reverse it somewhere. But the problem, of course, is where are we going to be living in the meantime? Because even for Mars, it's going to take like hundreds of thousands of years. Also, that's this view of going to Mars is in a very bad way, anthropocentric. Like or less. Yes, it is. I mean, we would need to take some of these things with us. But it's it's the idea that we can go to Mars without taking almost everything living here with us. I mean, we could start making a list, right? We would need some trees. We would need some bushes. We would need the animals that feed on the trees. We would need all of the bacteria and archaea that as a microbiologist, I love so much and I understand that we need them. So prepare your big aquaria full of living organisms that we take with us to Mars. Would be just more economical to stay here, I guess. A question that just came in wouldn't it be. I'm paraphrasing, I wouldn't be great if we could. Change the meaning of the Anthropocene into something positive, like make it deserve its name by making the world better and not destroying our living space. I hope that's that's what the person asking the question meant. Yeah, that's that's a good idea. I mean, that would be that would be solving the catastrophe. You know, that would be turning a catastrophe into something positive by staying true to the name and saying, you know, humans. With the Anthropocene, you always have the problem that it sounds like humans are parasites are. And it's necessary for them to be like that. You know, if you have the Anthropocene as the age of humans, of course, humans destroy everything. How can they be otherwise? But we know that we can be theoretically. Well, be well-meaning, at least. And we can make beautiful things out of dirt. And right now we make dirt out of beautiful things. So that would be like the the only way of really going at it, of really solving the catastrophe is to turn the whole thing into a positive. Let's say like that. And then, of course, the questions begin what that entails. So what is it that right now turns us into destroyers of Earth? And it should not be, you know, it would be an easy way out of saying, yeah, it's just human nature. That's I don't believe that that's that cannot be. I mean, then everything is over and it has been over from the very beginning. And we we know that it doesn't mean need to be like that. Sorry. So what do you think is holding us back? I cannot say too much about it. I really need to think about that. It would be too easy for me to just say, you know, capitalism. That's it. But there is something in us or among us, or in the way that we organize ourselves that goes against our very interest to survive on this planet. And we need good good analysis what this is. And my. And my. Feeling would be that it is the idea of turning everything into commodities and buying everything and then turning everything into into waste products at the end. But again, you really should not quote me on that. But it sounds like a great start. I mean, we have to start somewhere. We can only solve catastrophes iteratively. So step by step, I guess. And yeah, when we start one thing and see it helps, we can stick with it. And then when we see the next thing, we could improve. We do that. And then we do that at least. Yeah, it is it is a question of relation, right? It's the question of how do humans, humanity, we, whatever relate to the outside environment nature. All these terms need to be defined finer, I guess. And right now, this relationship is defined by material relations, relations of power. So it's something somewhere in that direction. But let's let's talk about that in, I don't know, next year. Yeah. Okay. Then, yeah, we will see each other again at 15, 20. Let's talk about the rapid venture, self-betraying and severe foreshadowing.