Scaling Down Our Imagination of the Human: Ted Chiang and the Fable of Extinction

The Anthropocene is an idea currently reshaping our thinking about what it means to be human. In a 2000 article for the Global Change Newsletter, Nobel-Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed using the term ‘Anthropocene’ to designate the current geological epoch. According to Crutzen and Stoermer, the impacts of human activities on the earth and atmosphere have escalated to such a degree over the past three centuries that humankind has become a major geological and environmental force. Anthropocene, from the Greek roots anthropo (human) and cene (new), is a term intended to take account of what Crutzen calls in a 2002 article in Nature ‘the geology of mankind’. ‘It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch’, Crutzen writes in that article, ‘supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 10-12 millennia’....