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00:00
Computer wormStack (abstract data type)Directed graphAddress spaceBitAverageEvent horizonComputer programmingUniverse (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Point (geometry)MathematicsSelf-organizationType theoryStudent's t-testProcess (computing)Variety (linguistics)Row (database)Graph coloringVideo gameOrder (biology)Crash (computing)Digital photographyStrategy gameStaff (military)Real numberForm (programming)Link (knot theory)TrailComputer animation
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Game theoryDew pointCore dumpRevision controlNumberScaling (geometry)Multiplication signExecution unitRight angleFrequencyHierarchyComputer clusterComputer animation
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Level (video gaming)Numerical analysisComputer wormSeries (mathematics)FrequencyExecution unitMultiplication signHierarchyScaling (geometry)Category of beingPhysicalismRight angleProcess (computing)Type theoryDifferent (Kate Ryan album)ConcentricShift operatorCASE <Informatik>BitBoundary layerCrash (computing)Row (database)MereologyGreen's functionComputer animation
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MathematicsElectric currentEvent horizonFaktorenanalyseMaß <Mathematik>Stress (mechanics)BitControl flowElectronic signatureFrequencyComputer animation
05:16
Computer wormCondition numberAerodynamicsPhysical systemSpeciesControl flowMultiplication signPresentation of a groupMereologyPoint (geometry)MathematicsBitSymbolic dynamicsProcess (computing)Game controllerForcing (mathematics)Dynamical systemSpeciesForm (programming)State of matterCycle (graph theory)Condition numberDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Boiling pointHand fanGroup actionConnectivity (graph theory)Row (database)Revision controlArithmetic meanRange (statistics)Universe (mathematics)Focus (optics)Level (video gaming)NumberLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
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FingerprintComputer configurationMereologyVotingFormal grammarTraffic reportingBitBoiling pointDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Range (statistics)Group actionCore dumpProjective planeClosed setRow (database)Point (geometry)Computer animation
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VotingComputer wormSoftware testingAverageDew pointStandard errorChi-squared distributionDigital photographySynchronizationCASE <Informatik>ForestLevel (video gaming)Degree (graph theory)Row (database)MereologyComputer configurationSource codePoint (geometry)Surface of revolutionCore dumpSlide ruleBitVotingDialectMathematical morphologyCivil engineeringRange (statistics)Product (business)Food energyConnectivity (graph theory)Group actionParticle systemMultiplication signPlastikkarteDemosceneWordStrategy gameSystem callComputer animation
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State of matterMathematicsNuclear spacePhysicalismConnected spaceResolvent formalismPhysical lawNuclear spaceComputer animation
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State of matterMathematicsNuclear spaceComputer wormSample (statistics)Revision controlVotingSampling (statistics)BitDrill commandsSoftware testingProjective planeMultiplication signRegular graphConcentricRepresentation (politics)Point (geometry)Arithmetic meanThermodynamic equilibriumCASE <Informatik>Row (database)EstimatorMereologySlide ruleNuclear spaceSound effectVotingOnline helpSelf-organizationTerm (mathematics)Mixture modelDisk read-and-write headPower (physics)Contrast (vision)Sign (mathematics)Cue sportsSoftwareWebsiteComputer animation
18:40
Hill differential equationPartial derivativeSound effectDegree (graph theory)Operator (mathematics)Total S.A.Universe (mathematics)Sound effectSystem administratorCASE <Informatik>Student's t-testAdaptive behaviorConservation lawVideo gameProcess (computing)Food energyConcentricWave packetReading (process)BitRepresentation (politics)Inheritance (object-oriented programming)Social classPoint (geometry)Hand fanComputer animation
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Conservation lawPartial derivativeSound effectSoftware testingParallel portDataflowComputer wormFood energyFunctional (mathematics)Multiplication signTotal S.A.Food energyBitPoint (geometry)NeuroinformatikBefehlsprozessorProduct (business)Arithmetic meanCASE <Informatik>System callLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
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Convex hullAuto mechanicMultiplication signLeakMobile WebData managementConcentricMereologyComputer animation
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Execution unitTwitterSource codeComputer wormMathematicsOpen setSlide ruleBlogLine (geometry)Block (periodic table)Closed setComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Different (Kate Ryan album)Point (geometry)InternetworkingLine (geometry)Arithmetic meanType theoryLecture/Conference
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Computer wormCycle (graph theory)Electric generatorLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
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DemosceneMathematical analysisBitTerm (mathematics)InformationFrame problemData conversionMultiplication signSpeciesNatural numberMassMechanism designCirclePlanningPoint (geometry)Lecture/Conference
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Roundness (object)Lecture/Conference
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MedianCartesian closed categoryHypermediaRoundness (object)Lecture/ConferenceJSON
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:14
So welcome to the Anthropocene or rather the talk about this possibly up-and-coming epoch that we humans created, started, initiated, might be useful verbs here. So I can, thanks to the introduction,
00:26
I can skip a little bit about this but I do want to make it clear that I am not a geologist myself. I studied it a little bit during an Erasmus semester and if you're a student and you have the chance to go on this EU program I encourage you to absolutely do it. That's one of
00:40
the EU programs that definitely works for you. You might have to take care of some credit points before you go at your home university but do it and even if they don't accept something from your guest university it is worth it. So now I think a little crash course is in order about chronostratigraphy. So this is the science of analyzing rock layers, assigning ages and
01:06
events in Earth history to them and in this example you can see a so-called sea stack which is located off the Irish coast and yeah you notice the rock layers they are differentiated by color and by material most obviously and in this example you have several
01:27
hundred million years of geologic history. If you've been lucky enough to visit the Grand Canyon once you have several billion years of death of the geologic record. So as you walk down to the valley you cross the different strata, these rock layers and the deeper you go the
01:46
older this strata will be. Now how do they form? Simplified they form by any kind of material sinking down through a water body like an ocean or even just a lake to the sea floor where they
02:01
form sediments and by a variety of processes which essentially amount to crystallization the sediments solidify into hard rock and then we have a stratum or in plural strata. The type of material can be really anything from sand to the biomass of the organisms that live in the water body and whenever something changes in Earth history
02:26
the sedimentation might also change so stuff might sink faster more stuff might sink down or different types of material and therefore you get a new layer which you can distinguish and before I showed you some photos of how the geologic record looks in real life now we're
02:43
going to have a look at the textbook example this is the average consensus international chrono stratigraphic chart it shows you all the rock layers from yeah the past on the right hand to basically now so and please note the version number up here on the in the right corner
03:04
when I submitted this talk in September it was still 2016-09 so if you thought geologists are working at a glacial pace you're actually right because climate change makes the glaciers move much faster as well and we're going to focus now on the very recent past you have here from
03:25
left to right the hierarchy of geological time units we are currently living in the period of the quaternary and the epoch of the Holocene and that one you can see it on the right there on the time scale started at about 11 700 years ago which is the end of the last
03:42
age and the epoch before that the Pleistocene was the epoch of the switches of ice and warm ages and that's where we humans evolved that's where we come from and now we're living in the Holocene the last important detail here in this crash course are the so-called GSSPs
04:00
again I'm simplifying a bit just keep in mind it's the so-called golden spikes and these are needed by the geologists to define the boundary layers between the strata so they can for example in the case of the Holocene be a shift in deuterium concentration in a particular ice core from the Greenland ice sheet and there are different types of methods to define
04:24
them for example chemical process chemical properties physics physical properties but also as this comic shows the fossil record for example here in the middle in the green mesozoic that was basically Jurassic Park and you know that had to close because an asteroid hit it and we find
04:44
therefore at the upper layer of the cretaceous period we find a lot of dinosaur fossils and afterwards we find only mammal fossils and in between we also find a chemical signature that is iridium from the asteroid so to summarize please read this yourself I'm going
05:03
to have a little break it started out with a bit of stress for me so I think we're good
05:24
so just please keep these three points in mind for the next part of the talk now we dive into the Anthropocene discussion with the currently running definition and that is that the Anthropocene is the present time interval in which many geologically significant conditions
05:41
and processes are profoundly altered by human activities which have a decisive influence on the state dynamic and future of the earth system conditions and processes we just covered a little bit the human activities well you can guess what they are and I'm going to talk about them a bit more and the state of and dynamics that is the stuff you hear about in the news so
06:03
climate change the ice caps are melting the oceans are acidifying species going extinct and quite importantly their changes in the global cycling of nutrients for our plants such as phosphorus nitrogen and obviously carbon in the form of carbon dioxide
06:21
um what I do want to argue is that these forces are also what will shape the Anthropocene and not as you sometimes hear in the popular press that this is like our age we're in control of this planet and so on because influence is definitely not the same thing as control I mean we are quite influential on many of the processes on this planet but we don't understand them
06:43
completely and some of them will behave in ways that we cannot predict or most of them maybe also the Anthropocene is currently just a concept that has been popularized in 2000 and has been floating around a little bit before that um the guy here on the left mr krutzen he's um a Nobel prize winner for his work on the ozone hole which is actually
07:04
a very positive example that the international community can get together and solve an environmental problem with an economical component quite quickly quite quickly if it is necessary and in the coming years this um epoch will be proposed so again it is just a discussion
07:23
currently and if you're a version control fan like me this would be the equivalent to it is not even staged yet so keep down everyone it will be super interesting but it's nothing to boil up too much now um and one important piece of or a point that I want to make is
07:42
that this concept collects a lot of lot of different parts of the discussion we have on the one hand the geological discussion like how do we define this into geological record but we also of course have all of these environmental problems mixed into it and they are related but sometimes it's necessary to focus just on one of them but still keep the big picture um the people who
08:03
are keeping the big picture are definitely the so-called Anthropocene working group or working group on the Anthropocene they are located at the University of Lake Leicester and that's their secretariat but of course it's a global consortium of scientists from a range of different disciplines and maybe you noticed this summer the discussion
08:25
did boil up a little bit because there was a vote and a like a intermediary report about how this working group wants to continue preparing from a formalization proposal and what I want to do now in the next part is to walk you through of these voting options
08:43
and explain a little bit what they mean what their background is and how they were received and the two core points are that they are discussing which which golden spike do we want to use which chemical signal in the geologic record and of course closely tied to that is the question when did the Anthropocene start or when will the start be defined and to do
09:06
that we're going to use this awesome xkcd chart no not yet oh there we are okay and we start at the end of the last ice age you see in the middle this white part is
09:20
basically the minus one degree plus one degree range that our civilization has experienced because that's after the last ice age we started settling down we started developing agriculture and also one clearly negative impact already maybe not in the case of this predator but we did have a hand in the extinction of many large mammals so wherever we went on this
09:43
planet on every continent we find evidence that very quickly after humans arrive the big mammals start to vanish in some cases there's a climate change component in it but sometimes we just hunted them down the keywords here are megafauna extinction and defaunation in case you're interested and these three parts for example are these three
10:05
sub-discussions they are visible in the archaeologic record and also in the chemical record in the geology and therefore there has been the suggestion that basically the whole Holocene should be replaced with the so-called Anthropocene however this has received little
10:21
attention by the working group so we move on a few thousand years and now we have all over the world cultures and civilizations rising and with that of course you can imagine you need some level of intensive agriculture so for example converting forest land into farmland mechanically tilling the farmland fertilizing it and in some cases even changing the morphology
10:45
of the landscape to suit the particular crop that is grown in some regions so because we find these signals all over the world and still after hundreds and thousands of years you can still detect chemically that a particular soil was created by humans this is called anthropogenic
11:04
soils and yeah there were a few more votes but essentially there's a delay here I'm sorry
11:21
okay it was rejected let's leave it at that then we move on now you're going to see the replay I'm already at the next slide is there anything we can do okay well we go to one obvious candidate the industrial revolution as you know the
11:44
coal the fossil fuel coal was became the major energy source and with it came the pollution from coal dust from coal soot and now because especially the european nations they basically conquered the world they brought this pollution with them
12:03
so finally now we also have a global signal of anthropogenic pollution however for some reason this option was also rejected so and now the question becomes political because up to now all of this has happened in the very far away past and nobody alive was
12:22
basically at fault but now we're entering the 20th century and yeah for the geologists fortunately a lot of candidates can be used here in the geological record not so fortunately for us there's also a third one which is not in the xkcd chart and that is the plastics from
12:46
convenience products that of course rises arise with a consumer culture and there is already evidence that this is entering the geological record for example in this case from hawaii where of course volcanic activity creates new rock all the time plastic trash is simply incorporated
13:03
and additionally microplastic particles are in all of the oceans and they also sink down into the sediments so now we have a show so sorry um the plastic part was also rejected although quite an interesting uh stratigraphic evidence in my opinion and now we basically have a little
13:21
showdown between the nuclear weapons here and the fossil fuel emissions but before we resolve this showdown i'm a bit lucky that both of these topics have been featured at this conference before so i encourage you to re-watch these talks in january as early as possible before you have a big tsunami of all of these talks here there is interestingly a connection
13:44
between these topics so on the one hand we have this engineering and physical and of course political topic of the nuclear weapons and on the other hand geology chemistry and climate science and archaeology plays into this as well you maybe know the so-called radio carbon method that is used to determine the age of biological samples so you know that in the
14:06
atmosphere there's a certain amount of radioactive carbon 14 that filters down to co2 to the plants the animals and when yeah some kind of living organism stops breathing the decay starts both on the biological side and also in terms of radioactive carbon and when you find a biological
14:24
sample you can measure how much a radiocarbon is left and thereby calculate backwards with the help of the half-life which is 5370 years how old the sample is but because we because of the nuclear weapons testing we have added a lot of it is um delayed again a bit
14:46
i'm not going to use the slides.com again yeah or only with the land cable then it might work okay now you see it okay um this is the so-called radiocarbon bomb spike so we added a lot of carbon 14 into the atmosphere so biological samples that were generated in this time
15:06
start out with a lot more radioactive carbon so in the future archaeological record they will appear much younger than they actually are however in the near future we will reach the equilibrium point basically or the baseline again and then depending on which of these
15:26
representative concentration pathways we take future samples will appear much older because we diluted the radioactive carbon from the nuclear weapons testing with fossil fuel emissions from
15:40
the coal and the oil we are burning and you can easily imagine with 5370 years half-life the fossil fuels are millions and millions of years old they do not contain any radioactive carbon anymore so we are in effect polluting both the present and the future but also the past or the future's past so now this is quite an interesting golden spike but also rejected
16:12
so and now we basically have the end of this showdown we have on the one hand the plutonium fallout and the fossil fuels they produce two possible golden spikes that is of course the
16:24
the fuel ashes and also the co2 concentration in the atmosphere yeah and the final vote was 10 to 5 basically for the nuclear weapons and remember i mean we're talking about geologists here they need to have stuff in the sediments in the rocks so something that actually falls out
16:43
of the sky and then even is radioactive in the rock is a much more interesting signal to look for than something that stays in the sky and now i want to make two important points here i mean i was talking about this a bit nonchalantly but these are of course quite problematic and horrible topics but now the chart goes on we have the the problem here that science sometimes
17:08
needs to be a bit devoid of emotions to keep a clear head because that's how it works now we stick to the science but we don't we shouldn't forget that these are quite horrible topics in some cases and also we have a mixture here now again as i mentioned before between the yeah
17:25
geological part of the discussion which is purely on the nuclear weapons side of the discussion and all the ecological problems that arise from fossil fuel emissions and the chart goes on as you know robin frank talked about this last year so i encourage you to also re-watch
17:45
this talk again and now the geologists have basically everything they need they have a clear goal what to search for in the stratigraphic records this will take the regular amount of time in science like projects are going on expeditions are mounted drill course will be drilled and in a
18:05
few years there will most likely be a formally a formal proposal to have the Anthropocene accepted as an epoch in the geological record and then the international commission on stratigraphy will vote on it that part i don't know how long it will take and i have not read any
18:21
good estimates in some cases this has taken many many decades and those are not influenced by the glaciers but when they do we can be pretty sure that this nice international stratigraphic chart will be updated quite quickly so and sticking to the to the theme of this congress i mean does it still work right now
18:42
it does not really i mean you saw these um the representative concentration pathways here they are from the ipcc um we're on this path currently and uh just from a few days ago the co2 reading in the atmosphere is over 400 ppm before the industrial age it was 280.
19:03
so and please notice that these are not fossil fuel emissions these are concentration pathways so they include natural sources for greenhouse gases so we have to account for that as well but what we need to do definitely is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions
19:21
a few years ago the recommendation was by 10 each year let's make it 20 to be safe you know so if you want to do something try to identify something in your life that directly produces fossil fossil fuel emissions or greenhouse gas emissions and 20 is an easy
19:41
thing to calculate just try to do 20 less of it also this is of course not an individual thing to solve this also needs um global campaigns you probably know the students divestment campaign in the u.s where students try to convince their administrations in the
20:01
universities to stop investing endowment funds into fossil fuel companies we also need to stop the operations that we're currently doing because just the resources that we have already tapped will most likely push us past the two degree goal or 1.5 degree goal that was um at the paris climate conference last year was agreed politically so the so-called stranded assets that
20:26
they that the companies have in their books they are worthless and also the stuff that they think they have found that is also worthless basically and one yeah maybe a bit more critical thing is you can still study how to find and extract fossil fuel resources in universities
20:45
so we also have to think about maybe we need to divest educationally as well because it's maybe it's not ethical to train young people for jobs that will not be available in the future yeah also there's um closely related to education is of course behavior and there we have a problem
21:04
with a so-called rebound effect um so you sometimes expect to save some amount of energy or some amount of resources if you introduce a new technology for example but then the adaptation of behavior of people eats up all of these savings so in the worst case you can
21:22
even have a backfire effect that for example people drive more cars if they buy more fuel efficient cars and thereby in total all over the world the um the savings are not actually realized at all and by the way if you know an example of the so-called super conservation where not only do you save everything that you were expecting but you save actually more please let
21:43
me know i try to find something no so we have as i mentioned before the cars i mean the engines are getting more efficient all the time but the cars get heavier more functions are built in they use more energy in total also in this community we get more batteries better batteries
22:01
all the time but we use our devices much more intensively so many of us require apparently external batteries so these are behavioral problems of course and um i don't want to pick on gitlab specifically because they really build a great product but what they are advertising is what i would like to label convenience computing CPUs are becoming more
22:23
efficient computing becomes cheaper and cheaper so we use it just for every single little thing that we can imagine and this is ineffective behavior that invalidates the improvements in technology that we definitely have but the solution or the the takeaway point here is that
22:41
technology alone will not save us so we have to adapt the behavior a little bit or not a little bit so to start the summary i think i'm good in time um i'm answering my own questions a little bit um so it is not yet a new geological epoch but it will be in a few years or it will
23:02
at least be proposed and then we will see um did we do it yep was it an accident this is interesting um more than 100 years ago the discussion whether co2 or in this case carbonic acid in the air um might actually be a problem for us was already going on i mean
23:22
the pollution directly from coal was very visible but also the understanding that increases in co2 concentration will change the chemistry of the atmosphere was already known and there's also i think this is something rob and frank called for last year there is a campaign
23:43
to prosecute the managers of axon mobile because they um through some leaks we learned that they were internally conducting a pretty good research actually on how fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions and climate change were related in the 70s and 80s but they still continue to mislead
24:01
the public as for example the tobacco industry did about the health risks of smoking for a long time as well so it was not an accident and the welcome part well that is on us of course i want to quickly give you an overview of the blogs and podcasts that are used for this research also you saw maybe the academic references in some places as well these are
24:26
all highly recommendable and the slides are online as well so that's how the opening ceremony closed you know and also if you saw the movie yeah let's get to it this is not too difficult to do thanks thank you very much let's see if we have any questions
24:56
okay micro five minutes okay everything from the internet maybe the IRC channel
25:01
i mean while people line up i already got one question from the internet myself that i can already answer um yeah the Anthropocene will of course end at some point most likely when there's a different type of influence globally that a new type of yeah strata will form and a future generation of geologists will find the next gold spike how long that will take you see
25:26
down there there's current research that probably the sea level rise for example will go on for many many thousand years so what we most likely have already done is to stop the cycle of ice ages and warm ages that was actually due so maybe we're lucky but only we i see we have one
25:45
question for microphone three uh thank you for your very dense uh um bringing everyone up to speed on the Anthropocene i've been following it for some time because in how uh halster kulturin in berlin has been covering it for about four years
26:00
and now they've moved on to a new framing of the issue called technosphere and in both of these terms for me where the controversy gets really intense and perhaps the struggle gets very intense is that the term and the way it's being used by the academic departments is a bit
26:22
confusing the issue in a way that points the blame on us as a human species and there's another analysis that points the blame at something like the capitalist scene or the corpora scene and it's that this the systems of of our society's operating mechanisms are really
26:43
are behind something that could and looks very catastrophic for not only the human species but millions of species and in fact we're perhaps moving into what's being called a sixth mass extinction and the anthropocene the problem is that it's almost like it's it's describing
27:06
it in a way that oh we can handle this with some technological solutions and it's really kind of something that's out of control and and it obfuscates the fact that we really need to like kind of repair nature rather than thinking we're going to fix nature for our
27:23
benefit now and so it's it's a really long debate and i've been following this for some time but i think it's really something to extend the conversation from what you just gave us for information so i thank you for that and if you've heard about this technosphere i would ask you if you know where that's leading um not about this particular term thanks i brought it down
27:44
research it um yeah i did mention this mix-up and i agree it is an extremely different a difficult topic with many sub-topics um i can agree only with you i know i'll be available
28:01
later for discussion up here thank you very much if there are no further questions i will thank her once again how about a big round of applause for her