Letters to the Editor
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We'll Adapt...
But there aren't going to be the nine billion of us the U.N. keeps telling us we should be planning for. There won't even be the six and a half billion we have now - not even close. If that sounds flippant, it's not.
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The Age of the Anthropocene Is Likely to be Short
On Sunday evening, the History Channel broadcast a show originally produced in Australia, called "Crude." This program should be seen now by every living person. It really brought home the significance of the rising levels of CO(2) in the atmosphere and the longer term significance of the melting of the polar ice caps.
CO(2) levels in the atmosphere are rising at a rate not seen in the history of the planet! Like many chemical and physical phenomena, the relationship between concentration and impact is not linear--it/they are best described by catastrophe theory. Thus, we will see some tipping points--of no return--in CO(2) levels that will inevitably lead to an anoxic, "dead" ocean and the destruction of most all life on the planet. Once the poles melt, there will be no cold water, no oxigenation of the oceans. These tipping points occur fast, in years, not decades or centuries.
We will run out of time before we run out of fuel.
We created this catastrophe by burning a significant portion of liquid sunshine of the Jurassic period, concentrated over hundreds of thousands of years, in under 300 years, and the planet may end up back in a new Jurassic period.
This issue overrides every other problem. We've got the intelligence to solve it but we've got to get out of our collective brain, an assumption and perceived right of cheap energy.
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Stratigraphic Jokes are Tough...
...But I will try one:
My friend Ben is an archaeologist. He specializes in pot shards, and he digs in Jordan. So... (get ready to bust a gut!)
When he finds a Coke bottle at his archaeological dig, he calls it a Late Hashemite relic! (HA-ha-ha-ha!...)
[Hashemite. That's the family of King Hussein and the CURRENT King of Jordan.]
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How do you pronounce that, anyway?
AN-throw-PO-cene? That sounds kinda southern.
an-THROP-o-cene? Seems snooty.
If it's gonna kill me...
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And after the Anthropocene... The Datapocene?
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".
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a new epoch predicted
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.
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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.
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something-pocene
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.
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How to say it
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.
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I'm thinking
Plasticene....
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@dogu44
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!"