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Comment by polotics | Hacker News Reader

This does not make us a geological era: we're an event. 200 million years from now, the descendants of some crafty octopus or african-grey parrot would most likely call us the 5th global extinction event: one certainly thin layer due to depletion of things to burn. Best case we're fusion-powered and the rest looks like The Expanse, worst case we lose technology for lack of resources and overabundance of conflicts, then it's clever hominids and their superstitions waiting for an asteroid, pandemic, volcanoes to come knocking...

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A distinct layer arising due to unusual circumstances that did not exist before, or after, the time that the layer was created in the geologic record would, basically by definition, make it a geological era.

If we were studying an extraterrestrial planet and discovered that there had been intelligent creatures in the deep past of that world that then went extinct, who had altered their world while they were around as much as we have, we'd probably select it as the #1 dividing line in the geological record for that planet. And not just for intelligence-centric reasons. It would be a logical way to segment it. For example, you're gonna have long-lived synthetic isotopes in the layers above, and not in the layers below.

An era is too long. It is controversial as a proposed epoch/series which is two levels down from an Era/Erathem in the geological time scale hierarchy.

>we're an event

I've heard us described as the Anthropocine Extinction

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-the-anthropocene.html

> then it's clever hominids and their superstitions waiting for an asteroid, pandemic, volcanoes...

..., global warming.

But in all seriousness, do humans alter the Earth's surface more than e.g., insects or worms do? Has anybody quantified this?

How can this question be serious? Across the street from me there is a 20 story building made with concrete that was hauled from dozens or hundreds of miles away, food from a thousand miles away with cars parked in the parking lot made with materials strip mined on the other side of the planet.

You severely underestimate the amount of earth moved by insects and worms, by a lot.

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