Seven of Nine, Unfortunately New post Is our home ready?

I used to love Seven of Nine. These seven of nine, though, I could do without.

The Planetary Health Check 2026 landed this week, the third edition of the yearly checkup scientists run on the nine planetary boundaries: the guardrails that keep Earth inside the mild, stable conditions every farm, city and civilization so far has been built within. Seven of the nine are transgressed – climate, biosphere integrity, land use, freshwater, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, novel entities (plastics, PFAS and tens of thousands of chemicals nobody bothered to test properly) and, since last year, ocean acidification. Same count as 2025, which sounds almost like stability until you get to the part the authors put in plain words: all seven are getting worse. CO2 sits at 426 ppm against a safe line of 350 ppm. The only two boundaries still in the green are aerosols, which are improving, and the ozone layer – the one planetary problem humanity once treated like an actual emergency, and fixed.

So: Earth is seriously weakened, but not yet (!) collapsed. The report still sees a window, a narrow one, if we manage to bend the curves within this decade – so roughly before a hypothetical firstborn of mine would learn to ride a bike.

Carl Sagan called it the only home we’ve ever known, looking at the Pale Blue Dot, a photo in which the whole planet takes up ≈0.12 pixels. I’ve been staring at that tiny smudge of a home a lot this week (and throughout the years), and not only because of a PDF with 124 pages.

Never ready, and the home?

In my last post I wrote about four days of almost-fatherhood and a sentence my ex said to me years later: you’re never ready; if you wait until you are, you’ll wait your whole life, and once the child is there, you grow into it. I believed her when I wrote it, and I still do. My fiancé and I want kids – two, at least – and the longing hasn’t gone anywhere; if anything it’s gotten louder, desperate even, the kind that makes me smile at strangers’ toddlers in the supermarket line like a lunatic.

But “you’re never ready” answers a question about me. The one that’s been sitting on my chest since the health check is bigger and meaner: never mind whether I’m ready – is our home?

I want children. And yet I don’t want to hand them this. I want to teach them how to be decent people; I’m not sure decency is what will keep them safe. I want to show them the world – and I’m not sure how much of it will still be there to show. I want it now! And yet I want someone to promise me first that it’ll be okay, and nobody can.

Imaginary lines

The planet is only the stage, and the play on it isn’t a comedy: the Uppsala Conflict Data Program counted 65 conflicts with at least one state involved in 2025, the most since its records begin in 1946; eight of them fought between states, a post-war record, 13 of them wars in the technical sense of at least 1,000 battle deaths a year, and ≈244,600 people killed in organized violence overall. And feeding the same fire, the arms race: world military spending hit 2,887,000,000,000 USD [2.887 trillion USD] in 2025, SIPRI reports, the 11th rise in a row and the highest figure it has ever recorded.

And then everything else, all at once. Politics drifts to the right almost everywhere I look, while AI and robots are about to join warfare at scale; the gap between the rich and the rest widens every year, and surveillance has quietly graduated from dystopian novel to product category. Environmental destruction, overconsumption, obscene wealth on one side and mass labor misery on the other, end-times capitalism with a loyalty program. Not everywhere, not everything – many areas, not all! – but enough of them that the pattern is hard to unsee. All of it happening on one planet, our only one, carved up along imaginary lines on maps and in minds.

The gut feeling that things are sliding backward isn’t only a gut feeling, either. In 2020 and 2021 the UN’s Human Development Index fell two years in a row for the first time in the 32 years it’s been calculated, dropping the world back to 2016 levels; the same report found six in seven people feeling insecure about their future. And it’s not only a temporary Covid side effect.

The world I got

I grew up in Munich and a Bavarian village in the 90s with stability, security, wealth and freedom – a ridiculously privileged position, the exception and not the rule for most kids born anywhere on this planet. The problems were visible even then, or at least foreseeable, and largely ignored. Yet there was hope: globalization would make everyone richer and friendlier, Europe would grow up into the United States of Europe, and whatever was left, technology would solve.

How gullible, how shortsighted!

Now the houses of cards are coming down one after another, and the rose-tinted glasses are coming off with them. My fear isn’t a single catastrophe; it’s a direction. That my kids grow up in a world that, for the first time in decades, develops backward – less optimistic about its own future, and fuller of pessimism, envy, fear and resignation. That there’s no stability left in Southeast Asia, with the Taiwan Strait as the fuse, and none in Europe, where the EU weakens or breaks apart, nationalism does its usual thing and war scenarios have moved from think-tank papers to the evening news. That they get less freedom than I had: personal, ideological, the freedom to travel, the freedom to develop into whoever they turn out to be. That the world of 2050 is simply less diverse and less colorful than the one I was handed.

Societies are aging, and minds are aging with them – a world run by rich, old, bitter men clinging to power with everything they’ve got. My generation complained about the boomers; our kids will complain about us, millennials and Gen Z and Gen Alpha alike, and honestly, they’ll have the better material.

There’s an ugly footnote to all of this, and it belongs in the main text: most children born this year were never going to get the Bavarian 90s anyway. Part of my fear is the fear of a privileged man that his kids won’t inherit his exception. That doesn’t make it wrong – but it makes it smaller than the planet, and I should know that about myself.

A catalog of things they won’t see

I’ve walked across glaciers in the Alps. Researchers from Lausanne and Zürich calculated that the Alps will lose at least 34% of their ice volume by 2050 even if warming had stopped dead in 2022, 46% if the melt of the last 20 years simply continues, and up to 65% if you extrapolate the last ten. Some of the ice I stood on will be a sad gray remnant by then; some of it will be a scree slope with an information board.

I’ve hiked through the spruce forests of the Harz National Park, which today looks like a moonscape: drought, storms and the bark beetle killed around nine in ten spruces in the central Harz, and the park decided to let the forest remake itself. It’ll probably come back as a mixed forest, maybe even a better one – but a different one, and it takes decades, and I’ll be old by the time it’s a forest you’d call a forest.

I had winters with 30-40 cm of snow in the 90s, snowball fights and sledding hills and that muffled silence only deep snow makes. That’s rare now; in 2050 it’ll be a story grandpa tells, suspiciously often.

I’ve watched towns and cities eat the open land between them, in Germany, across Europe, everywhere – fields and meadows turned into cul-de-sacs, parking lots and logistics halls, and none of it ever comes back.

I keep visiting the Mekong Delta, where my fiancé grew up. It’s home to ≈18,000,000 [18 million] people, and a new elevation model by Philip Minderhoud found it sits on average just ≈0.8 meters above local sea level – not the ≈2.6 meters the maps had long assumed; groundwater pumping and sand mining make it sink faster than the sea rises. A 2022 paper in Science warned that most of it could slip below sea level by 2100. Depending on which forecast you believe, the land where my kids’ other grandparents live will be partially gone by the end of the century, or completely.

My sister went to the Great Barrier Reef last year and told me to go too – and to go now, because it’s about to disappear. She’s not being dramatic: the Australian Institute of Marine Science recorded the largest annual drop in coral cover in two of the reef’s three regions since monitoring began 39 years ago, down by a quarter in the north and by almost a third in the south. One of the natural wonders of the world has turned into a limited-time offer.

And then there are the animal documentaries of the 90s and 2000s, the ones with the solemn narrator (kudos to you, David Attenborough) and the species “at risk of extinction”, whose subjects are rarer today or simply gone. My kids get the archive footage; I got the warning, which, in hindsight, was the preview.

The world we’ll see in 2050 – my kids maybe, me hopefully too – won’t just differ from the one I grew up in through technology and society; it’ll differ literally, in the ground under our feet and the water around it. We’re living through the largest transformation of the planet in its recent history, and it’s only picking up speed.

Pulling someone in

Adoption is easier to think about, strangely. That child already exists, already lives in this world whether I like the world or not; all I can do is make the most of it together and prepare them, as well as I can, for what’s coming. A child of our own is a different decision entirely. That one I’d be pulling into existence – into a home with seven of its nine alarms ringing, because I wanted to be a dad.

I had a hunch I wasn’t alone in this, and I’m not. In a UNFPA and YouGov survey across 14 countries, nearly one in five people said fears about the future – climate change, wars, pandemics – would make them, or already made them, have fewer children than they wanted. Among 16- to 25-year-olds in ten countries, a study in The Lancet Planetary Health found 39% hesitant to have children because of climate change alone. One in five, four in ten, depending on who’s counting and how young they are: a whole generation holding the same door handle and not quite pressing it down.

And yes, the same report that started all this insists the window is still open. The ozone layer proves we can fix a planetary problem when we’re scared enough – resistance isn’t futile, not yet. I want to believe that, and some days I even do.

But under all the numbers, the boundaries and budgets and body counts, there’s one fear no report measures.

I worry that my children will judge me for bringing them into this world.