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The Anthropocene Epoch Began With 1945 Atomic Bomb Test, Scientists Say
hypnosec writes: Scientists have proposed July 16, 1945 as the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch. That was the day of the first nuclear detonation test. They say "the Great Acceleration" — the period when human activities started having a significant impact on Earth – are a good mark of the beginning of the new epoch. Since then, there has been a significant increase in population, environmental upheaval on land and oceans, and global connectivity. The group says in their article (abstract), "The beginning of the nuclear age ... marks the historic turning point when humans first accessed an enormous new energy source – and is also a time level that can be effectively tracked within geological strata, using a variety of geological clues."
does it really matter? no, not to us, not right now. but generations from now it will be nice for the historians to have a name to go with the time frame (not like they wouldnt simply make one up as we have done with all other periods in time to date)
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
All science is either mathematics, or stamp collecting. This would be printing a stamp and adding it to a collection of already printed stamps.
This reminds me of the classic Asimov short story, "The Last Trump"; you should go read it. Here's the Wikipedia link, but it's full of spoilers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Yes, why have words to describe things which have a significant impact on humans? Let's go further than denying the impact of our brains, and deny our brains entirely.
Unf. NN grrr mgrgrlrgl. Snarf? Brrrp. Fapfapfap. Queeeeg! Ook.
We had access to coal and oil for a lot longer than nuclear, and fossil fuels today still represent 10x as much energy generated/used as nuclear. linky
The figures are from 2008 - before fukushima, and nuclear plant construction is going nowhere, while China produces 1 new coal plant every day.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The Anthropocene Epoch ended when the Bad Slashdot Style Epoch began after the following style code was introduced:
#comments { clear:both; display:block; position:relative; padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 122px; padding-right: 1.5em;z-index:1;}
Get rid of the 122px left margin--it's wasting a lot of space.
No, that was the Industrial Revolution: steam trains and burning coal.
Also... from TFAbstract, they chose the date because all of the nuclear explosions have left a clear marker of radioisotopes which can be easily located when tracing the geological record.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
If it's classified as "he period when human activities started having a significant impact on Earth", then wouldn't the industrial revolution mark the start of that?
Or were coal-powered factories all over Europe belching horrible soot and smoke into the atmosphere not good enough?
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"Most operating systems designed to run on 64-bit hardware already use signed 64-bit time_t integers. Using a signed 64-bit value introduces a new wraparound date that is over twenty times greater than the estimated age of the universe: approximately 292 billion years from now, at 15:30:08 on Sunday, 4 December 292,277,026,596"
The first A-bomb produced fear and peace.
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
That is the same day the Gojira was awakened.
No, that was the Industrial Revolution: steam trains and burning coal.
No, it was when humans ventured out of Africa, caused mass extinctions, and began regularly burning millions of square miles of grassland to maintain better grazing for their prey.
The nuclear blasts produce more obvious changes in the geological strata than the coal and other industrial changes do, so it's easier to trace. When looking at geological timeframes, the 200 years or so difference is a blink of an eye. It's not especially useful now while both periods are so recent, but it will become more useful as time goes on.
You almost have a point but that if it's only important for future scientists, let them define it based on better informed notions. I'm positive that the radio or some industrial landmark would make more sense. E.g. first mass pollutions, which do have environmental impact. Medieval deforestation of Europe may be a candidate too.
the detonation of the atomic bomb is a perfectly reasonable way to mark the beginning of a new epoch, because there is a very real and easily identifiable geologic marker for that event (radioactive isotopes & plastic in the topsoil.) if millions of years from now aliens discovered our planet and looked through geological data, and wanted to classify periods based on that data, it's a safe bet that the sudden proliferation of radioactive isotopes and appearance of an entirely new substance (plastic) would be something that they noticed.
as for the necessity of defining a new epoch - would you deny that humans have profoundly changed the planet? no value judgements being made here, just straight facts, the planet is WAY FUCKING DIFFERENT than it was 1000 years ago due to human population explosions and human construction. also, lots of newly-extinct species.
but, i at least agree with you about nuclear power being the solution to a lot of our problems, if we would stop being such pussies about it. that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, though.
And did the turns speed up ?
NO, it was when Porn because freely available on the Internet.
Fuck'n Amateurs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yeah, it'd be like using Latin for scientific terminology today.
You're thinking of the Spankocene Era.
Nuclear power has nothing to do with the topic? The dawn of the nuclear age is the topic. Perhaps I am alone in seeing the irony in the story.
no, the dawn of the HUMAN age is the topic. the nuclear bomb just happens to be a nice easy geological marker for that.
note that the epoch is called the anthropocene epoch. anthopo, meaning human.
we aren't calling it the nuclear epoch.
Everyone who takes ages serious knows we live in The Age of Pisces looking forward to The Age of Aquarius.
Unf. NN grrr mgrgrlrgl. Snarf? Brrrp. Fapfapfap. Queeeeg! Ook.
You sound like my niece.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This. This (or shortly thereafter) was when homo sapiens started significantly altering the ecology of the planet.
Now the nuclear age may introduce a specific inflection in the Anthropocene but so did the widespread burning of coal (the 'Industrial Revolution'). Just starting at ground zero, so to speak, seems really arbitrary.
Perhaps millions of years from now when the Anthropocene layers are a few meters thick it might make sense to start dating from the beginning of widespread man man isotopes, but if there are anything resembling archeologists around at that time they will have found plenty of other bits of 'civilization' in that rubble.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Film at eleven.
we use latin words to be unambiguous, but we come up with the latin names ourselves. the romans didn't name a rattlesnake crotalus atrox. They hadn't even determined the whole family genus species classification stuff.
Now, if we described stuff by it's percentages of fire earth air and water and spirit...
It will provide the basis for lots of academic papers and the creation of new "anthropocene studies" departments at institutions of higher learning. What's not to love?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And like my knees.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
good luck finding a geological marker for any of those things you mention.
the geological timescale cares very little for your opinions on culture or our ability to insert tab A into slot B enough times to create an airplane.
Then again, an argument could be made that the fulcrum for the advancement of our species occured with the invention/introduction of true perspective in art, which isn't even technology.
Almost. You can see true perspective in statues and facades in pre dark age Europe and the Mediterranean. The flat non-perspective that you are referring to signifies the importance of every object on a panel. That's why you get floating ships in the background much larger than they should be ~ people in the foreground smaller than the subject in the middle. You are really talking about renaissance realism which incorporated true perspective on panel work.
The biggest change imho is the burning of masses of fossil fuels (including radioactive matter). That would be a measurable criteria.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
... I know when the Cretaceous period ended because the dinosaurs (except birds) went extinct and stuff, but I don't know when the Cretaceous period started or the Anthropocene period, either, but Bennett Haselton.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
When we stopped hunting and gathering and stayed in one place. Not bending to the earth but bending the earth to our needs. That's the beginning of the Anthropocene.
Also... from TFAbstract, they chose the date because all of the nuclear explosions have left a clear marker of radioisotopes which can be easily located when tracing the geological record.
And importantly, this will be true globally. This seems to be what most posters here seem to be ignoring... A hundred thousand years from now you'll probably be able to dig into the ground and identify this epoch anywhere on Earth where the rocks are old enough by the distinct atomic decay signature, among other things.
E pluribus unum
http://www.ar15.com/media/medi...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
should really begin in 1879 - the year edison first lit his lightbulb.
2cents
I'd put it down to world wars I & II which caused a massive acceleration in development of all types including land and air transport, computers, electronics, nuclear.
The nuclear bomb coincided with jet flight, the transistor was 2 years later.
And much of this development started with the industrial revolution in the 1800s.
It was also a time when women were prominent in industry and the war effort, suffraget late 1800s to women's liberation 1960s effectively doubled the working population and changed society.
Nuclear is an event which wasn't causal but only a useful marker.
It's just another fuck-up by the industrial age but I'd feel the petrochemical/plastics industry has had a much more pivotal and destructive effect than nuclear.
Go well
Today is January 16, 69 AE (Anthropocene Era)
Someone born in 1946 CE will now be referred to as: Born in 1 AE
Someone born in 1945 CE will now be referred to as "Born in 0 AE"; the year of the Anthropocene Epoch.
1944 CE will now be referred to as "1 BAE"; 1 year before the Anthropocene Epoch, etc
In this manner, every year renumbered.
And of course, tomorrow will be 1/17/69.
In a million years, the start of the industrial age and the start of the nuclear age will be a geological blur.
Besides, if we have to put a date on it, 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z is about as good a time as any other time in the 19th/20th/21st centuries.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have the book "E = mc^2", by David Bodanis.
In the notes accompanying the text there is (on Page 295 of the paperback) a note regarding a phrase on Page 191 of the main text), regarding steel production, Scapa Flow, and radiation monitors on stellar and interstellar instruments:
In 1919 the Imperial German battlefleet surrendered to the British, and eventually the entire fleet was scuttled in the relatively shallow waters of Scapa Flow, Scotland. There's a lot of pre-WW2 iron in that watery graveyard.
Steel-making requires a *lot* of air, and ever since the first atmospheric nuclear explosion, the air has been tainted with some of the radiation from these explosions... so it's uneconomical to make steel without these impurities.
If, however, you want an ultra-precise radiation monitoring instrument on the moon, or elsewhere, then the Scapa Flow iron hulks have proved immensely valuable in providing pre-atomic-age steel.
So, Scapa Flow steel is on the moon, on Pioneer, on Galileo, and in other places where non-irradiated steel is vital.
This is a one example where the first atmospheric nuclear test irrevocably changed the nature of human capabilities. This is a good case that supports the contention of the authors that the first nuclear explosion was a epoch-marking event.
Bodanis references Dan van der Hat, in "The Grand Scuttle: The Sinking of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in 1919" (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982).
Now, if we described stuff by it's percentages of fire earth air and water and spirit...
shouldn't that be fire, earth, air, water, and Leeloo?
This space unintentionally left blank.
It's a bit like the iridium spike at the K-T boundary in that the use of nuclear weapons is an event that will have a worldwide signal, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if they got the idea from the asteroid impact. This would be a bit ironic because Alvarez, the guy who discovered the impact, was a Manhattan project alum who actually worked on the explosive lenses and triggers used in the Trinity implosion bomb. The issue with using Trinity is that from a biological/evolutionary standpoint its not that meaningful an event. The Chicxulub impact is a huge deal, it's the driver of the biggest mass extinction in 250 million years. The Trinity test has the advantage of being easy to measure but nuclear weapons have had pretty much zero effect on the biosphere. In fact, primitive hunter-gatherers running around with fire and spears have a vastly larger effect than nuclear bombs. After Homo sapiens moves out of Africa into Australia, Europe, and the Americas, we see massive dieoffs of the megafauna which, combined with the use of fire to alter the landscape, dramatically alter the fauna and vegetation on a continental scale. From an evolutionary standpoint, these migrations are important; they mark the first time the species began to alter the world on the level of entire ecosystems. So I'd argue that the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa would be the defining event, but obviously that's kind of hard to date.
there is no way to tell what additional factors, natural or manmade, may influence the hypothetical future geological record.
Except through the usual tools of science and reason.
we use latin words to be unambiguous
We could use plenty of other schemes to get the same effect without having to use a dead language. The grand parent's point remains.
In the terms of "Epochs" it's total wankery (or in American English, mental masturbation ;)
It may even make sense to consider "the atomic age" as a new Epoch at some point in the distant future, but placing that date on it is pure politics, not science.
Except it's not really using a *dead* language, it's using a popular academic language that was chosen back when people still LEARNED AND READ LATIN (and really, one with a structure that lends itself particularly well to the purpose).
Your current perspective on it is about as useful as someone 150 years from now saying "why they hell did we standardize one the metric system when we could have used plenty of other systems of measure?"
Meh. I'm sure there were many cases of species altering the ecology. It wasn't worldwide and (semi-)permanent until MUCH later. We didn't name an Epoch just because a particularly large population of predatory mammals reduced the population of prey in a region (which happens all the time).
Except it's not really using a *dead* language
Nobody speaks it. The closest anyone comes is "church latin" a near variant used by the Roman Catholic Church. That's what makes latin a dead language.
Philip K Dick was right after all - 'The Empire never ended'. King Felix!
Actually, the second bomb and the threat of 9 more produced "peace".
Many have suggested that the second bomb brought hostilities to a close a day or two earlier than would otherwise have happened. It was taking the Japanese a while to get their heads around the problem of not being invincible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And like my pants.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remained—however frozen—in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion. "Dead" is really just a shortened version of "dead to the evolutionary fads of populism".
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
On the other hand, perhaps Perl isn't quite as "dead" as the idiom suggests. Perhaps Perl is merely catatonic, or just resting.
Tying the antropocene epoch to the first nuclear detonation is a brazen attempt to smuggle the Garden of Eden / fall of man metaphor into this discussion under cover of a blinding fireball.
How about using Madame Curie instead, and picking a nice round date like 1900?
I also noted this passage in the Wikipedia article.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. [/.sic]
The shift to accuracy and secular subjects in art is a useful milestone in terms of anthropology or history certainly. However, it's not anthropology that's really under discussion in this "Age of Man" thread. That would be more of a goeologic metric than an anthropologic one.
+...and yes it is true that a lot of the Italian Renaissance was the re-discovery of principles that had been known to the ancients.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Applying the colloquial criteria of "dead" to a language that remainedâ"however frozenâ"in widespread and specialized use over many centuries is a complete waste of time for the present discussion.
Aside from being highly relevant to the discussion at hand. Keep in mind the original assertion was:
It's pure hubris to think that scientists in the future are going to go along with our stupid names for stuff.
Yet here we are going along with Latin names for things even though Latin is a dead language whose practical uses now only extend to specialized scientific labeling and rituals for a particular religious sect.
One could argue that Perl is presently a near-dead language (it's evolution has become famously glacial) and then on this basis write a script routing all security advisories concerning Perl (such as DSA-2870-1 libyaml-libyaml-perl) straight into the round device.
One can argue the Moon is made of green cheese. The obvious rebuttals are 1) computer languages aren't languages, 2) unlike Latin, Perl is in widespread use as far as computer languages go, and 3) nobody argued that a language was dead on the basis of it remaining static over time.
Nobody speaks it.
I don't know. I think it still gets used on an ad hoc basis.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
I think the development of fire might be one of our defining moments but it may not be measurable in rocks an eon later. The invention/discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been the common starting point and I think those changes would be measurable in rocks by paleontologists of the future.
Is there a generally understood tolerance, plus or minus a century or two? Because I think it's fair to consider that humankind had transformed the planet before 1945 , with the industrial revolution, the span of railroads across continents, flight, building huge cities and skyscrapers and lighting them up at night with electricity (visible from space), etc..
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I was thinking R2D2.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
There's already hundreds of millions or billions of tons of U238 in the natural environment - where do you think it all came from?
About 4 billion tons of uranium in the oceans alone..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Only trouble with aliens. - If an alien turns up that has FTL technology, nuclear bombs and missiles are not likely to be any more effective than wooden bows and arrows, or thrown rocks.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
There's already hundreds of millions or billions of tons of U238 in the natural environment - where do you think it all came from?
So what? It's not universally mixed throughout the environment. One will still be able to see a spike in uranium 238 in sediment from coal burning and enhanced erosion of certain forests.
Actually, the second bomb and the threat of 9 more produced "peace".
Many have suggested that the second bomb brought hostilities to a close a day or two earlier than would otherwise have happened. It was taking the Japanese a while to get their heads around the problem of not being invincible.
Others have suggested it was removing the clause to indict the Emperor for war crimes (and instead leave him be head of state) from the conditions of surrender that let the Japanese allow to surrender without losing face.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
“ the chances are minuscule but collisions do occur out there in the Universe, and if one came our way and we had no tools like the Teller-Ulam designs, we'd be sitting ducks. ”
Do you have any idea how dangerous that would be to fire a nuclear bomb at an incoming asteroid? What does the Hydrogen bomb have to do with it?
Please watch any of Neil's stuff on this
The kind that would cause us extinction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUgxmfgIlY
What happens if you “nuke” it:
http://youtu.be/vjdxuT8zhk0?t=3m37s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ReuLZ2quc
Longer talk dedicated to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi54HYX9pWc
Your wit is amazing in this. Bravo! :)
One can argue the Moon is made of green cheese. The obvious rebuttals are 1) computer languages aren't languages, 2) unlike Latin, Perl is in widespread use as far as computer languages go, and 3) nobody argued that a language was dead on the basis of it remaining static over time.
Yet none of your points has remotely disproved the green cheese hypothesis...
My point was people did use it in many applications (church as well as science) back in the 1600-1700s when it was first used to name species.
And not speaking it in normal conversation doesn't mean it isn't or wasn't used. There are many thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of scholars *now* who can read it in order to read and study old texts. And in the 1600's when the biological taxonomy was first established, Latin was literally the common written language between scientists of a dozen different countries who may not even have been able to communicate any other way.