The Noöcene  

Just a token post tonight - Jamais Cascio (flirting with danger lately as he takes photographs of critical pieces of infrastructure and risks provoking a cold war style response) gets yet another award for word of the day - the Noöcene.

Word of the Day: Anthropocene -- the current geological era, marked by the accelerating human impact on the Earth. The term was first used in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a scientist who has popped up again last year as an advocate of looking at what would and wouldn't work in geoengineering.

The question that comes to my mind, of course, is "what follows the Anthropocene?"

If our civilization is destroyed, there won't be anyone to name the era, so let's set that scenario aside.

If we suffer a significant die-back, and the planet starts to revert to pre-human influence conditions, then we'd probably end up calling it something like the "Rehabilicene."

My bet, though, would be a world in which our information sensing, communication and analysis tools are so pervasive that they change every aspect of how we understand and manage the planet around us. A world so fully enriched by knowledge could only be called one thing:

The Noöcene.