(LoL!!) Rob Seaman... Yes, yes, yes. Too fantastic, but oh, so true. Shall we call this self-induced sympatric speciation? Wreck the environment so we can entertain ourselves through physical transformation.

Ah, Neroism is in the air!

...for better or worse.

The idea that our various technologies have removed us from the "natural" flow of evolution is a hoot. Rather, our technologies represent the grandpappy of all extended phenotypes in Dawkins' terminology. Our food and shelter and clothing and technology bind us vastly more closely to evolutionary pressures than our peripatetic ancestors chasing down megafauna with atlatls.

Prior geologic boundaries are marked by biologically significant events. There is nothing remarkable about the habits of today's dominant lifeform similarly marking its temporal territory.

We're in for one heckuva punctuation point in evolution - whether or not it is followed by another tame equilibrium. (Actually "tame" is a far more aggressive term than anything emerging from the sans-human circle of life.)

But calcareaus, dear, it will be something like our current integrated circuitry - which of course is embedded in rock thanks to Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby - just taken to the nth power. Just like pre-angiospermic plant life and a bunch of dead dinos provide us with our energy ("societal food?"), we may be doing much the same for the macro-organism under development. Who know?

And to the other commenter who brought up the subject of an asteroid smacking us: (heh,heh,heh) when my friends start moaning 'n groaning about global warming, I tell 'em: well it's better than an asteroid hitting us. At least we have a little time to do something about it, or at least mitigate the "damage", no? Hey, things are bad, but they can always be worse. And THAT is the last rule of thermodynamics, as far as I'm concerned.

You're talking about completely different scales. The dinosaur-killer asteroid didn't end an epoch; it ended an era (the Mesozoic). The classification, from largest to smallest, is eon, era, period, epoch, and stage. I don't think anyone claims that humans are causing enough change to end the current era (the Cenozoic) but the idea that we're causing enough change to end an epoch is entirely reasonable. It's kind of like saying, "The biggest employer in my hometown just laid off a thousand people, but that doesn't mean anything because the Dow Jones is still doing fine!"

Plasticene....

I would say anth-ROW-po-cene.

>If it's gonna kill me...

It probably won't kill you, humans stopped living by the rules of natural selection long ago, when we cheated by clothing our weak bodies, and cooking hard to digest food. Simply put, the purpose of technology is to thwart nature. Taken to the extremes as it has been, our prosperity is now killing off other organisms.

We are not unique in this ability. Ecologist refer to any creature who can substantially change it's environment as an "ecosystem engineer". Another example would be a beaver, whos dams back up fast flowing streams, and flood low lying areas, to the ruin of the prior inhabitants.

Don't get gloomy about mass extinctions - they occur consistantly in the geologic record. The niche that one organism vacates is an opportunity for another one in the future. We wouldn't be here in the first place, had others not fallen before us.

As for the "The Datapocene" - let's not get carried away! The geologic record is defined by changes in the character of sedimentation being deposited. You have to be able to see it in the rock. Further, these changes need to be global to merit a new category in the geologic record.

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.

The Persian prophet Baha'u'llah said way back in the 1860s that mankind and the earth were entering a new phase of time that would last 10,000 years. He said it was time for mankind to finally unite, to eliminate war and prejudice, and to usher in a glorious future the likes of which no one had imagined before. Of course, there would be severe birth pangs preceding this new epoch as mankind went through its last phases of immaturity. He predicted the two world wars, the rise of communism, a world confederation of nations - the U.N., and predicted more calamities to come (global climate change? massive environmental pollution? virulent pandemics? ). However, his vision was ultimately optimistic, as he said that mankind would ultimatley unite and solve it problems. Check out the Baha'i faith. Even if you're not particularly religious, it's still a fascinating historical development.

I don't know if that is exactly the right word, but in my heart of hearts I believe something like this is happening. At my job we were discussing AI, and I laughed "artificial"? The stupid thing is building itself, with the internet - or whatever replaces it - the beginnings of a neurologic construct. Hominids are going to be the dumb corpuscles carting the shit around.

Laurie Anderson said something to the effect: "It rises up out of a boggy swamp on a foggy night; it's life's light!

I say: "Natural is a moot point, unnatural is just somebody's stupid opinion".