It does seem pointless to avoid naming a new era for dramatic irreversible changes that would have defined a new era if they happened millions of years ago.
How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken?
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With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory of "planet".
It defies common usage, and also common language forms. Prefixed nouns usually refer to subcategories, not excluded categories.
What science fiction story is going to carefully distinguish "dwarf planets" as being a completely separate category from "planets" because one didn't completely clear its orbit of debris?
A better (equivalent, and just as useful) nomenclature would have left the common definition of "planet" alone: i.e. a body circling a star, too small to be a star or brown dwarf (no continuous or aborted fusion), but large enough to form a near sphere based on its own gravitational field.
THEN, subdivide "planets" into "major planets" and "minor planets". We have 8 major planets, and it turns out, many many dwarf planets.
Pluto is a "planet", specifically a "dwarf planet". Earth and Jupiter are "planets", specifically "major planets".
"Rogue planets" are "planets" that left their systems. Some were originally major, some dwarf. "Protoplanets" are new "planets" actively accumulating mass by clearing their orbital field. They may stabilize as "major" or "dwarf" planets.
The new exlusionary definition of "planet" also opens the doors to inevitable conundrums:
Some day a huge planetary type body will be discovered in the outreaches of a solar system where it has not cleared its area of debris. So not a "planet"?
Some day a small planetary body with a cleared orbital field will be found between the orbits of larger planetary bodies that haven't cleared their fields. So it is a planet, but the larger bodies surrounding it are not?
That doesn't really fix anything, because no matter what you call Pluto, it has to get demoted from the list of planet-like-things-whatever-we-call-them that school children learn.
The issue is that there's hundreds of objects at least as planet-y as Pluto is, and nobody is going to remember all of those. So either we demote Pluto somehow, or we have to have some reason that it's more important than the rest.
So, Pluto is just historically interesting but inherently just one of many rocks. And science tries not to categorize things based on "oh that one somebody noticed first".
I agree, distinguishing between the importance of things is helpful.
But changing “planet” to not include Pluto just created unending inconsistency.
There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged.
People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.
The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.
> There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged.
> People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.
Even the other dwarfs we know of so far seem to make it a different category to me. Pluto is a lot more like them than it's like even Mercury.
> The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.
Are you saying that we're going to find huge planets that haven't cleared their neighborhoods? That sounds unlikely.
The main issue is just that you have a limited number of rocks that normal people are going to care about. Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc.
Should Pluto be in this list? If so, why? It's a boring tiny rock way the hell out, one of hundreds. Making this list hundreds long is not feasible, nobody will remember them.
We already had 'minor planets' (asteroids). Planets are a continuum, from small rocky or icy ones the size of large moons, to "terrestrial" ones, to ice giants and gas giants.
Yes, that is how I think "planets" should be used. A root category over any number of subcategories defined over continuums and combinations of other features.
Yes. The entire Pluto thing seemed like a pedantic waste of time. Or, at least grandfather it in. Now everyone still thinks of it as a planet, but we have to qualify it when talking : "Oh hey I read an interesting story about the 9th planet Pluto, ooops, sorry, I mean 'dwarf', don't crucify me".
> The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you can’t let it go.
The IAU happened 18 years ago but the vast public hasn’t cottened on to the whole new “cleared orbital debris” concept tacked on to a word that already has widespread use and understanding.
Mistakes don’t become not mistakes because of 18 years. The mistake was that it’s predictable that two definitions for “planet” will still be jostling each other 50 years from now - for no good reason when distinctions could be made without attempts at universal redefinition by a minority of people who use the word for highly specialized reasons.
Instead of just coining a new phrase such as “major planets” for their brand new definition.
What are regular people supposed to say now when they want to say what planet meant which includes Mercury and Pluto? “Planetary like things?”??? It’s a completely avoidable mess.
> The IAU happened 18 years ago but the vast public hasn’t cottened on to the whole new “cleared orbital debris” concept
The vast public doesn't generally cotton to anything. People don't routinely specify that they're talking about non-avian dinosaurs, or non-tetrapod fishes.
Which doesn't matter, because nobody expects the general public to actually be precise, so nobody gives a shit.
> a word that already has widespread use and understanding.
An enumeration is not an understanding. There is no understanding where Pluto is a planet and Eris is not.
> without attempts at universal redefinition by a minority of people who use the word for highly specialized reasons.
You mean the people who actually use the words as if they meant something?
> What are regular people supposed to say now when they want to say what planet meant which includes Mercury and Pluto? “Planetary like things?”???
That scenario occurs about as often as regular people wanting to say planet excluding pluto before the vote: they're never precise enough that it matters, and in the zero cases where it happens, they can just specify "incuding pluto" or "excluding pluto".
Sometimes when forming standards, it is worthwhile to grandfather something in, just for the pure logistical effort needed to change.
Consider that every single book, textbook, poster, pamphlet in the entire world has to be edited and re-printed. Just so we don't have the numbers go to 9.
Every kid for decades was taught about the 9th planet Pluto. 18 years later, and a lot of people still refer to it as a Planet.
And. Now we can't refer to the search for Planet 10 with the much cooler name of Planet X. "Searching for Planet X" sounds cooler. Now every conversation has to be "Searching for Planet X, oh, I mean 9, because of those guys that renumbered them, why did they do that again? Was there a point."
Your entire comment is a weak attempt to justify an emotional response on non-existent grounds and making shit up (wow, people have to update their understanding of classifications, such hard, so never happens), and you waste more time on a subject you complain is a waste of time.
You really should talk to your therapist about your unhealthy relationship with pluto.
Would anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse?
If the problem being identified is that science is bad at PR, I agree. Science communication, I love you; please stop being a self-fulfilling prophesy.
If the message is that human industrialization besides carbon emissions directly have obscured the discussion. Yes.
But this article kinda… does not tell you the thesis, it gives you the evidence for us to come to our own (proven and correct) conclusions. At… length.
I like it, but we should probably try to get new people who don’t already agree… maybe
I would like to have a word like Antropocrisis or Anthropoverflow which would be a collecting point for child-free arguments, because nowadays a declining of population is still considered as a negative event everywhere.
Did you take a look at all those positive exponentials in the article? They're all a byproduct of exponential population growth, so any sign that that growth might be slowing down is a positive one in my book...
We don’t _have_ to succumb to idiocracy. Just a reminder.
Our (royal we) actions to dumb down our UIs was probably immoral in the middle-game; if we wanted anyone to not just smash money buttons, based on feelings.
I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean, and I really don't mean to be the language police, but I don't think "royal we" means what you intend it to mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we
This makes it sound like the designation is latent, even if rejected by committee right now. They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.
But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably the most sudden change in the geological record. It still took thousands of years for the consequences to shake out into a steadier state.
If we were studying the current transition hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now starting with zero knowledge, the disappearance of megafauna (ongoing and has been for tens of thousands of years), the large scale transformation of forests to grassland, the invasion of species to every corner of the earth, the mass extinction most severely in the tropics and oceans, the appearance of so much carbon, plastic, and other pollution in the geologic record, and the disappearance of glaciers (tens of thousands of years to go there, even in worst case scenarios) would appear virtually instantaneous. There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.
So the argument starts to sound a bit like denial. But that's OK. We've been through lots of denial around whether extinction happens, if mass extinction happens, if the K-Pg impact happened, if it caused a mass extinction, or whether continents move around. All settled now.
> They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.
You mean aren't admitting the anthropocene as an epoch? That's not what the article says. The reason it's not admissible as an epoch is because we might blow ourselves up tomorrow and wipe out industrial civilisation. And the whole layer of steel and concrete we laid down would be very thin in the record, like the K-Pg impact. The banded iron formations are kind of on the boundary, they're associated with the Great Oxygenation Event but you could also maybe call it the Jatulian period. That was a couple hundred million years.
> There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.
Those are classified as events, not epochs. The K-Pg impact was an event.
Ed. I guess you could also say why can't we have a new Anthropocene period caused by an Anthropocene event, but I don't know what to tell you, it's just confusing to do that. That's why the K-Pg impact is followed by the Danian age, not the The-Start-Of-This-Period-Has-A-Lot-Of-Iridium age. I don't get why the proposal didn't want to call it the Crawfordian if that's where the canonical marker is found
Besides, if we don't blow ourselves up, it's a virtual certainty that there will be another completely different geologic event in the next 100 years. And some completely different one on the following 100 years.
Hell, many of the changes from the current event are not even coherent with each other.
IMO, some people are just way too intent on pushing futurology around. (On something similar, people started pushing some grand event that would mark the end of the 20th century at the 80s. Of course, they pushed lots of different ones.)
I'm fine with everyone landing on their own names. Provided each has some kind of preamble (context, assumptions, scope) and acknowledging everyone else has the same right(s) to add to the confusion.
Huh. That looks like really important context. I wonder why the Smithsonian article neglected to mention it. Do they just not want to admit that there's any dissent?
The Smithsonian article specifically mentioned it right after the leading paragraphs that outlined what the distinguishing features were and that it had been put forward:
The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy— of which the International Commission on Stratigraphy is a part— without citing substantive reasons, but most public criticisms of the Anthropocene stem from a range of sources: from within the heart of geology, to well outside it, among the social sciences and humanities.
It then goes on to address 10 points of dissent made and why these reasons are weak, misconstrued, not sufficient, etc.
I think the proposing team ran out of options on the formal track so now they're going the ad-hominem track against the IUGS (they're uncomfortable with the Anthropocene, they're climate-change deniers, etc.)
Suppose you want to graph negative responses to a survey over time. Let's say the business had been getting increasingly worse on all metrics over time.
Grouped by day you might just see a couple huge spikes on days where there were a few negative responses.
Grouped by year you'd notice that the volume of negative feedbacks was increasing.
Grouped by milllenia it would be hard to notice that something had changed radically in the last few years.
The question is what timeframe matters to your particular case. Unless you can answer that, you can't form a specific idea of how bad something actually is or whether it's begun improving or is still deteriorating.
The worst atmospheric polluting parts of the industrial revolution will have been over for most countries for a century before we really feel the environmental consequences of rising sea levels and increased greenhouse effects. No one alive today was burning coal in 1895. So it's not crazy to think about how we adapt, while still considering how to stop adding to the damage.
This seems like a reverse logic article. Here are 'myths', but really 'Not'.
It isn't against naming this the Anthropocene, all of the myths are followed by reasons why they aren't myths and this is probably the Anthropocene. "From a certain point of view".
From an exceedingly anthropocentric point of view.
People assume that humans are the only or first animal of the Holocene to have left lasting global impacts. The mastodons essentially great swaths of steppe. Ants and worms have essentially altered the grounds. Bacteria generate the bulk of the oxygen. Beavers change the course of rivers and create lakes. The number of critters that alter the Earth is quite numerous. Humans also alter the Earth, and in increasingly large ways, but naming an epoch after humanity seems… egotistical when other critters do stuff equally impressive when scale is factored in.
The use of the word "myth" implies that people who don't accept it are conspiracy nut jobs. But in reality it is only a semantic debate. It doesn't change reality, nor does it allow better understanding. We clearly have an impact on the planet, but it is up to whoever in the very far future to decide if it really was the start of an epoch, assuming they would still express themselves in such primitive concepts.
Honestly, it is hubris to start the anthropocene in just the last human lifetime. Our species has been making an impact that will be evident in the geological record for longer than that.
e.g. Geologists of some far-off future are going to notice that species that were isolated to one continent suddenly started popping up everywhere in the fossil record a few hundred years ago. Sea travel has united the continents in way they haven't been united since Pangea.
A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human lifetime to those future geologists. To us however, it's an important distinction.
"A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human lifetime to those future geologists."
On what do you base this claim? Before humans, not much happened around and the sediment layers were thin. The amount of energy moving things around was limited to weather (due to sun radiation, mostly), volcanic/tectonic activity, and to (a lesser degree, due to direct effect of) tidal forces. Humans activity however, both directly and indirectly, caused effects that also involved energy stored in the span of millions of years. That should be anything but indistinguishable.
Also, from the article:
"The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters, and such sediments are full of distinctive markers, like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species. To define a time period formally, geologists must identify distinctive signals in sediments or rocks that can be correlated around the globe, and the presence of such markers is ubiquitous. The geology is real."
> like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species.
How much of that stuff is going to survive on geological timescales amd the concept of "invasive species" isn't really applicable to anything but conservationists that want to maintain a static environment.
Agreed. Spain's old growth forests were denuded to build the Spanish Armada (or thereabouts) and you can go further back to catastrophic, anthropogenic, environmental shifts a few thousand years back in India, China and elsewhere in the world. Geology isn't focused on single year boundaries so maybe it's best to say that we entered the Anthropocene 6k-2k years ago (a 4k year range).
Spains (and much of Europe's) old growth forests were also almost completely denuded much earlier than that to build most of the Roman Empire, and its vast mining operations, naval flotillas and so forth. Yet they grew back to again disappear roughly around the Renaissance over 1000 years later.
The interesting thing is that many modern popular social discussions (and even some pop sci arguments) speak of old growth forests as irreplaceable things that, if cut down, pretty much disappear when history clearly shows that this isn't true.
I don't defend cutting them down just because, but I think it's good to be honest about their ability to come back.
Making fire and the wheel considered dangerous, choosing farty animals for our cultivation endeavors stinks while getting down from trees into concrete caves was a bad move. Scaling that up to "everyone"... priceless.
What we once considered pivotal points in our development seems now the source for our declared demise. At least we discovered that via satellites shot into orbit by rockets.
Now, if we accept that as the natural overshooting in a evolutionary jump, we just need to adjust. The undershooting will be painful, the discussion in the next few oscillations annyoing, still, it's the way to go. After all, denial is just a common step in change.
You're basically walking into the middle of a niche debate about semantics. There is a faction that dislikes the use of the word "anthropocene" to refer to the current geological era - and specifically, the past 100 years or so. Their main argument is that it's an imperceptible blip on the radar compared to the scale of other geological eras we study.
This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts". It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel "myths".
"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...
How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken?
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With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory of "planet".
It defies common usage, and also common language forms. Prefixed nouns usually refer to subcategories, not excluded categories.
What science fiction story is going to carefully distinguish "dwarf planets" as being a completely separate category from "planets" because one didn't completely clear its orbit of debris?
A better (equivalent, and just as useful) nomenclature would have left the common definition of "planet" alone: i.e. a body circling a star, too small to be a star or brown dwarf (no continuous or aborted fusion), but large enough to form a near sphere based on its own gravitational field.
THEN, subdivide "planets" into "major planets" and "minor planets". We have 8 major planets, and it turns out, many many dwarf planets.
Pluto is a "planet", specifically a "dwarf planet". Earth and Jupiter are "planets", specifically "major planets".
"Rogue planets" are "planets" that left their systems. Some were originally major, some dwarf. "Protoplanets" are new "planets" actively accumulating mass by clearing their orbital field. They may stabilize as "major" or "dwarf" planets.
The new exlusionary definition of "planet" also opens the doors to inevitable conundrums:
Some day a huge planetary type body will be discovered in the outreaches of a solar system where it has not cleared its area of debris. So not a "planet"?
Some day a small planetary body with a cleared orbital field will be found between the orbits of larger planetary bodies that haven't cleared their fields. So it is a planet, but the larger bodies surrounding it are not?
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