Birth, life, and death is an endless cycle, both for sentient beings and for phenomena. A human might live a century, an empire seldom makes it for three, and geological ages a hundred times longer stretch back over four billion years. Change is the only constant.
Due to many interlocking causes and conditions we are now at a massive inflection point. That our empire should fall now to a mix of corruption and resource depletion is surprising only in that we've lasted nearly two and a half centuries with only one serious domestic discontinuity. Humans have faced political, economic, and environmental crisis countless times since our species arose.
But the exhumation of carbon which we seem powerless to stop will erect not just the headstone for our empire, but perhaps for our entire species along with the biosphere in which humans evolved.
A new intelligence may arise and progress, as our kind once did, in another fifty or hundred million years. When they dig deep enough, they'll learn of the Anthropocene Thermal Maximum.
continued at Daily Kos...
