swampman posted:Even the concept of the "anthropocene" as a geologic era is hopelessly euphemistic, because what is happening is an instantaneous disaster on the geologic timescale, not a period of steady change. Its name invites comparison to things like the Oxygen Catastrophe which is similar in scale and importance but happened over a period of several hundred million years. To understand the forces being unleashed you have to understand how they were created in the first place. Most coal for example was laid down over a period of seven hundred million years, via the gradual mass extinction of a lignin-based global forest. That's 20% of the total time that life has existed on earth. Since nothing during the Carboniferous could digest lignin, which takes thousands of years to decay on its own, dead forests piled up for eons, continually buried and compressed.
We've been using coal power on a large scale since the late 1800s, and we have something like 400 years of coal left to burn at today's rate. So, we're unleashing the carbon in coal about a million times faster than it was stored. Which makes me feel like any form of social order that isn't rooted in thermodynamics is useless.
i thought i remembered that there is a geologically identifiable very thin strata line of the widespread use of coal, at least in industrialized areas, but i can't find any reference to it so maybe it was bullshit i saw on tv as a child or something.
In "On the history of humans as geomorphic agents" (2000, Hooke) which is widely cited and seems to be a Big Deal, and he claims the sum total of earth-moving by all human activity in the past 5000 years would amount to 100km of mountains, but ~95% (i'm eyeballing) of Hooke's estimated anthropogenic geological effect is attributed to agriculture, but even that paper admits that is just moving some sediments around. it seems unlikely that it would amount to anything more than a tiny hairline microscopic difference on the geological scale. the other 5%, actual mineral extraction, is the over past 2000 years but mostly industrial era - and what's a 5km mountain range spread over the land surface of the earth.
so yeah. humanity is a geological blip / geological time is an unreal incomprehensibility. we have nothing to do with each other and it will never matter.
e: checked this and while it's true, it's not really as big as i thought. you can also detect roman silver mines and shit if you look finely enough. the really big worldwide changes in lead/cadmium/arsenic/thallium are seen in greenland and antarctica past 1889 cuz of coal
Edited by Bablu ()
littlegreenpills posted:if dinosaurs or whatever had developed a technological civilization in the distant past wd we be able to tell
the answer is we might not, and i.s. shklovskii & carl sagan reference some math suggesting that any planet bearing a civilization now has a decent chance of having already developed one at some time in the past. of course theres no evidence of it but we have a sample size of one right now. shit is incredibly goony and the ussr cared a lot about it because they saw themselves as trippy econonauts of the material universe, and they were correct
cars posted:i find it weird how easily david harvey dismisses catastrophic risk, i thought that was a discarded element of a lost era of marxism, it's not worth a bunch of discovery channel crap and boondoggle spending but we know now that we can be splattered by the material world and, if we wait around long enough without doing our jobs, we will be eventually, which is imo a good argument for communism & other sorts of decency
Sounds like a reason for hedonism.
swirlsofhistory posted:.custom287390{color:#000000 !important; background-color:#F8FFBD !important; }cars posted:i find it weird how easily david harvey dismisses catastrophic risk, i thought that was a discarded element of a lost era of marxism, it's not worth a bunch of discovery channel crap and boondoggle spending but we know now that we can be splattered by the material world and, if we wait around long enough without doing our jobs, we will be eventually, which is imo a good argument for communism & other sorts of decency
Sounds like a reason for hedonism.
capitalism should just get all the fat cats, corrupt bureaucats, arms dealers to come together for one last big orgy of consumption and destruction
cars posted:in between this post and my last post is a no read zone like whoa
inclusive
NoFreeWill posted:clearly me and lykourgos will be the great lords in the castle, while people like you will be yoked in the fields farming and reproducing peasant wenches we can claim for primae noctis. and i'm doing everything i can to bring it about (eg training with a sword on weekends, driving a hummer, etc.)
Strong analysis, much support. I am currently in the Chinese countryside preparing for our ascendance to royalty.
What communists actually believe
Bablu posted:i know i've read that you can detect when large scale mining of the potosi silver mine began in the 16th c. from looking at the heavy metal content of ice cores from greenland
e: checked this and while it's true, it's not really as big as i thought. you can also detect roman silver mines and shit if you look finely enough. the really big worldwide changes in lead/cadmium/arsenic/thallium are seen in greenland and antarctica past 1889 cuz of coal
dats cool can you post the graph or source