Imagining a future in which human beings fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering.

Just about everyone has heard that there are no more any locations left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond figures documenting melting glaciers and shrinking types counts. It signals a fresh geological epoch. In The Man made Age group, Christopher Preston argues that what’s most startling about this arriving epoch isn’t only about The Man made Age: Outdesigning Advancement, Resurrecting Varieties, and Reengineering Our World how much influence humans experienced but, more essential, how much deliberate shaping they will start to perform. Emerging technologies guarantee to provide us the energy to take over some of Nature’s most elementary operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it really is that people are abandoning the time in which planetary change is merely the unintended effect of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by technical engineers and technicians means the delivery of the planet’s first Synthetic Age.

Preston describes a variety of technologies that may reconfigure Earth’s very fat burning capacity: nanotechnologies that may restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular developing” that provides unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology’s potential to construct, not just go through, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that may outdesign progression; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to control solar rays by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temps by raising the lighting of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees and shrubs that capture carbon from your breeze.

What does it mean when human beings shift from getting caretakers of the Earth to getting shapers from it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our artificial future? These queries are too vital that you be left towards the engineers.