Why Earth Futures?

NEWS AND DEVELOPMENTS

ANNOUNCING: FRONTIER FELLOWS PROGRAM!!!   TIME TO APPLY!!!

The EFI Frontier Fellows program continues with great success, and will include six new Fellows in its fourth year.  Each Fellow will conduct original, interdisciplinary research on a topic relevant to planning Earth’s future. Application Deadline is March 9, 2025. For the official announcement click on this link. You will find the proposal form here.

Learn about this year’s Fellows and their project here.

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The UCSC Climate Salon #1 “Challenges to a Renewable Future” with Alice Friedemann will be on Thursday, January 30th, 2025, hosted by UCSC CAN, Baskin Engineering, and the Earth Futures Institute. Please join us in person at the Center for Adaptive Optics Atrium (UCSC Science Hill), and via Zoom with this link. Meeting ID: 899 5271 6648, Passcode: 210375. We look forward to a lively conversation after the talk. You can find a sample reading of “Life after Fossil Fuels” with this link, and a sample reading of “When the Trucks Stop Running” with this link.

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Congratulations to EFI Frontier Fellow Sam Leveau, a member of the UCSC “Electrified Slugs” team, which recently won the 2024 Farm Robotics Challenge “Excellence in Safety” Award. Congratulations to Sam and his co-students on the Electrified Slugs team, as well as to all of the mentors. Please read about this great achievement, including further links regarding this challenge, in this article from November 18th, 2024.

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Dr. Patrick Chuang’s Talk at UC Santa Cruz from November 19th, 2024 titled “What is and is not possible in a fossil-fuel free world?” can be viewed by clicking on this link. Climate Action Now (UCSC CAN), Baskin Engineering, and UCSC Earth Futures Institute hosted the event in person and via Zoom. You can find more information under “EFI Climate Salons and Talks” in the menu bar above.

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Dr. Sandra Faber’s talk at UC Santa Cruz from October 9th, 2024 titled “Cheap Energy: The Indispensable Elixir of Modernity” can be viewed by clicking on this link. Climate Action Now (UCSC CAN), Baskin Engineering, and the UCSC Earth Futures Institute hosted the event, and a page with more information and a link to the presentation PDF titled “EFI Climate Salons and Talks” can be found in the menu bar above or via this link.

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THE RESULTS OF (FIRST) EFI LOGO COMPETITION.  EFI announced a competition for a logo in April 2023. The three finalists are listed here.  These are great ideas, but we are not yet ready to make a final decision.  Please send us any new ideas that you may have to earthfut@ucsc.edu!

NATE HAGENS VISITING UC SANTA CRUZ. World-renowned futures thinker Nate Hagens and his colleague Joan Diamond visited UCSC Feb. 20-21, 2023.  EFI sponsored their visit.  They participated in a brainstorming session involving students, faculty, and staff on ideas for how UCSC can participate in sustainability and climate planning activities, and this was followed by Nate’s EFI EconSociSci Seminar entitled “Right in front of our eyes but almost always unseen: Energy Blindness and the Human Predicament,” which is viewable here.

Vision

That Earth’s astonishing capacity to create complexity and beauty will be preserved, flourish, and procreate as long as the cosmos permits.

History of the Earth Futures Institute

The Earth Futures Institute at UCSC took shape in 2018 under the impetus of a strategic planning exercise at UCSC Santa Cruz. Inspired by her lifelong research, faculty member Sandra Faber had been thinking about the prospects for intelligent life on Earth on cosmic time. Like many, she feels that humanity is at a tipping point — our population and economy are exceeding the carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth, and there will be a major reckoning soon in which we will be forced to come back into equilibrium with our planet.

This is, therefore, a time of peril, but also one of great opportunity. It is time to prepare now to gracefully and safely negotiate the coming transformation. It is also a time to think about where we want to land on the other side. What will Earth look like, what will our descendants be doing? How many of them can the planet hold on cosmic time? What parts of the stupendous edifice of knowledge and technology that we have built in the last two centuries can be preserved and put to the service of these future generations?

Above all, why is Earth important? What will be lost to the Universe if Earth no longer functions as the cradle of creativity, complexity, and beauty that it has for the past five billion years?

These questions find their natural home in the University. The challenges are not only economic, scientific, and technical but also social, ethical, and moral — all facets of academia must be engaged. The answers, we predict, will amount to re-writing the story of what it means to be human.

The greatest drama in the history of our species is about to unfold, and yet very few people apprehend that it is near. Our goal at the Earth Futures Institute is to educate in the near term, advise in the mid-term, and inspire in the long term with visions for what humanity can become on the other side.

WHY EARTH FUTURES?

Humanity needs help — we are living for the moment with little thought to our own or Earth’s long-term future. To fill this gap, UC Santa Cruz created a new kind of institute — an “Earth Futures Institute” — to help our species grapple with the perils and prospects for life on Earth over the next one hundred to one million years. Knowledge from across the university will be integrated to forge a deeper understanding of our origins — Earth, life, consciousness, and civilization —  and how these will evolve in future. By bringing “hard science” to life via the talents of UC artists, humanists, and philosophers, the basic goal of EFI is to foster and provoke the first honest, probing appraisal of Earth’s prospects, both now and on cosmic time.

What kind of future should human beings strive for? As yet, there is no planet-wide consensus on this question. And so, EFI’s second mission — in parallel with the first — is to help humanity discover our “moral compass for the future”. Thinking about Earth’s evolution on cosmic time will redirect that quest in profoundly new and helpful ways. A million years is 40,000 human generations, a future so removed from personal experience that each of us can contemplate fundamental human values frankly and without concern for the fate of anyone now living or their progeny. A million years also fires us to imagine humanity’s ultimate creative potential, and thus our ultimate cosmic significance. Finally, a million years poses the question of sustainability on cosmic time, and whether that is even possible. We are furthermore convinced that thinking about stability over a million years will bring to light new strategies that can be applied now, and thus may impact near-term thinking without deliberately setting out to do so.

These two themes — the far future of Earth and the moral compass to find it — set EFI apart from other futures organizations, which tend to be more short-term and practically oriented. Many such near-term activities exist on our two campuses already, and EFI will embrace and facilitate them.  But the two new themes of “moral choice” and “far-future” pose a whole new set of questions about the viability and value of Earth in the long run. These are questions that virtually all disciplines and all faculty can engage with for the first time — and should.

Specific functions of EFI include promoting multi-disciplinary research, developing novel modes of graduate and undergraduate training, and mounting ambitious public engagement programs. EFI’s focus meshes seamlessly with UC’s larger goal to become carbon-neutral by 2025. Finally, knowing that UC campuses are addressing the major question of our time — where is Earth headed? — addresses public anxiety that our planet is drifting towards catastrophe with no one at the helm. If nurtured, EFI can become a beacon, a leading light, and a source of civic pride and reassurance to the people of California.