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    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
    Unavailable
    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
    Unavailable
    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
    Audiobook10 hours

    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

    Written by Annalee Newitz

    Narrated by Kimberly Farr

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How?

    As a species, Homo sapiens is at a crossroads. Study of our planet's turbulent past suggests that we are overdue for a catastrophic disaster, whether caused by nature or by human interference.

    It's a frightening prospect, as each of the Earth's past major disasters-from meteor strikes to bombardment by cosmic radiation-resulted in a mass extinction, where more than 75 percent of the planet's species died out. But in Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, Annalee Newitz, science journalist and editor of the science Web site io9.com explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Life on Earth has come close to annihilation-humans have, more than once, narrowly avoided extinction just during the last million years-but every single time a few creatures survived, evolving to adapt to the harshest of conditions.

    This brilliantly speculative work of popular science focuses on humanity's long history of dodging the bullet, as well as on new threats that we may face in years to come. Most important, it explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow. From simulating tsunamis to studying central Turkey's ancient underground cities; from cultivating cyanobacteria for "living cities" to designing space elevators to make space colonies cost-effective; from using math to stop pandemics to studying the remarkable survival strategies of gray whales, scientists and researchers the world over are discovering the keys to long-term resilience and learning how humans can choose life over death.

    Newitz's remarkable and fascinating journey through the science of mass extinctions is a powerful argument about human ingenuity and our ability to change. In a world populated by doomsday preppers and media commentators obsessively forecasting our demise, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember is a compelling voice of hope. It leads us away from apocalyptic thinking into a future where we live to build a better world-on this planet and perhaps on others. Readers of this book will be equipped scientifically, intellectually, and emotionally to face whatever the future holds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 14, 2013
    ISBN9780804127295
    Unavailable
    Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction
    Author

    Annalee Newitz

    ANNALEE NEWITZ is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.

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    Reviews for Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

    3.5/5

    66 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A positive book. It covered low tech to high tech options for our survival. Is pretty current.
    • 2/5
      Pop science light. News flash: Carbon emissions are bad! Let's build an elevator to space and colonize Titan!
      Yeeks.
    • 4/5
      This was an impulse buy at the bookstore. The title and blurb promised me exactly the sort of book I was looking for at that moment: an optimistic account of how humanity will realize its destiny as starseed. This book didn't exactly deliver on that, but it did deliver a fair amount of interesting information along the way.

      The book is divided into five parts, but thematically, I think it's really three: 1) A history of mass-extinctions and crisis points. 2) Stories of how life itself, and later, humanity, survived these bottlenecks and crises. 3) Science and developments happening right now that may help us through our current age of extinction and global warming.

      Some of Newitz's choices never seem fully justified. The book seems to exist in a muddled grey space between "my personal journey from despair to hope over the ultimate fate of humanity" and "an academic treatise on the possibilities of the continued existence of the human race." For instance, as an example of the survival of a particular human culture through multiple crises, she uses the Jewish diaspora. Which may be fully legitimate, but an academic text would have either discussed more examples or made a better case for why we're discussing this one in particular rather than giving the feeling that this is the case we're discussing because Newitz is Jewish and she knew the most about this one.

      Lest you think I'm just being Anti-Semetic, Newitz also promises to plumb the world of science fiction for ideas of how humanity will survive. But this exploration is limited solely to the works of Octavia Butler. Now, I love Octavia Butler. She is hands-down one of my favorite writers and I referenced her idea of Earthseed or starseed in the beginning of this review. But really, why only Butler? The choice is never explained.

      So mostly, the parts of the book I most enjoyed were those describing current science that may lend to our survival and imagining the future. There was some great stuff on living buildings (seriously, some Slonczewski references would have been great here!), and interesting discussion of the still theoretical space elevator, and the rarely made acknowledgement that humans are continuously evolving, and that even without genetic engineering or uploading ourselves into computers, should we survive, the humans of a million years from now will look radically different.

      So, this wasn't exactly the book I was looking for. But that book would probably have been agonizingly long. This book was still a step in the right direction.
    • 2/5
      not up to date (by a decade) on the science; sloppy reasoning - maybe because of the point of view
    • 3/5
      I love the idea for this book, but I don't think it was extremely well-executed. I found it hard to get through and took many breaks from reading it.
    • 3/5
      Lightweight, Internet blog-style writing padded to book length, informed by pulp science fiction and technological utopianism. The concept of the title is good, but needs a historian who understands the multiple disciplines required to give a coherent Big History on this topic.
    • 2/5
      Written and edited for a pop audience presumed to be interested also In science fiction, virtual-reallty games, and disaster movies, this book Is ultimately too glib. There are promising openings — whale migration as it might Illuminate human nomadism. for example. But they aren't followed up. Instead. the author gee-whizzes Into space travel and human-ET hybrldIsm. There's plenty of scatter In her Method, and maybe too much Adapt as she drifts into the next topic, whatever it might he. I wish there were more here for me to Remember.
    • 3/5
      I was rather hoping for kind of an updating of Isaac Asimov’s A Choice of Catastrophes, a survey of all the things that could wipe out humanity and how humans could prepare to survive them.There’s a lot to like in this book. Newitz reminds us there were more mass extinctions in Earth’s history than just those two publicity hogs, the Permian and K-T. And even the dinosaur extinction may not be as simple as a big space rock smacking the Yucatan. She nicely sums up state of the current Neanderthal debate. Did we kill them? And, if they did leave us some of their genes, was it rape or a peaceful merging of cultures? Though she accepts the idea of harmful anthropogenic global warming, Newitz reminds us we don’t have to shut down industrial civilization to mitigate it. She also reminds us that’s also not a path without plenty of technical, scientific, and political complications. But she also knows that environmentalists like the famous Bill McKibbin have chosen an arbitrary state of nature to preserve and fixate on. Finally, I can’t hate any book that touches on so many interests of mine: geology, the Black Death, and science fiction.However, I think anybody who even pays just casual attention to science journalism is going to find this an overpriced book with a fair amount of padding and digressions.The padding? The history of cyanobacteria on Earth and the migratory patterns of the gray whale are interesting, but it would have been nice if Newitz would have used examples from human history to illustrate the survival strategies of adaptation and remembering. The engineering of cities to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis is certainly interesting and a worthy goal, but neither type of disaster threatens the extinction of our species.The digressions? While the ability to grow food in a city, particularly an underground city, is quite indispensable in the event of a supervolcano or that deadly duo from space, a gamma ray burst or asteroid strike, the section on San Francisco as the “City of Tomorrow” comes off as naïve (and native) boosterism by Newitz for a city, in other eyes, full of moral preeners escaping, in their green zone, the problems they cause or aggravate elsewhere. The book is, Newitz admits at one point, an argument for why man needs to move into space. I agree with that goal, and, in that regard, I was glad to see an update on the progress to build space elevators, but the argument could have been shorter (and cheaper) or more detailed. Often, the book leaves the connections between some parts less than clear and further reinforces the impression of some chapters maybe starting their life as articles on Newitz’s IO9 website. I also liked the bizarre visions of literally organic city buildings though the problem of gene exchange and evolution thwarting our designs is barely touched on. There is also a section on radical attempts to capture solar energy via organic photosynthetic methods rather than silicon photovoltaics. Logically, that sort of runs in opposition to the urban utopians we meet who somehow think, with all this cheap, future energy, we will want to live the life of local famers.The book does conclude logically, though, with a look at transhumanism – the promise and pitfalls and complications of changing the human condition by changing our bodies and brains. However, for me, Newitz’s final analogy of our transhuman descendents regarding us fondly as we do our pre-Neanderthal ancestor, seems an emotionally unconvincing conclusion to her story. I feel more emotional kinship with a German Shepard than Australopithecus I’m afraid.But, if you are familiar with no more than two or three of the topics covered here, then you probably won’t mind this wandering book and just look on it as a fascinating grab bag of articles
    • 5/5
      Love post-apocalypse fiction? Here’s apocalyptic science made utterly fascinating and relatively hopeful--How can humanity survive life-annihilating disasters like global warming, cyclical ice ages, cosmic radiation, mega-volcanoes, rampaging pathogens, and asteroid strikes? After talking with scientists, engineers, philosophers, historians, technicians and--as she puts it--sundry brainiacs, Annalee Newitz has a few suggestions. Since I inexplicably love novels, movies, and TV shows set in post-apocalyptic times I found her book utterly fascinating. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember covers a vast territory of time, from the earliest days of life on Earth until a million years in the future. The first section, A History of Mass Extinctions, describes times when life was almost snuffed out completely, only to reemerge adapted for new conditions. Often these almost end-times were brought on by external forces, but it turns out we aren’t the first species to pollute our own environment--that would be the oxygen spewing cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae). Oxygen was poisonous to the life forms of early Earth and most of them died off when it began to fill the atmosphere, but the change set our planet on a trajectory that gave rise to the world as we know it. The second section of the book, We Almost Didn’t Make It, covers times when starvation or plague killed vast numbers of people. Lessons From Survivors draws its conclusions from many different life forms that have survived mass death, not just humans. Sections titled How to Build a Death-Proof City, which suggests possibilities like underground communities, urban agriculture, and bioplastic buildings, and The Million Year View, which has space colonies among its ideas, conclude the book. Some of the information is necessarily speculative, but science is exciting in Newitz’s hands. It’s a hopeful book, drawing ideas for the future from the many times life forms on Earth have managed to sneak past the ultimate grim reaper.