A man-made world.docVIP

A man-made world 一个人造的世界 Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with 科学上已经将人看作是一个地质推动力了 May 26th 2011 | from the print edition THE here and now are defined by astronomy and geology. Astronomy takes care of the here: a planet orbiting a yellow star embedded in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, a galaxy that is itself part of the Virgo supercluster, one of millions of similarly vast entities dotted through the sky. Geology deals with the now: the 10,000-year-old Holocene epoch, a peculiarly stable and clement part of the Quaternary period, a time distinguished by regular shifts into and out of ice ages. The Quaternary forms part of the 65m-year Cenozoic era, distinguished by the opening of the North Atlantic, the rise of the Himalayas, and the widespread presence of mammals and flowering plants. This era in turn marks the most recent part of the Phanerozoic aeon, the 540m-year chunk of the Earth’s history wherein rocks with fossils of complex organisms can be found. The regularity of celestial clockwork and the solid probity of rock give these co-ordinates a reassuring constancy. 这儿和现在是被天文学和地质学定义的。天文学关注这里：在银河的一个螺旋状的旋臂中镶嵌着一颗黄色的恒星，一颗行星绕着它运行，室女座超星系团的部分是与银河系类似的一个巨大实体，它是点缀在天空中的数百万个星系之一。地质学则研究现在：1万年之久的全新世是第四纪(Quaternary)[1]的一部分——第四纪的特点就是冰期间冰期的有规律的交替，而全新世(Holocene)[2]则是一个非常稳定和温和的时期。第四纪是6500万年的新生代(Cenozoic)[3]的组成部分，在此时期，一个显著的特点就是北大西洋的诞生和喜马拉雅山的崛起，以及哺乳动物和开花植物的广泛出现。反过来讲，这个时代是显生宙（Phanerozoic）[4]最为年轻的构成部分——在地球5.4亿年以来的历史中，那些含有复杂生命体的化石都可以在这个时代找到。天体的运动规律和岩石的确凿证据给了以上说法提供了有力的证明。 Now there is a movement afoot to change humanity’s co-ordinates. In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an eminent atmospheric chemist, realised he no longer believed he was living in the Holocene. He was living in some other age, one shaped primarily by people. From their trawlers scraping the floors of the seas to their dams impounding sediment by the gigatonne, from their stripping of forests to their irrigation of farms, from their mile-deep mines to their melting of glaciers, huma