One is the sheer scale and speed of the phenomena associated with the Anthropocene: the geological Anthropocene, that is—essentially the original concept of Paul Crutzen—the one that represents overwhelming change to the Earth System, rather than the interpretation referring to all significant human impacts on our planet, ranging back 50 millennia or more.1 The former is just some seventy years lo. [...] In 2000, the “anthropogenic” mass on Earth—all the things that we build that are in functional use—was equivalent to about half the mass of the biosphere, of all living things on Earth. [...] The critical threshold may well have something to the with the technosphere, the brainchild of Peter Haff, which is not just the sum of all technological constructions on Earth, but their intertwinement with the humans and human systems—board rooms, political parties, trade unions—that notionally “built” them.2 The technosphere in this sense operates at different levels than individual artefacts a. [...] Are we, thus, on a descent to nothing? Well, one of the great gifts of the Big History perspective is that it shows that what is now happening has no real analogue in the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet or (so far as we are aware) in the 13-billion- year history of the cosmos. [...] He is the author of such books as The Earth After Us, The Planet in a Pebble, and (with Mark Williams) The Goldilocks Planet, Ocean Worlds, Skeletons, and The Cosmic Oasis.
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- Published in
- United States of America
