Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, but the fossil record shows signs of simple life starting only about 3.8 billion years ago, and complex life forms only about 600 million years ago. Over the millennia, life forms have changed and evolved, depending on the epoch. For the last 11,500 years or so, geologists tell us, we have been in the Holocene epoch, which followed the Pleistocene epoch, also known as “the Great Ice Age.” Why should we care? Because we will miss the Holocene if it goes, and it appears to be going. For most of the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, its climate was not very hospitable to human beings, as it oscillated between “punishing ice ages and lush warm periods” that “locked humanity into seminomadic lifestyles,” explained Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, one of the world’s leading Earth scientists, and one of my teachers on all things climate. It’s only been in the last eleven thousand years that we have enjoyed the calm, stable climate conditions that allowed our ancestors to emerge from their Paleolithic caves and create seasonal agriculture, domesticate animals, erect cities and towns, and eventually launch the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the information technology revolution.