Joenonymous in the Anthropocene Age

Rambling Through Time

Excerpt:

The world is old beyond comprehension, and our story on it is short. The conceit of the Anthropocene, the supposed new epoch we’re living in, is that humanity can already make claims to its geological legacy. But if we’re to endure as a civilization, or even as a species, for anything more than what might amount to a thin layer of odd rock in some windswept canyon of the far future, some humility is in order about our, thus far, infinitesimal part in the history of the planet.

Astronomy gets much of the credit for decentralizing the role of humans in the story of the cosmos, but just as Edwin Hubble placed our island universe in deep space, the geologist James Hutton placed us in deep time, gawking in awe in 1788 at the chasms of history that confronted him in the rocks at Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland. mammoths and giant ground sloths. We walk past Broadway to Riverside Park, eventually hitting the Hudson River.

We’ve already put more than a thousand centuries behind us, but we’ve got a long way to go. So we march up the West Side Highway and cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. Despite our sore feet, and having covered untold millenniums over several miles, we’re stupefied to learn that we’ve scarcely gone back a million years — an all but insignificant amount to geologists. In fact, we haven’t even emerged from the pulsating ice age that has waxed and waned for the past 2.6 million years.

The scale of the task dimly dawning on us, we push on, trudging along the rumble strip of Interstate 80 in New Jersey, battered by gusts of passing tractor-trailers. After walking for more than 24 hours we make it clear across the state, stumbling into Pennsylvania. Morale now collapsing, we’re further gutted to learn that walking as the crow flies 300 miles across the Keystone State won’t even bring us back to the age of dinosaurs.

Comment: Image Source. I am basically a young earth creationist (I believe in the revelation of Adam and Eve). But I found the article interesting because I had never heard of the concept of the Anthropocene Age. Related is the Great Acceleration/ "Joenonymous" is a contraction of "Joe" (as in "average Joe" and "anonymous"

OPINION EXCHANGE | A walk through Deep Time on the Stone Arch Bridge https://t.co/KGwPQyMpKe

— James Peet (@jrpeet) May 19, 2019