Letters to the Editor
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A little premature, don't you think?
One good smack from a fateful asteroid, even one that is orders of magnitude smaller than the dinosaur killer of 65 MYA, or a full sized super-volcano typical of the ones that occur every few thousand years throughout our geological history , or a pole reversal, or nearby gamma ray burst, and the idea of anthropocene will do down into the dictionaries, if any survive, as a derisive term reflecting man's proclivity for blowing things all out of proportion. As it stands, I wouldn't be too sure we're actually done with the pleistocene, since in fact the holocene, or own very special window of time, looks to be as much like an abberation to the normal earth history as much as it signals anything really serious as far as the earth's natural systems are concerned. Of course our human history might come to an end but the point is that it's arrogance squared to think we're going to change much with our puny efforts and messy carelessness.