The Anthropocene is more than just a fanciful notion held by those who believe homo sapiens has gone totally berserk. Bigwig geologists are taking the idea super seriously. In fact, members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy — the masters of the official geologic timetable — have organized a group of scientists and experts to consider formal adoption of the Anthropocene. The basic task of the Anthropocene Working Group is to try to imagine what the rock record will look like a million years in the future, and to figure out whether we humans will have a lasting enough impact to truly merit an epoch all our own.

To get a peek behind the curtain, the Generation Anthropocene producers recently sat down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: Jan Zalasiewicz, the group’s convener; Mike Ellis, head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey; Mark Williams, a paleobiologist at the University of Leicester; and Davor Vidas, an international lawyer and expert on the Law of the Sea.

“The signal — physically, biologically, chemically — will be quite clear,” Zalasiewicz said. “Unless the cavalry ride in, there will almost certainly be climate change on the order of 3-7 degrees globally over the next few centuries. There will be a major sea level rise … Beaches will be covered by offshore muds.”

Ellis added that submerged cities will be preserved for the ages as well: Rising sea levels “will fossilize the various urban structures that we have built over the past few hundred years.”

So those future geologists will see our signs. Now it’s up to Zalasiewicz, Ellis, and Co. to decide whether or not it’s hubristic and premature to say that we’ve kicked off a whole new geologic era. The team will make an official recommendation in 2016.

In the meantime, some members of the working group are concerned with the less academic implications of what we’re doing to the planet. Take Vidas, the lawyer. Rising sea levels will force a serious rethinking of maritime law, he said. “Our international law is the law of the Holocene. However, with the entry into the Anthropocene, with conditions that are not environmentally stable, we may be facing a problem.”

Every geologic boundary marks a redefinition of the terms of life on Earth, which is why the Anthropocene debate has that rare quality of being simultaneously academic and socially relevant. It is an exercise of deep-time imagination, but with real-world, right-now implications. So strap on your geology goggles and dive into the Anthropocene with the masters of the geologic timetable — for the 50th episode of Generation Anthropocene.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Imagine Earth with toxic air, stifling heat, no water, and no signs of life — sort of like Los Angeles. This is a world laid bare by massive and catastrophic climate change, and believe it or not, it isn’t science fiction. It’s our neighbor, Venus, and it’s more similar to Earth than you might want to believe.

Venus and Earth have a lot in common: They’re practically the same size, they’re made up of basically the same stuff, and early in the life of our solar system they were nearly identical, right down to oceans and moderate atmospheres. But then climate change arrived on Venus — the same processes that are playing out on our planet today with rising carbon dioxide and an increasing greenhouse effect — and transformed the planet into an uninhabitable, 900-degree-F wasteland swathed in clouds of sulfuric acid.

“It’s almost as if you had a twin study — you take these identical twins and give them different experiences in life and see how they grow up,” says David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the NASA-sponsored astrobiology chair at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center.

Comparing planets and their evolutions is Grinspoon’s bread and butter, and Venus is one of his favorite subjects. “It gives us a laboratory to see if we really understand atmosphere and climate as well as we think we do,” he says. After all, physics is physics everywhere and chemistry is chemistry everywhere. So if our climate models on Earth are any good, we should be able to tweak the inputs and run them on Venus too.

Clearly we’re in no real danger of turning Earth into Venus anytime soon. But Grinspoon says that Venus is a sort of parable for what might happen if we keep pushing our climate system farther and farther out of balance.

Listen to my interview with Grinspoon below — and lest you think it’s all about climate apocalypse, we also took some time to discuss George Carlin’s philosophy of environmentalism, the “canals” on Mars, and Grinspoon’s old friend Carl Sagan.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

When the Voyager spacecraft left Earth in 1977, it carried music in case it was ever encountered by aliens. If extraterrestrial beings have found it and downloaded its contents onto their iPods, they’re now listening to Mozart, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry, among others. When the Curiosity rover landed on Mars earlier this year, it beamed back will.i.am — and imagine, some people actually question our technological advances!

So what, exactly, is Curiosity doing out there? And what have we found so far? I recently sat down with Ken Herkenhoff, a planetary geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and co-leader of the ChemCam team for Curiosity. ChemCam is that piece of technology that lasers rocks so we can learn what they’re made of. I talked with Herkenhoff about the rover itself, the gadgets on board, and the dicey “seven minutes of terror” involving the rocket-powered “sky crane” that lowered the rover to the Martian surface.

Now that we’re there, Herkenhoff explains that, “it looks like we landed in the outer parts of an alluvial fan” — confirming longstanding suspicions that there was once an abundance of water on Mars. But this finding is just the beginning of what Curiosity might accomplish. Two weeks ago, one of the mission’s principle investigators, John Grotzinger, told NPR the rover had found something “for the history books,” but refused to elaborate until the team had a chance to check its findings.

For those who feel horribly teased (NASA has promised more information in December), Herkenhoff offers his own list of potential “touchdown” discoveries, including ocean beds and organics — the carbon-based building blocks of life. We also spent some time talking about the rover’s cultural impact and why the team at NASA and the USGS call Curiosity “she.” So suit up and have a listen!

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

Those giant steel towers rising all across the United States — they aren’t sucking oil from the ground. They’re pumping water into it, building enough pressure to break the rock and release 10-million-year-old fossil fuel. This is hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, and fighting it has become the cause célèbre of filmmakers, politicians, movie stars, and activists.

For good reason: The Environmental Protection Agency has found that fracking chemicals can contaminate drinking water supplies, gas companies have laid waste to rural landscapes, fracking can release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, and scattershot state and federal regulations allow drillers to keep the ingredients of their chemical cocktails secret. Fracking has even been linked to earthquakes.

Given all this, I’d be willing to bet a large part of my small salary that one of the following statements elicits a strong protest from those fighting the good fight against fracking. Ready? Here we go:

• “I don’t know of anything in my lifetime that has been so badly mischaracterized or blown out of proportion as this fear of fracking.”
• “There’s nothing about the hydraulic fracturing process itself that poses a danger.”
• “The shale gas revolution is the biggest revolution since nuclear went commercial.”

All three statements were made by Mark Zoback, a Stanford University geophysicist who has spoken before Congress on issues related to shale gas production. And before you heave your laptop out the window or dismiss Zoback as a fracking apologist, let me also say that all three of those quotes are taken deliberately out of context. Why? Because I think Zoback’s story mirrors the charged story of shale gas. He highlights an important distinction between the science of fracking and the practice — where statements about one are often taken out of context to support or attack the other.

My co-producer and Generation Anthropocene creator Mike Osborne sat down with Zoback recently to talk through the science of fracking and the environmental dangers posed by pumping chemically treated water into the ground. Listen closely, and you will never hear Zoback defend the practice. It’s the science that he stands behind, whether industry chooses to live by it or not. Ultimately, Zoback argues that “Switching from coal to natural gas is part of that process [of decarbonizing the energy sector]. It’s not the solution; it’s part of getting us where we need to go.”

It’s a conclusion that a growing number of environmentalists seems to be reaching as well. I would prefer that we didn’t get stuck with a choice between lesser evils. Let’s just hope that these short-term half-fixes are just that, and let the science provide the context for the practice instead of the other way around.

This interview is part of the Generation Anthropocene project, in which Stanford students partake in an inter-generational dialogue with scholars about living in an age when humans have become a major force shaping our world.

In 2000, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested that humans have had such profound and far-reaching impacts on the planet that we have ushered in a new geologic age – the Age of Man, or, as Crutzen called it, the Anthropocene. The idea has been bouncing around the halls of academia ever since, and in the last few years, it has jumped from the ivory tower into popular literature and a few geek-tastic conversations over beer. The notion that humans now run this joint seems to have struck a chord.

Just getting up to speed? The team from the Generation Anthropocene podcast at Stanford University sat down in the recording studio and tried to explain everything in five short minutes. (It ended up taking seven, but who’s counting?) Just for fun, they did it game-show style. Here they are talking about the basics of the Anthropocene, the arguments for and against adding it to the official geologic timetable, and why the idea is so catchy:

Also:

• Grist’s David Roberts explains why the Anthropocene is so hard for people to get their heads around and links to a cool video.
• If you really want to dive deep, the Royal Society dedicated an entire issue of its Philosophical Transections to the Anthropocene.
• Find Generation Anthropocene’s interviews about our new age on Grist, or go straight to the source.