Humanity is not easy to kill

But we are trying very hard

Lena Bresser, Alexey Morozov, +1

How exactly will our species – Homo sapiens- die out? Is it time to get used to eating insects? Will there be enough antibiotics for everyone? Is there a conspiracy of pharmacists? Who made money on the pandemic? We talk about this and many other things with Professor of Moscow State University, biologist Andrey Zhuravlev.

Andrey Zhuravlev – Doctor of Sciences, Professor of the Biology Faculty of Moscow State University (Department of Biological Evolution). Specialization – paleontology and history of the biosphere. In the recent past – scientific editor of the magazine "National Geographic Russia". Author of more than thirty books and four hundred articles. He is known to the general public for the book "The Creation of the Earth", in which he reveals the role of living organisms in the formation of our planet.

First of all, our teeth will fall out

– Will humanity die out?

– Absolutely. In a few million or tens of millions of years. However, we try very hard to destroy ourselves earlier. But you can't destroy them all. Man is a tenacious species. We have existed for about 200 thousand years, this is a good result. For example, woolly mammoths are not much older, but there are already 5 thousand of them. not for years. We've settled in pretty well.

– How exactly are we going to die out? Will the arms and legs fall off?

– Something will certainly fall off from a person. It's already falling off – wisdom teeth, for example. Some scientists believe that we don't need hair and soon we will go bald. I do not believe that everyone will suddenly become smarter and we will have a huge head: but how to give birth to such a "tadpole"? You don't need a big brain to be "smarter". For example, Turgenev had a huge brain, and Anatole France is small, and now what? In general, our body will remain about the same. Since the time of the Neanderthals, we have not grown extra hands, which means that the general design of the body suits nature. In general, "extinction" is, rather, not the disappearance, but the transition of a species to a new state. That's where we'll go.

– What is the probability that we will be destroyed by "new" viruses or bacteria?

– Practically none. We are incredibly resilient. I'll tell you why. Our body is an ecosystem. Nine-tenths of this ecosystem is a legacy of the deepest past. Bacteria and other prokaryotes, fungi – all this originated billions of years ago, evolved before us, and now forms an integral part of our body. We share 37% of the genes with prokaryotes, another 20% with unicellular eukaryotes, and only an insignificant part with chordates, vertebrates and primates. For example, with chimpanzees, we have only 3.5% of the same genes. So, our ability to resist poisons is provided by bacterial genes that are 4 billion years old. Roughly speaking, we learned to drink and smoke when we were bacteria.

And now scientists are discovering new prokaryotes, for example, under the ice of Antarctica or in deep caves. A killer from the past? Do we have no defense against him? As if not so. Well, they spent three million years under the ice. The human body, consisting of bacteria billions of years old, knows them well. We will destroy them and not notice. But they are unlikely to survive. They sat in sterile conditions and forgot how to fight for life.

The conspiracy of the headlights of Matsevts

– The pandemic has turned our lives inside out, and this coronavirus is not the most contagious and lethal.

– We have developed vaccines against Covid-19 incredibly quickly. This alone shows the highest level of modern medicine. And yet there is panic in the world. Why?

We have a genetic fear of the new, unusual. Of course, the pandemic has become so "new". Firstly, the exterior – masks, gloves, those creepy cars with megaphones that drove around the cities a year ago. Secondly, people have not encountered something like this for a long time. Even the notorious Spaniard of 1918 passed almost unnoticed by contemporaries, since it coincided with the World War and revolutions. It's only now that we're starting to realize that she actually killed more people than guns. We were morally unprepared for the pandemic.

The pandemic has shown two things. Firstly, society as a whole is uneducated. I mean all sorts of covid dissidents: if I don't see the virus, it's not there. Secondly, it turned out that governments do not have a plan for such cases. The situation was largely left to chance. An interesting fact: the companies that showed the best profit by the end of 2020 are those where there were the most cases. It is clear that they simply abandoned people to their fate and did not declare quarantine. There is nothing to be surprised about. For a businessman, an employee is an expendable material, which he does not even fully perceive as a person. And governments are just confused. I'm afraid the biggest lesson after the pandemic is that we haven't learned any lessons.

– Many people say that antibiotic resistance is becoming a giant threat. Soon, they say, we will find ourselves one-on-one with viruses, as in the XIX century. It's true?

– That's not true. We are just beginning to discover really important "sources" of antibiotics. For example, ancient multicellular organisms of the lowest level – sponges, horseshoe crabs and others - are now being actively studied. They are older than us, they fight bacteria even better than us and produce a huge amount of the strongest antibiotics. We are definitely not in danger of being left without antibiotics: often there is no need to develop anything, they already exist, it remains only to borrow them from nature, from other organisms.

– That is, talking about resistance is a trick of pharmacists who will trumpet about the problem, scare everyone, and then offer a miracle pill for a lot of money?

– Well, something like that.

Relax here: you won't have to eat insects

– A person digs in the bowels, burns fuel and changes the world, perhaps irreversibly. But all living beings change the world! For example, mollusks produce so many shells that geological plates can bend under the layers of sediments and continents can shift. Is human work so fatal?

– Here, unfortunately, there is one serious difference between humans and other species. Other species operated with the elements and substances that are in the biosphere at the moment. And we have reached the reserves that the biosphere has been creating for billions of years and which are buried so deep that no animal will get there. Some of these reserves are unique, could be formed only in certain epochs and will never recover. For example, the main iron reserves arose at the turn of the oxygen-free and oxygen-free era. We recycle and spray it all. How fatal this is, no one can still understand. Many scientists say that we are upsetting the balance that has developed over 4 billion years. But other experts believe that man, on the contrary, performs some higher task: to free the planet from the burden that "weighs" it. Will we die as a result of such activities? Easy. Will life on the planet die? You won't wait. The Earth will recover almost instantly after we disappear. That is, we will do our job and leave. And didn't nature call us to the stage just so that we would burn oil, gas, get poisoned and go into oblivion? Maybe.

– Environmentalists say that agriculture has become another threat. They say that there have never been so many chickens, pigs, cows on Earth – nature does not need so much, and we again upset the balance. But is it only man who cultivates creatures of a different kind? Don't ants breed aphids?

– Aphids and ants are a great example. In fact, some of the species of these insects no longer exist, but coexist, and cannot exist without each other. There are thousands of such examples. For example, thanks to the study of fossil resins from Burma, we know that already a hundred million years ago, small beetles attached themselves to social termites and themselves became like termites. Many fish "breed" sponges. They take care of them and harvest at a strictly defined time – just like us. It's amazing, but even public amoebas – slime molds are doing this: they cultivate bacteria. It seems that our "agriculture" is not at all a fatal invention of a person separated from "nature", but, on the contrary, a deep, characteristic behavior of all living things.

Another thing is that agriculture, of course, it's time to modernize. We can cultivate the soil more carefully and efficiently and, in general, dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the agro-industrial complex. The reserves here are enormous, many techniques and methods have developed spontaneously, such as, for example, the breeds of animals that we eat. It is enough just to change the "settings" a little so that the agro-industrial complex becomes less "harmful" to nature.

– And you won't have to eat artificial meat and insects?

– Of course not. Corporations invent and want to sell. To do this, they create demand by applying "green" rhetoric, that's all. There's enough food. Of course, there is a horror story that there are "too many people" and a food crisis is inevitable, but this is just a myth. Even such a densely populated country as China provides its citizens with products, and more diverse than on the tables of Russians. I like to eat in China more than here. The myth of the overpopulation of the Earth is tenacious, because it is in tune with the thinking of politicians. These anxious guys talk all the time that "they will conquer us" because "there are few of us, but there are many of them", and everything like that in the same spirit. In fact, the population is approaching a peak and will stop around the 10 billion mark. All living systems self-regulate, man is no exception.

Homosexual birds and the "moral foundations of the state"

– How does it work?

– I could give thousands of examples of how nature regulates the number of hares, bears and bacteria. A person thinks of himself as something special, but in fact obeys the same laws. With the difference that he acts, as it seems to him, rationally and consciously. For example, there are fewer and fewer children in families, and many do not want to have them at all. This is declared a cultural phenomenon, but in fact it is based on pure biology.

– Is homosexuality also part of the self–restraint program?

– Homosexuality is common among many mammals and even birds. For most living beings, in principle, it is unclear who is a boy and who is a girl. But bacteria and birds don't have governments, but humans do. Governments are constantly trying to develop some kind of "norms" and dictate to a person how to live. Instead of keeping economics and science in order. Science is the only institution with which hopes for the survival of mankind are linked. The fact that we seem to be defeating the pandemic is not the merit of governments, but of medicine, which almost ceased to exist through the efforts of Russian officials.

– You are full of optimism, but the heavens above us are not. We do not see other civilizations, which means that they have perished. Why are they unlucky, and we are so tenacious?

– And what do we know about space? We learned to detect planets from other stars a couple of decades ago. We have yet to understand how many "markers of life" are actually scattered throughout the universe. Let's not forget that from afar the Earth looks absolutely lifeless. Therefore, we will not wind ourselves up with the idea that "all civilizations have died, we will die too." Maybe it's not so gloomy. Another thing is, will we ever meet with aliens? It seems that a person is not able to fly even to Mars, it will simply be killed by radiation. It is most likely impossible to solve this problem, and, apparently, civilizations are sitting at home.

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