Thanatia and the Crepuscular Earth Model - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 294

erates within this paradigm and on the premise that everything is substitutable and
reversible::: after all everything can be fixed, except death. Yet this view is funda-
mentally flawed because replacing forests that once spanned the whole of Eurasia,
re-concentrating metallic ores previously extracted from mines or converting all the
CO 2 and water back into hydrocarbons and oxygen, whilst perfectly possible from
a thermodynamic point of view, takes more than money. In fact, it would require
such an amount of energy, knowledge and time that restoring irreversible processes
would become insurmountably costly and almost practically impossible. One can
therefore with not too much di culty, imagine a “commercially dead” planet Earth
as a possible end to the “anthropocene” 3 period (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). In
the hypothetical scenario of a “dead state”, all concentrated materials would have
been extracted and dispersed throughout the crust and all fossil fuels would have
been burned leading to an increase in atmospheric CO 2 concentration and mean
global temperature due to the greenhouse effect. Using this as a reference point,
every substance that is more concentrated or diluted, warmer or cooler, with a
greater or a lower chemical potential, pressure, height or velocity and so on will
have exergy.
The hypothetical Earth alluded to here is Thanatia and as indicated by the
Greek “&”, represents death. In fact it is the embodiment of non-violent
death. The authors use the name to describe the possible state of the Earth when
all commercially exploitable resources have been consumed and dispersed. More-
over, Thanatia, as both a name and a concept, constitutes the starting point for
assessing the loss of mineral endowment on Earth. The model behind Thanatia
is the “Crepuscular Earth” and has been developed with current geochemical and
geological information on the atmosphere, hydrosphere and crust (see Sec. 10.3).
In theory, by using ever refined Earth system models, better approximations can
be obtained. This is something that the authors actively encourage the scientific
community to do. There could be as many Crepuscular Earth models, representing
Thanatia, as there are authors which demonstrates the necessity of reaching an
internationally recognised consensus regarding this baseline. That said, since the
future is a great unknown, science may never create a model su ciently capable of
depicting Thanatia. However even a reasonable guess, would provide a quantitative
estimation as to the effect of mankind on Nature. It is equally likely that Man will
never live to see Thanatia as hopefully, alternatives to the extraction and dispersion
of natural endowment on Earth will be found.
10.2.2 Thanatia compared with Gaia and Medea
The Earth's evolution has been the subject of a number of hypothesis and models,
especially since the 1970s. Climat ologists, for instance, have estimated future atmo-
3 The Anthropocene is an informal term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human ac-
tivities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems (Crutzen and Stoermer,
2000).