this article from the 12 Jul 23 *Economist* is almost as poetic, especially the last line.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/13/what-matters-about-the-anthropocene-is-not-when-it-began-but-how-it-might-end Leaders <https://www.economist.com/leaders/> | Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Worry not about when the Anthropocene began, but how it might end It is all too easy to imagine an era that is nasty, brutish and short [snip] It is by their beginnings that the ages of the Earth are known. [snip] In 2009 the Anthropocene working group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy was charged with deciding whether the Earth’s transformation at human hands was significant enough to declare the beginning of a new epoch. In 2016 the working group answered “Yes”, and said that it began in the mid-20th century. On July 11th this year it announced that it had chosen the bit of rock that should be taken as marking this beginning. It is a layer of sediment <https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/12/a-canadian-lake-could-mark-the-start-of-humanitys-geological-epoch> laid down in Crawford Lake, near Toronto, in 1950, shortly after the start of the nuclear age. [snip] Alas, it is easy—perhaps too easy—to imagine instead an Anthropocene which is nasty, brutish and short. The nuclear weapons whose testing produced the telltale layers of fallout in Crawford Lake still abound. At some point a geopolitical rupture will see them used, possibly one exacerbated by the environmental catastrophes caused by Anthropocene excess. [snip] Think again about the Cretaceous. What captures the imagination is how it ended: in fire, tsunami and a deep, wintry darkness brought about by the impact of a massive asteroid. Its gravestone is a worldwide layer of extraterrestrially tainted clay and ash sitting like a rocky shroud over the bones of the last dinosaurs. The less the Anthropocene looks like that, the better. ■ *** K3, president, stellarcorp.tv On Wednesday, July 26, 2023 at 5:08:22 AM UTC-4 p.j.irvine wrote: > *New Substack post > <https://peteirvine.substack.com/p/it-started-with-a-flash-brighter> - It > started with a flash brighter than a thousand suns...* > > The Anthropocene started with a flash brighter than a thousand suns, but > will it come to be defined by a sun one thousandth as bright? > > "When historians, centuries in the future, reflect on how the Anthropocene > shaped up, they may not see the atomic bomb as the defining technology of > the age. They may think of SAI instead: A deliberate, global, technological > intervention to manage the consequences of our yet-to-be-constrained > impacts on the environment" > > Cheers, > > Pete > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/geoengineering/6ce0ab98-cd04-4169-9837-e9fab36f3ac2n%40googlegroups.com.
