What kind of era are we in

Read Seven Surrenders and let me know if you agree with my choice. Follow Ada Palmer on Twitter , on Facebook , and on her website.

When we teetered on the brink. Interesting that Seven Surrenders will look back to our time. I recently wrote a TLtT timeline , consisting mainly of events that Mycroft describes from There is a big gap between the Enlightenment and the Mukta flight in This is a great article with great questions.

One thing that characterizes our age is the massive social experimentation which is happening almost accidentally as a result of a declining respect for received values and the voices of the past. Emancipated sex, easy divorce, gay marriage and transgenderism are changes to the most basic human institutions — more basic even than the existence of the state.

The intended and unintended consequences of this are almost impossible to foresee, but they will certainly be massive because they are changes to the most basic ways we relate to each other. I cannot imagine that any technological issues will have the impact that these social changes will. Add to that the early nuclear age.

As so many ages referred to the energy technological advancements or perhaps the early solar age. I think this may be the tail end of the Age of Employment. The way things are looking, in fifty years time there may be no need for human labour at all. Said it on Twitter, but I like the Computer Age idea. Most everything else stems from advancements that come from computing. Why not call it the Age of Extinction?

This might matter to people who have to live with the consequences. Search Button. Search for: Close. Written by Ada Palmer One question a science fiction writer faces when world-building a future Earth, alongside questions of future technology and future politics, is the question of future history. So what does your 25th century call our age of history? And why?

November 11, No Comments. Excerpt: Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. While the broader trend of warmer temperatures and receding glaciers holds just as true today as 11, years ago, there are other changes in the geologic record. Around 4, years ago, a devastating drought lasted for at least a hundred years and caused the collapse of civilizations around the world. Effects from the drought were felt around the world. Not only did this drought alter human civilization, it even left an imprint in the rock record.

The drought can be seen in stalagmites in India, where the lower monsoon levels are represented by changes in oxygen isotopes. The global nature of the drought, the permanent record visible in rock layers, and the lasting effects to life on Earth mean that this moment in history is enough to qualify as the beginning of a new age.

The Meghalayan isn't the only new age identified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. They also named the Greenlandian as the first age of the Holocene, ranging from 11, years ago to 8, years ago.

This age ended when the planet abruptly cooled from melting glacial water flowing into the North Atlantic. These new divisions of geologic time will likely bring some order and clarity to an era defined by monumental change, but not all scientists agree that the new ages are the best way to reclassify recent history. We have lots of new definitions that perhaps now contradict the Anthropocene Working Group and go against what most scientists perceive to be the most important change on Earth in the last 10, years.

I asked him what he made of the progress of his idea. Under the glow of a projector in a darkened classroom, two dozen researchers shared their latest findings on topics such as organic isotope geochemistry and peat deposits.

In the front row, Zalasiewicz watched with the air of an adjudicator. Eventually, he chimed in. One of the loudest critics of the Anthropocene is Stanley Finney, who as the secretary-general of the IUGS , the body that ratifies changes to the timescale, is perhaps the most powerful stratigrapher in the world.

Zalasiewicz told me that Finney was an accomplished geologist, but one of a different temperament. To him, it just seemed like a big fuss over the human junk on the surface of the planet. Finney, who is 71 and a professor of geological sciences at California State University, Long Beach, has spent much of his career trying to picture what the planet was like m years ago, during the Ordovician period, when the continents were bunched together in the southern hemisphere and plants first colonised land.

The two scientists knew each other professionally. But for some time the pair had not seen eye to eye. As the writing got underway, things turned sour. Finney began to feel that Zalasiewicz was not treating his suggested revisions seriously.

Just take my name off. Finney only decided to look at the Anthropocene in detail after he began getting comments from people who thought it was now an official part of the geological timescale.

The more he looked, the less he liked the idea. As the Anthropocene working group gained momentum, he grew concerned that the ICS was being pressured into issuing a statement that at its heart had little to do with advancing stratigraphy, and more to do with politics. It is pragmatic, a way to name the problem — and thus begin the process of solving it.

Yet if a term becomes too broad, its meaning can become unhelpfully vague. A seasoned geologist, Ruddiman has written papers arguing against the stratigraphic definition of the Anthropocene on the grounds that any single start-date would be meaningless since humans have been gradually shaping the planet for at least 50, years. Yet for the majority of the working group, the stratigraphic evidence for the Anthropocene is compelling. T he day after the Mainz conference came to a close, a small number of working group members met at the central station and took a train to Frankfurt airport.

As the train left the city it crossed the Rhine, a wide river the colour of tepid tea. Buildings became sparse, giving way to flat fields crossed by pylons and wires. For all the years of discussion, research and debate, after the meeting it was obvious that the Anthropocene working group was still a long way off submitting its proposal to the ICS.

Proposals to amend the timescale require evidence in the form of cores of sediment that have been extracted from the ground. Within the core there must be a clear sign of major environmental change marked by a chemical or biological trace in the strata, which acts as the physical evidence of where one unit stops and another begins. The core extraction and analysis process takes years and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds — money that, at that point, and despite grant applications, the group did not have.

They discussed the problem on the train. But in the months that followed the meeting, their fortunes changed. The money would finally allow the group to begin the core-extraction work, moving the proposal beyond theoretical discussion and into a more hands-on, evidence-gathering stage.

Then, in late April, the group decided to hold a vote that would settle, once and for all, the matter of the start-date. The results, announced on 21 May, were unequivocal. For Zalasiewicz, it was a step forward. The important votes at the ICS were still to come, but he felt optimistic. In Mainz, after the train pulled into the airport, the group made for the departure zone. One was the shape of a horseshoe, and another looked like a wishbone.

Zalasiewicz identified them as rudists, a type of mollusc that had thrived during the Cretaceous, the last period of the dinosaurs. Rudists were a hardy species, the main reef-builders of their time. One rudist reef ran the length of the North American coast from Mexico to Canada.

Staring at the rudists encased in limestone slabs that had been dug out of the ground and transported many miles across land, it was strange to think of the unlikeliness of their arrival in the airport floor.

The rudists beneath our feet had died out 66m years ago, in the same mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists generally believe that the impact of an asteroid in Yucatan, Mexico, plunged the planet into a new phase of climatic instability in which many species perished. Geologists can see the moment of the impact in rocks as a thin layer of iridium, a metal that occurs in very low concentrations on Earth and was likely expelled by the asteroid and dispersed across the world in a cloud of pulverised rock that blotted out the sun.

Now that the working group has decided roughly when the Anthropocene began, their main task is picking the golden spike of our time. They are keeping their options open , assessing candidates from microplastics and heavy metals to fly ash. Even so, a favourite has emerged. Plotted on a graph, the radioactive fallout leaps up like an explosion.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at gdnlongread , and sign up to the long read weekly email here. The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?