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- Jun 12, 2018
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"Those objecting noted a much longer history of human impacts on Earth, including the dawn of agriculture and the industrial revolution, and unease about including a new unit in the geological timescale with a span of less than less than a single human lifetime, it said."
Scientists don't like the idea of a single generation responsible for everything happening. That would be because implementation of scientific advances, not discoveries, over a single lifetime have brought us to where we are today. They probably feel that people might blame them.
All the stuff that has gone down over the past 10,000 years or more was done by considerably smaller populations. Going back in time, if people happened to ruin a place, which meant they ran out of easily available resources, they moved to another location and the land rebounded back to it's original characteristics. That could take some time, but it came back. That's no longer possible.
In the current world, once a piece of property has been developed for human use, it never goes back to what it was, it just keeps being used by people for purposes other than what it did naturally. Everything in nature serves a useful, functional purpose. File enough cogs off the gears and the ride goes off the tracks.
Eight billion people doing the same thing is going to leave a big hole compared to what a couple of hundred million were doing when an entire continent could have fallen off the face of the Earth and most of the world would never have heard about it.
I still think plastic is a good marker. Throw in all other products and by products from the oil and gas industries and there will be a layer rich in hydrocarbons that was created by redistributing the oil and gas that was sequestered underground in contained deposits over the entire surface. How long that unique layer will last is a good question, it might just turn into plain old carbon.
We could make a sociological marker that extends over 5 million years. It would have plenty of periods in it that would be marked by the simple number of the human population at the time.
Scientists don't like the idea of a single generation responsible for everything happening. That would be because implementation of scientific advances, not discoveries, over a single lifetime have brought us to where we are today. They probably feel that people might blame them.
All the stuff that has gone down over the past 10,000 years or more was done by considerably smaller populations. Going back in time, if people happened to ruin a place, which meant they ran out of easily available resources, they moved to another location and the land rebounded back to it's original characteristics. That could take some time, but it came back. That's no longer possible.
In the current world, once a piece of property has been developed for human use, it never goes back to what it was, it just keeps being used by people for purposes other than what it did naturally. Everything in nature serves a useful, functional purpose. File enough cogs off the gears and the ride goes off the tracks.
Eight billion people doing the same thing is going to leave a big hole compared to what a couple of hundred million were doing when an entire continent could have fallen off the face of the Earth and most of the world would never have heard about it.
I still think plastic is a good marker. Throw in all other products and by products from the oil and gas industries and there will be a layer rich in hydrocarbons that was created by redistributing the oil and gas that was sequestered underground in contained deposits over the entire surface. How long that unique layer will last is a good question, it might just turn into plain old carbon.
We could make a sociological marker that extends over 5 million years. It would have plenty of periods in it that would be marked by the simple number of the human population at the time.
