
The Anthropocene Is a Joke - haunter
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/
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mncharity
> The idea that we’re in a new epoch is a profoundly optimistic one, for it
> implies that we’ll persist into the future as an industrial technological
> civilization on something like a geological timescale [...] perhaps we
> should more humbly refer to this provisional moment of Earth history that
> we’re living through as we do the many other disruptive spasms in Earth
> history. Though dreadfully less catchy, perhaps we could call it the “Mid-
> Pleistocene Thermal Maximum.” After all, though the mammoths are gone, their
> Ice Age is only on hold, delayed as it is for a few tens of thousands of
> years by the coming greenhouse fever. Or perhaps we’re living through the
> “Pleistocene Carbon Isotope Excursion,” as we call many of the mysterious
> global paroxysms from the earliest era of animal life, the Paleozoic. Or
> maybe we’re even at the dawning of the “Quaternary Anoxic Event” or, God
> forbid, the “End-Pleistocene Mass Extinction” if shit really hits the fan in
> the next few centuries. But please, not the Anthropocene.

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pvaldes
> Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years,
> this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago

There had to be "a first month of Cretaceous Period" sometimes.

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MR4D
Agreed.

The next epoch will begin the moment the first AI become sentient.

