The anthropocene started with a flash brighter than a thousand suns, but will it be defined by a sun one thousandth as bright?

[p.j.irvine]

New Substack post - 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

[Gregory Slater]

Interesting point.  Thanks.  I might slightly change that to something like, "the point in history at which humans took deliberate control of nature at the planetary scale."  In that view, the arc of humanity is characterized by the control of nature on successively larger scales.  Of course, for many, this is exactly what they hate most about humans....

[Robert “SputnikWranglerVtoroi” Kennedy]

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 | 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 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. ■

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K3, president, stellarcorp.tv