The Arrogance of the Anthropocene

It's a little backwards. The top level article is the original. The grandparent linked article is the author's response from last week indicating responses to the top level article made him re-think and feel he was wrong.

The holocene always struck me as odd. Here we have the final geologic epoch, and it's 10,000 years old, and every other geologic epoch is ~50M years long. And it just happens to coincide with the rise of our species, who just happens to be the one creating the taxonomy.

Paleohistory is pretty fascinating, and it's easy to forget just how small we are on this big earth and how much things differ from today. For example:

We're technically in an icehouse age. An icehouse age is defined as "any period of time where glaciers exist anywhere on the planet". For about 80% of geologic time, there is no such thing as a glacier, or of snow and ice for that matter. The entire earth's surface is above freezing, even the North and South poles. What we know of as an "ice age" (a glaciation) is a feature only of icehouse states. We currently happen to be in an interglacial of an icehouse age, which is why we think of this as being a warm period. But geologically, the earth is well below its temperature average.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth

It's likely that the earth has completely frozen over on at least two occasions, with the entire planet being encased in a gigantic ice sheet like Europa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth

The larger of these two incidents may have been triggered by the evolution of photosynthesis and the addition of oxygen into the earth's atmosphere, which also likely caused a major mass extinction among the dominant anaerobic bacteria of the time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Sea level over time has fluctuated by 300-400 meters. That means that anything at an altitude of less than about 1000 feet (which is the vast majority of human settlements) was once underwater. (Well, technically land level fluctuates more than sea level, so most of these low-lying areas are actually sediment weathered off of nearby mountains.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level

There've been some massive outburst floods in the past, like the draining of Glacial Lake Missoula (a pleistocene lake roughly half the volume of Lake Michigan, held in by an ice dam on the Clark River nearly 2000 feet tall) which released an outflow 13 times the size of the Amazon River:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_Floods

"What if they used different minerals because before they mined them out, different minerals were present?"

I'd point out I didn't say that all the minerals were gone, but that the good veins were gone, surrounded by the stuff they left behind. I say that because that's how we do it now, and we do it for economic reasons that any civilization will be subject to. This is a particular pattern that I'm not aware of anyone ever observing.

I am also not aware of anyone even proposing anomalies in element distribution of things like rare earths. Rare earths aren't as rare as their name suggests as I'm sure you know, but as you go up the periodic table, you do naturally get less of them in the crust for several reasons (less created in the supernovas that created the heavy elements, and more of it sinking in the earth during the early phase). It's possible that our understanding of elemental distribution is a "just so" story created by what turns out to be artificial manipulation of the contents in the past, but given that our understanding of the processes that led to the current distribution includes a lot of astronomical observations, it'd be one heck of a "just so" story at this point. I am not aware of even a hint of an observation that requires an intelligent civilization on Earth in the past.

I'd say if you really want to have some fun, hypothesize a dinosaur civilization that attained some sort of singularity, and on the way out chose to leave behind machines that restored Earth to its "natural" state over the course of a few centuries or something, thus wiping out all traces of their presence to make way for the next civilization. It's not impossible to imagine a human singularity ending that way. Come up with some semi-compelling reason why all or at least most civilizations would tend to do that and you've got a fun premise for a sci-fi story universe. Perhaps we're not merely the second, but the dozenth. Heck, maybe we're not even the first primate.

(Another bonus "thing we clearly don't see": At the current rate of human advancement, in another couple hundred to couple thousand years, even putting aside really high-end nanotech, our primary contribution to the history of planet Earth may not be the sudden extinction of a lot of life forms, but the sudden proliferation of a lot of life forms, along with visible cross-transfer of genetic characteristics that couldn't possibly have naturally occurred. Even if the intelligent civilization completely keeled over dead, or Transcended, or whatever, the mark on the planet's genetic history would be visible quite possibly right up to the point the Sun sterilizes the Earth. We aren't there yet, but we are darned close. As much fun as a lot of people seem to derive from wringing their hands and posturing about how terrible humanity is, on a geological time scale, we may not be living in an Athropocene Extinction, but instead in the gestational phase of the Anthropocene Explosion.)

I thought that was actually the point of the article. The author freely admits that from a human perspective, climate change and habitat destruction and the bleaching of coral reefs are a big deal. The point he's making is that from a planetary perspective, humans are insignificant. Indeed, from a planetary perspective multi-cellular life is insignificant, and life at all is a minority.

The thing is that much of the debate over global warming has been framed in planetary terms. If you frame it in human terms, you already have a good argument: climate change will cause mass migrations, historically mass migrations have caused massive wars and the collapse of civilizations, I don't want to die in a war while my whole civilization collapses, ergo it's probably a good idea to solve or at least adapt to this climate change thing before shit hits the fan. But if you frame it in terms of "climate change will make the earth uninhabitable" or even "climate change will lead to the extinction of humanity", a.) you're probably wrong - our species is remarkably resilient, and we have lived through large planetary-scale shifts in the earth's climate b.) the earth has been made uninhabitable to much of life in the past, and yet we're here and c.) so what, we'll all be dead.

Outside of a blip in CO2 emissions and soil nitrogen, and a dramatic decrease in biodiversity, we will leave almost no trace if we disappeared tonight.

https://youtu.be/8xDK2LgSeyk