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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

"We have pretty good information about 20th century events"

We don't have specific dates for when the vast majority of extinctions have happened. We have a rough idea of what the base line extinction rate was for the last million years, and we have good data suggesting that the trend has been up for maybe 10-20,000 years, give or take several thousand years. Picking a specific year, such 9,874 BC, or 434 AD, or 1965 AD, is arbitrary, and a political act.

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Is presence of species and biological diversity more relevant than transient geological evidence, asteroid impacts and tectonic activity? Without geological evidence (fossils) we would have no benchmark for non-living species.

Arguably, all geological timescales and frames of reference (as named by humans, and thus innately political) are based, not on biological taxonomy and known degrees of species diversity, but rather, on geological records, for which radioactive markers from weapons testing carried out by humans, remains a relevant and valid point of reference that may outlast us.

Not really, they are simply using the date related to a specific event which has error bars measured in months and expecting people to relate that event to the extinction. If WWIII happens and we have a full scale nuclear exchange then that's likely to be used as the peak.

Really, it's not a political statement just an interesting observation.

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