Ask Ethan: Can “following the science” save the Earth?

It’s no secret that, here on Earth in 2026, we’re more scientifically and technologically advanced than ever, and yet — with over 8 billion human beings presently on planet Earth — we’re arguably closer to causing our own self-extinction than ever before. Of the entire planet’s land surface (excluding Antarctica), just 23% of Earth’s wilderness remains. Since the start of the industrial revolution, our atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content has increased by over 50% of its initial value, driving global temperatures up over 1.5 °C above pre-industrial values. Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons exist across the globe, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic killed at least 25 million humans from 2020-2021 alone.

With the rise of energy-intensive and water-guzzling technologies, like AI and the associated datacenters, along with the largest wealth inequality in modern times, it seems like human civilization might be on the cusp of its own self-destruction. But unlike most biological systems that overconsume resources until they drive themselves to extinction, humanity has the capacity to study these problems, plus many others, and identify and enact solutions to them. Is “following the science” the solution to our woes? That’s what Terry M. of Michigan wants to know, asking:

“We, as a planet, have a limited existence… Our resources, economies, and funding are changing constantly. Should we, as a [planet-wide civilization], focus more on understanding how we can survive or reverse the destruction of our planet and its resources? Shouldn’t we collect our greatest minds to ‘seriously’ develop strategies that curb the erosion of everything we value?”

Here in 2026, this question is as relevant as it’s ever been. While the ultimate answer has not yet been written, the choices we collectively make today may very well determine what path our entire civilization takes moving forward.

The destruction (so far) to our planet

If you look around at what our planet used to be, prior to the recent expansion of human civilization, it’s easy to look at all that we’ve built and call it “destruction.” After all, we can, from a scientific point of view, quantify the ways that we’ve altered the Earth on a planet-wide scale. Examples include:

• the changes we’ve made to our atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution,
• the widespread extinction of wild plant and animal species,
• the loss of wilderness: required to sustain our planet’s ecosystem,
• the introduction of all sorts of novel diseases, without successful measures to prevent their worst effects, into the human population,
• the pollution of the environment, risking our ability to safely eat, drink, and breathe,

as well as many more. It’s clear that if we continue down this course, with no mitigating factors in place, we will indeed chart a course to our own ruin.

But “ruin” isn’t the only possible option. While certainly many things have been lost or destroyed, it’s far more accurate to view the changes we’ve enacted here on planet Earth as a transformation: one that’s still in progress. We know how things were in the past, and they’re certainly different now, but we have yet to reach an equilibrium state: where things can remain as they are over a long period of time. Things have changed and are still changing, and there’s much that’s still to come that we, as a species, have an enormous amount of control over.

The hope and potential of science

For example, each of the aforementioned “pain points” that one — if they were so inclined — could argue points to the destruction humanity has wrought upon the planet can be abated, or at least ameliorated, by the right set of scientifically-motivated interventions. Science, remember, is our way of interrogating reality: by asking the natural, physical world questions about itself, and listening in the right ways (through experiment, measurement, and observation) to draw conclusions about how reality actually is. When we do it right, we can find not just theoretical, but usually practical, solutions to even the most complicated problems we can formulate.

Science is, at its very core, two very disparate things together.

1. It is the entire body of knowledge that we’ve gleaned about our physical reality: across disciplines, subjects, and time, including all of the physical and life sciences and every topic that they encompass.
2. It is also the process by which we inquire into the nature of reality: making observations, conducting experiments under controlled conditions, independently verifying and testing our conclusions, formulating theories that can be validated or refuted, and by self-correcting as new information is acquired.

When we do it right, we not only advance our knowledge and uncover scientific truths, but can often determine which path (or paths) forward can save us from a variety of potentially dangerous and destructive scenarios.

Past successes

It’s important to recognize that there were, throughout history, an enormous number of problems that society faced that were, indeed, solved by implementing scientific solutions.

• We had all sorts of diseases that ravaged humanity: rabies, polio, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. First via the process of variolation and later through the more sophisticated process of vaccination, we were able to either cure or prevent these diseases, or at least mitigate the severity and consequences of infections, significantly.
• We were able to understand the link between air pollution and conditions like asthma, lung cancer, and COPD, as well as between the ingestion of various minerals and chemical compounds and the adverse effects they had on human health, and enact regulations that led to clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and safe foods to ingest.
• We were able to identify which foods were healthy and safe to eat, and in what quantities, and which foods were unsafe, toxic, or even lethal, and to ensure that people had access to healthy and safe foods.
• We were able to recognize that some of the chemicals we were releasing into the environment — chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — while not toxic to humans, would instead rise into the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and interact with ozone molecules, breaking them apart into oxygen: destroying our ozone layer. Through international collaboration, we eliminated CFCs from products on a worldwide scale, and the hole in the ozone layer is now recovering.

Many other interventions, particularly in matters of public health and the environment, have also successfully been enacted on local, national, and even global scales.

However, these weren’t merely scientific interventions that altered the course of human civilization for the better. Scientists played vital roles in:

• quantifying the problems we faced,
• identifying the root causes of those problems,
• devising paths to solutions to those problems,
• and making policy recommendations that would lead to better lives and better outcomes for not just individuals, but for human civilization and planet Earth as a whole.

This doesn’t just come into play when we speak about health and safety issues, but also about issues such as our environment, our ecology, our infrastructure, access to needed services, education, and much, much more.

While science can tell us what the optimal course of action is based on the full suite of knowledge and capabilities currently available, science alone did not enact the solutions to these problems. These problems got solved because of the actions of society: our governments and institutions. Only because there were mandates to what people, corporations, and municipalities could and couldn’t do — as well as what they were required to do — were we able to provide safe food, air, water, a sustainable environment, and disease-free public spaces to all. In places where those measures were not taken, severe, often deadly consequences resulted.

Present challenges

Today’s challenges are some of the most monumental, from both a scientific and a societal perspective, that human civilization has ever faced. At a time when we know more scientifically — and are capable of more, technologically — than ever before, it only makes sense to mobilize our greatest minds and the full suite of our resources, to address these problems. Some of the top scientifically-minded interventions include:

• ensuring that everyone is fully vaccinated against vaccine-preventable diseases,
• protecting the remaining wilderness on planet Earth from human encroachment, and working to re-wild significant fractions of land being used inefficiently by humans,
• developing and implementing sustainable energy technologies and moving away from net carbon-releasing fossil fuel energy sources,
• providing access to the basics required for survival in the modern world (food, air, water, education, electricity, internet, etc.) to all,
• giving scientists the freedom and means to conduct research and implement measures to protect us from pandemics, disease vectors, and foodborne illnesses,

as well as many others. These interventions are designed to improve public health, reduce preventable maladies, and create a long-term sustainable future for generations of humans to come here on planet Earth.

The biggest question that goes beyond science

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: the science is already there. We, collectively, as scientists, know precisely what needs to be done and how to do it; that is an already-solved problem. What stands between the creation of the sustainable society that works together for the benefit of all humankind that we envision? Where we follow the best recommendation of science to increase the health, well-being, and opportunity for a fruitful life for everyone on Earth?

We do. We, the people of Earth, and the very civilization that brought us to this point, are our own worst enemies in this regard.

We have the most powerful disease-prevention science and technology of all-time, and yet people are more distrustful of it than ever. People who aren’t forced or compelled to accept vaccines reject them, and even defend their decisions — under the guise of personal freedom — as they, their relatives, or even their own children die as a direct result of that refusal.

We have an unprecedented ability to replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy-generating technologies: solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric among them. And yet, each year, the global carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, with the last dip lasting just one year: 2020, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The short-term and long-term risks of ignoring science on a huge variety of issues are known and well-quantified. The Earth has a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and oceans than at any time since the existence of our early hominid ancestors, and is warmer than at any point in over 100,000 years, with the warming accelerating here in the 21st century due primarily and directly to human activities. Once-eradicated illnesses have returned, infecting thousands and killing many, and yet people remain opposed to routine vaccinations: once a standard requirement to enroll in public school or participate in civil society.

And yet, arguably due to an enormous suite of well-funded misinformation campaigns about everything ranging from supplements, tobacco, and fluoridated drinking water to vaccines, the climate, and more, people and governments routinely reject the recommendations of science, actively choosing the more globally harmful behavior. Reasons vary, and range from personal profit/gain to simply the “gut feeling” that they themselves must personally be convinced that this is true, even if there is no logical or reasoned argument that could get them to change their minds.

This is particularly egregious in our modern society: where the deleterious actions of even a minuscule percentage of people can completely undermine and overwhelm the positive actions of an overwhelming majority of people.

One classic example is the measles vaccine: a vaccine that’s over 97% effective in granting complete immunity to the disease. (93% of people gain immunity after one dose; 97% gain it after the recommended second dose.) Because measles is an exceptionally contagious disease, roughly 95% of a community needs to be immune to it in order to stop outbreaks: outbreaks which are particularly deadly to the elderly, the unvaccinated (including those too young to be vaccinated), and the immunocompromised.

After decades of measles being eradicated in the United States — until recently, the global leader in vaccines and public health — the country has now experienced more than 2300 confirmed measles cases in 2026, so far, alone: a 35-year high. Of those cases, a whopping 93% of patients were recorded as not having had a single dose of a measles vaccine. The lesson is clear: unless you compel people to behave a certain way, a significant percentage of them, for whatever reason (including for no justifiable reason at all), will not comply.

To sum up: if you demanded that the leading bodies of the world’s best scientists would need to approve of any policy plans for:

• ecology and the environment,
• public health and safety,
• food, air, and water safety,
• natural disaster (including wildfire) preparedness,
• disease/pandemic prevention and containment,
• and so on,

we would swiftly be able to solve nearly all of the problems that currently threaten our long-term future on Earth. What’s vital to remember is that even though there are “tipping points” for when, once we pass them, many preventable issues become worse, there is never a point-of-no-return: a point that, once we pass it, we can’t conduct meaningful action to make things better. We can always do that: whenever, collectively, as a species, we come to our senses.

However, as long as it’s permissible for individually bad behavior to persist — even incentivizing it in many ways — there are no collective actions that can overcome the harm those actions will do.

• A single arsonist can undo decades of conservation work by the rest of the community.
• A small group of anti-vaccine advocates can lead to a new pandemic, particularly because each new infection is a new opportunity for the disease to mutate into a strain that evades prior immunity.
• And a single polluter can poison the air, water, or food of a community, nation, or planet, depending on the scale of the pollution.

We already all “comply” with a whole host of rules and regulations in order to be part of civil society; breaking those rules and regulations gets you fined, imprisoned, or worse. Until policy comes into alignment with science — not just as a suggestion, but as a mandate, and with consequences for violating that mandate — the persistence of “everything we value” will forever be at risk. As Carl Sagan put it so presciently back at the end of the 20th century:

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

It is up to us. The choices we make — not just as individuals, but collectively, including the actions of (and consequences arising from) the most destructive of us all — are choices that the entire world will have to reckon with.

Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!

This article Ask Ethan: Can “following the science” save the Earth? is featured on Big Think.