"Officially, we live in the Holocene epoch. Yet it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Home Sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology."
-Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2017), Chapter 2, p. 84.
So does the Anthropocene date from 70,000 years ago or from 1945 (see image)? Nothing more clearly indicates a period of change than a disagreement even about the length of the period.
3 comments:
See also dating the anthropocene to the beginnings of agriculture, about 8000 years ago.
The claim is that cutting down forests for farms released CO2 and rice paddy agriculture released methane, thus preventing the slow cooling of the earth into the next glacial period. Burning fossil fuels is now way overcompensating for the natural cooling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_anthropocene
Kaor, Jim!
And I am impatient for the beginning of the next stage of that Anthropocene by seeing mankind getting off this rock into space!
On to the Moon!
On to Mars!
On to the asteroid belt! See Anderson's TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS.
On to the Oort Cloud!
On to the stars!!!
Ad astra! Sean
And save the Terrestrial environment for the many who will still live here.
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