What If We Evacuated Earth?

What If We Evacuated Earth?

Planet earth. It’s been home to every human in history, with only a select few ever venturing off of it into outer space for even a brief time. But what if that changed? Could we ever adapt to survive in an off-earth environment?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if we evacuated earth?

A lot would depend on our motivation for leaving. Perhaps, some day in the future, the effects of global warming become too much for us to bear, forcing us to relocate. Or, humanity wages nuclear war against one another, to the point where the planet becomes inhospitable. Or, maybe in an alternate, sci-fi style future reality, some kind of extra-terrestrial invasion prompts us all to flee. In every case, though, regardless of whether the human race is itself united or divided, there’s clear reason to worry, be fearful or panic. After all, an evacuation is rarely staged because people want to leave - it’s because they have to.

Currently, we wouldn’t be able to transport humans to the stars en masse. And indeed, we’d have zero experience of sending anybody further than the moon for just a few days. So, if evacuation was required tomorrow, we’d be in big trouble.

But, say it happened in the near-future, at a time when our technology had advanced enough to at least try to achieve it. First, we’d have to decide who to select from the 7.7 billion global population to carry out the legacy of humankind - in case we didn’t (or couldn’t) all make it. And, even if it was possible to remove every single person, we’d probably still see an unsettling social hierarchy set in where those on the first ships off of earth (i.e., the first people out of danger) would be the richest and most powerful figures.

No doubt there’d also be some who outright refuse to leave earth at all, regardless of the threat present. And so, whatever the catastrophe we’re avoiding, maintaining some kind of social order would be crucial - to make sure we can at least keep some portion of humanity alive. Whether the world’s nation-states had dissolved or not, we’d have to realize that working together toward the common goal to evacuate would be the only way to succeed.

Say we did succeed, though, and the entire human race left earth on an armada of spaceships. We’d all be subjected to a whole new lifestyle aboard our interstellar crafts. Most of us would have to ‘learn on the job’ in terms of ‘how to live in space’, given that the vast majority know almost nothing about space travel beyond what we see in the movies.

The initial shock of such a dramatic lifestyle change - let’s call it space-sickness - would surely claim thousands of lives, one way or another. But then, for those who do adapt, day-to-day experience would never be the same. To stay strong during weightlessness, we’d all be obliged to exercise daily to maintain muscle mass. We’d all be eating freeze-dried meals at strictly enforced times, as part of an unparalleled logistical effort to keep as many people alive as possible. We’d sleep, wash and relax to rigid, individual schedules, and we’d all find ourselves reallocated with a job or professional role to ensure that life on board the ship goes as smoothly as possible.

Because, we’d all essentially be shipmates, and regardless of how big the evacuee ships were (or how many of them we’d have), it’d be everyone’s responsibility to maintain them - which means making internal fixes, staging external spacewalks, managing communications, organizing logistics and piloting the actual ship. Again, evacuating earth would require everyone involved to work together with a shared goal in mind.

Of course, so much of the success of this monumental mission would depend on the technology available to us. No doubt these giant ships capable of ferrying thousands of people through space would look and work nothing like even today’s highest spec spacecraft. We’d need a reliable method for creating artificial gravity via centrifugal force; We’d need ways to indefinitely grow crops, produce water and manufacture goods on board; We’d need around-the-clock, 24-hour energy supplies, to power everything from propelling the ship to lighting the corridors; We’d need living quarters designed to optimize minimal space; And, we’d need minutely detailed digital records of every surviving human being on every ship, to at least try and fend off the inevitable chaos.

Because, while we’d hope that such extreme circumstances would bring out the best in human behaviour, we’d also never have seen anything like this in terms of physical and mental strain. As part of the collective effort to maintain life on these ships, the emergency services would be vital in keeping crime rates down, keeping morale levels up, and ensuring that everyone feels at least faintly safe despite knowing that they’ll never see earth again.

Clearly, moving our entire society into a new and dangerous environment would require massive coordination between our greatest minds. Inevitably, as we try to determine who’s in charge of this unprecedented, completely displaced community, we’d see a political structure start to form. And then, assuming that we evacuated earth on multiple ships rather than just one, we’d see the emergence of ‘ship leaders’ to represent their people, negotiate inter-ship relations and broker trade deals. In the event that we initially left earth because of nuclear war between ourselves, the diplomatic tension could once again set in. If we were chased out by an alien species, then that fear could either strengthen alliances between ships or breed distrust. It’d be an unpredictable political landscape unlike any other, played out across the stars.

But, finally, what about the planet we evacuated in the first place? Back on earth, the indicators of human existence would slowly disappear. The lights would go out, energy systems would fail, buildings would collapse, and volatile power stations would explode. Whatever animals we left behind would have to scavenge for their own lives, while sprawling urban forests could swallow our cities. Given that humankind had felt it necessary to leave, though, it’s safe to assume that earth’s atmosphere will’ve turned toxic. So, for whatever reason, the prospects for any life on earth wouldn’t be good.

For as long as the planet stays inside the habitable zone of our solar system, there is every chance it would recover after a few thousand years or so - perhaps to once again host a long and intricate period of evolution. But, by then humanity will be long gone, steering their ships through some other star system as just a distant spec in the earth’s sky at night. And, that’s what would happen if we evacuated earth.