The End of Earthly Oceans - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 198

(people and the ideas that they generate) it is accelerating its own
development. The technosphere, suggests Haff, is the force that is
changing the Earth—by damming rivers, hoovering the fish out of
the oceans, and hugely modifying natural elemental cycles.
Is it inherently robust though, in the sense that the biosphere is
robust and has never lost its grip on the planet, no matter what catas-
trophes the Earth has endured in its history? It is much too early to
say. A major threat to the technosphere currently is that it has not yet
learned to recycle its own waste products: think of those plastics
building up in the ocean gyres for instance, or that invisible but more
sinister phenomenon of the carbon dioxide building up in the atmos-
phere and oceans. The biosphere, after billions of years of practice,
has become very good at recycling. If the technosphere is to survive
for anything approaching geological timescales as a system it has to
alter its functioning, before it chokes itself and its human components
on its own waste products.
The novel options that may be opening to this planet allow no sen-
sible prediction. They may well, of course, turn out to be mirages,
quickly built and then quickly destroyed by human hubris. Then we
may safely return here to the realm of a natural Earth. And here we do
have some guidelines.
The New Biology
As the dust settled from the impact of the 10-kilometre-diameter
meteorite that ploughed into the Yucatán peninsula 65 million years
ago, much of the world's ecosystem collapsed. It may well have been
in poor shape previously, because—as planetary luck would have it—
the meteorite arrived just as the Earth was suffering the toxic effects
of a particularly intense episode of volcanic eruptions on the other
side of the planet, on what is now the Deccan region of the Indian
subcontinent.