Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

by Vaclav Smil

Besides, why rush to elevate ourselves into the creators of a new geological era instead of waiting a bit to see how long the experiment conducted by Homo sapiens can last? Each of the six elapsed epochs of the Cenozoic era—from the beginning of the Paleocene 66 million years ago to the beginning of the Holocene 11,700 years ago—lasted at least 2.5 million years, including the previous two (the Pliocene and the Pleistocene), and we are now less than 12,000 years into the Holocene. If there is in fact an Anthropocene, it may date no further back than 8,000 years (counting since the beginning of settled agriculture) or 150 years (counting from the takeoff of fossil fuel combustion). Should we manage to be around for another 10,000 years—a trivial spell for science fiction readers; an eternity for modern, high-energy civilization—we should congratulate ourselves by naming the era shaped by our actions. But in the meantime, let us wait before we determine that our mark on the planet is anything more than a modest microlayer in the geologic record.