Humans began to officially ruin the planet in 1960s with above-ground nuclear bomb tests, and it became obvious that mankind's indelible mark was to be found everywhere on the planet. The Anthropocene age began between October and December of 1965, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Researchers found the marker of this new era in the wood of the so-called loneliest tree on the planet, located on a remote island in the Pacific ocean. The article stated that "for the first time it gave us a well-defined global signature for a new geological epoch that could be preserved in the geological record." Read the whole story at this link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2018/02/19/humanity-officially-started-ruining-the-planet- in-1965-welcome-to-the-anthropocene-era/#5655ba115636
I was looking for an embed function, though embedding doesn't really work here on HF... Anyway. Worldometers has some sad if not sobering little counters on its website. They tell you the statistical state of affairs with regard to many different things. Some of them are: Population, government & economics, society & media, environment... food, water, energy. I found the Health section particularly enlightening. It has a little counter that tells of how many deaths because of smoking occurred this year. The reason I associate worldometers with this forbes article is they're both sort of saying that humans have begun their journey down the path of no return. Worldometers - real time world statistics link to site
the index fossil is a crushed pile of aluminum beer cans. i like the post human, post ecopocalyptic era better, when furry sapiens will have inherited the earth.
Worldometers - real time world statistics Thanks for the info Soulcompromise... this link was very interesting indeed.
Every few million years or so, a planet settled on an orbit where life can be born. We then spend a few hundred thousand years reducing it all to dust. Then when we discover that we cannot live on salt water and sand (even with a few creme pies), we all die. The complete history of the earth in 3 lines.
The beginning of the end was about 12,000 years ago when agriculture was adopted. Everything bad can be traced to that along with human greed. Happening a bit faster nowadays!
Humans continue to ruin our earth as we know it. No foresight and/or care about future generations. Luckily the earth is strong and can handle it, but for how long?
i think it actually began when auldivoi was the garden of eden, and it wasn't an angry god who kicked us out, but ourselves who trashed the place, some 26 thousand years ago, or whenever it was that 'lucy' of auldovoi was alive. the meek who inherit the earth will have pointy ears and floofy tails. but they could also have brains and dexterity equal to ours, and there are several ways this could come about. the earth has a simple solution; our own extinction. its not the mineral substrate we're a treat to, its the self sustaining diversity of life on it, that depends on that diversity, and of course the big mistake we make, one of them, is this idea that we're something separate and apart from it. and yes, bunnies did create a problem in australia, and now they want to blame it on cats. at any rate, our own human species is very much dependent on a relatively narrow range of conditions, which are the very ones our own short shortsightedness are destroying. at any rate we do have choices. we are so wasteful of so many things that bring no happiness nor gratification, that we only do so to support the ideology of kiting little green pieces of paper. the things we actually do enjoy we could have, by doing some things a little differently. its a choice of priorities. big cars, big houses, big money, big extinction, but i really believe we could have, not just some of us, but everything, the kinds of things we each in our personal diversity actually enjoy, without all the trying to impress each other with big careless destruction. not sustainable means one day you wake up and what you take for granted is just gone, as if it never was.
60s no. it started a lot further back then that. there's a lot of different starting points you could name. whenever our influence on each other became greater then that of natural forces like the weather. i think the best "index fossil" for the beginning of disproportionate human dominance, would be human population level, just about the same time as the invention of the automobile, and the level of dependence on mechanical energy that developed around that time. even this was more then double what it had been the last time it was truly sustainable, which was before steam and coal began to transform nearly all aspects of life. another earlier convenient time point, would be the columbian genocide of the caribbean. while that, or even the invention of agriculture, began profound human influence on conditions of environment, for a really clear demarcation of before from after, population level at the beginning of steam, is probably the clearest before and after. certainly more then anything before or since to make as large and unambiguous a change. (and i'm certainly not suggesting everything since needs to be thrown out with the bath water, we just need to replace dirtier technologies with cleaner ones, which can do almost everything, and what they can't, if there even actually is anything they can't, are things that we can quite happily live without. refrigeration, mobility, communication, none of these are dependent on destroying our very means of existence. energy storage is the key to conversion to collecting incident energy instead of conversion of mass, and we have all that, only political will and cultural inertia are preventing us from saving ourselves, from a very real risk of near or even total extinction. we may have passed too many tipping points to prevent all the effects of ecopocalypse, but its not too late to prevent the extinction of species human from being total. we're just not going to do that by continuing to equate economics with the accumulation of symbolic value, or the idea of perpetuating our family name, or transportation with personal motor vehicles. and you know, even that, just ending subsidies to fossil fuel, might be all it takes for clean energy to prevail, as even in a capital environment it has proven not only viable but advantageous) and population doesn't mean anybody had to give up sex, it just means you have to lower human fertility across the board without bias or exception, starting with the largest most dominant demographic, not the smallest and least able to defend itself, so that fewer babies are born total. and closing borders does nothing to reduce that either.
