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hundred thousand years. That was the timescale of previous 'hyper-
thermals' such as the burst of Toarcian warming in the Jurassic, or the
Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Planetary biology, after a seri-
ous mass extinction event, takes longer to build itself back up into the
complexity and diversity it formerly enjoyed—albeit into an array of
mostly different species. This healing—and transformation—of life
has, in the past, taken a few million years, until the biosphere is rebuilt
into its new pattern.
As we peer dimly into the future, the simplest scenario is to con-
ceive of some future Earth, with future oceans, slowly evolving into a
new natural pattern, once the remarkable pressures generated by
humans have been lifted. This is assuming, of course, that our species
will die out. All previous species on Earth have become extinct; few
species exist for longer than a few million years—and our own spe-
cies, we are fully aware, is putting itself at risk by rapidly undercutting
its own planetary life support systems. With humans out of the pic-
ture, we might then simply use our understanding of both Earth his-
tory and of planetary systems to chart a way into the far future. This,
indeed, is the path we will generally follow in this chapter.
But what if humans survived? Humans are resilient, manipulative,
and ingenious as well as ecologically reckless, and they may be con-
structing something quite new on this planet that might interact with
and affect oceans and land alike, and that, once in place, might prove
robust and self-sustaining. The technosphere, it has been called.
The technosphere is the idea of Peter Haff, a professor of geology
and civil engineering at Duke University in North Carolina, who has
been thinking through the effects of technology at the most funda-
mental of scales. The technosphere may be compared with the
century-old idea of the biosphere, which was, to all intents and purposes,
the brainchild of Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian scientist who per-
formed the extraordinary feat of surviving through both Tsarist and
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