Greet Anthropocene
Most successful animal
Ends competition
Kate Rauner
Like the Age of Fishes, the Age of Reptiles, the Age of Mammals… we’re in the Age of Humans.
“Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000–15,000 years ago, to as recent as the Trinity test in 1945. As of February 2018, the ratification process continues and thus a date remains to be decided definitively, but the latter date has been more favoured than others.” Wikipedia
Personally, I like the idea of using the start of the nuclear age as the beginning of the Anthropocene. If we’re declaring the start of a new geological age, there should be a clear line in the strata showing where it began. And supposedly there is already a clear, detectable line in the strata caused by nuclear fallout from the 1940’s.
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A layer of nuclear fallout is appealing. I looked into this once before. https://katerauner.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/anthropocene-the-human-epoch/ has the logic for dating the start of the Anthropocene at 1610 AD. Briefly:
Arrival of Europeans in the Americas had an unprecedented impact on the planet. 50 million people in the Americas died, and most of those people were farmers… farmland grew back to the original vegetation… which removed enough carbon from the atmosphere to see a pronounced dip in the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration that can be seen in ice core records. The lowest CO2 level is the precise marker. What do you think of that?
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Truly overwhelming. Add in this, the concept ” we should no better” and you have every right to claim, that humans are not the intelligent species they purport themselves to be. Of course there are some talented people and even some truly good and decent people yet the evidence supports the fact, humans are not intelligent. Consider that our intelligence is measured by our own ability to make the measurement. This is manifested in the circle of ignorance that is brought forth in the expression ‘History repeats Itself”. So maybe the Anthropocene should marked by traces of vaporized humans in the strata.
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I can see the logic of that too. I just feel like the nuclear fallout thing would be such a distinct marker in the geological record. I imagine that if someone in the very distant future were studying Earth’s strata, that would be the most obvious evidence of our activities.
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It is unique
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All creatures will have some effect on their environment. Somewhere along our journey humanity took a wrong turn, indicated in many ways however none more obvious than our effect on the climate., I think this wrong turn is an important thing to acknowledge. In doing so there is something very interesting revealed, and there is beauty in it also. Having the possibility of a wrong turn clearly indicates a right turn as a possibility. Here is the beauty if we did not have this choice then we would simply be mechanical yes machines. This can be taken as a very strong indicator, that humankind has a significant role in the unfolding of the universe but only if humans are true to their own nature. Yes there are strong implications in this it seems that there is an unfolding in motion.
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