The anxiously anticipated decision from the International Commission on Stratigraphy is finally in. We are not there yet. The Anthropocene epoch is not yet upon us. It was supposed to be adopted as a new epoch marked by the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945, although some set its birthday at the explosion of the hydrogen bomb in 1952. The Anthropocene epoch would set us apart from the Holocene epoch that came at the end of the ice age and the wake of the first Agricultural Revolution some 11,000 years ago.
This whole controversy around the validity of the Anthropocene epoch made me curious; so I set out to educate myself about our geological timeline. First, some definitions. Anthropocene means a new (Greek kainos) epoch in Earth’s history impacted by humans (Gr. anthropos). The preceding epoch Holocene means a whole (holos) new epoch marked by the first serious impact of humans on nature through agriculture and the domestication of animals.
Right now, we are in the Meghalayan age (marked by an extended drought 4200 years ago) within the Holocene epoch, of the Quaternary period (beginning 2 mya*), of the Cenozoic era (beginning 65 mya – with the end of dinosaurs), of the Phanerozoic eon (beginning 540 mya – with the appearance of complex animals and plants) on planet Earth born about 4.6 billion years ago.
No matter how interesting the geological line is, I find the lineage of humans even more so. Our genus Homo starts with our ancestor H. Habilis about 2.8 mya. It is followed by H. Erectus 1.7 mya, H. Heidelbergensis 0.7 mya, H. Sapiens 0.3 mya, and here we are as the Modern Homo Sapiens since 50 thou. ya. Since the human line split from the other primates, a good many other human-like species came and went, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans whose DNA we still carry in a tiny amount. But homo sapiens is the one human species that managed to survive all adversity to this time. No wonder we are full of ourselves.
Now this succession and extinction of human species along the way reminds me of the myth about the creation of humans in Hesiod’s (9th century BCE) Theogony (Creation of Gods). First, the Gods created the Golden race (the best of all), followed by the Silver, the Heroic, the Copper, and finally the Iron race. Just like the offspring of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, the Iron race is destined to live with worries and suffering. I find it interesting that in both, the Greek mythology and the Hebrew bible, the better days of humans are in their earlier not the later stages.
That’s not how we modern humans think. No matter what cards we are dealt, we believe our present world is the best humanity ever had and even better days await us in the future. I suppose this confidence comes from our triumphs in science and technology. But not everybody agrees with this assessment. For example, the transition to agriculture has been held responsible for eliminating the egalitarian life of hunter/gatherers, and for ushering in class hierarchies, administrative bureaucracies, and the regimentation of work.
So, is it possible that our own human intelligence takes us down to a path toward a post-human species? As a matter of fact, brilliant minds have been actively speculating about this possibility. On one side, we have the anti-humanism futurists who believe that we will degrade the environment to the point it can no longer sustain us and we will go the way of the Copper race. Then, once we are gone, the Earth will no longer suffer in our hands.
On the other side, we have the Transhumanists who believe that by harnessing the power of AI humans will find ways to solve their environmental problems by becoming all mind and data and no physical matter. By uploading our minds on platforms our environmental impact will come to an arrest and we ‘ll live peaceful and prosperous lives like the Golden race or Adam and Eve before their fall from grace. Sadly, neither school of speculation envisions a human future where a physical body and an ethereal mind interact to produce the human experience of our present state.
So, I asked myself what name we could give the next species if the Transhumanism prediction came to pass. I came up with the name Homo Artificialensis, before a Google search revealed the next human (?) species had been already named Homo Artificialis.
It is really worth asking what species contemplates its own extinction or its transformation into an artificial entity as the only solution to preserve what is left of nature. Both views reveal our anxiety about our impact on nature and our resignation that we cannot stop moving “from living with what nature give us to living with what we want to have from nature” in the words of a thinker.
The more, however, we want to bend nature so that it gives us what we want, the more we set ourselves outside nature. But this is not a way of living or thinking shared by all humankind. Most of humanity has lived and continues to live within limits set by nature and thus it bears very little responsibility for the environmental damage we experience. That’s what the climate researcher Stephen Lezak correctly points out (NYT 3/26/24). And he adds that as noted in a statement published in Natural Ecology and Evolution by a group of scientists “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”
That’s an important point to heed. It implies we have choices as to how we wish to live as humans and we are not locked into a path entirely determined from outside ourselves. Which brings us to the reason for naming our epoch as Anthropocene, that is, the explosion of the atomic bomb. Did it come up by happenstance? What if the terms put on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles were not so onerous as to breed humiliation and misery? What if economic policy makers had listened to voices like that of John Maynard Keynes as to how to address the threats of inflation and unemployment? What if in the absence of these adverse consequences of peace, there was no World War II, and there was no race to develop nuclear weapons?
Resorting to historical “ifs” may sound naive. But historical retrospection can also inspire cautious reflection as we choose our steps into the future. That is after all the value of history.
*mya means million years ago.
Let's Reason 