| Abstract | In 2015, the Earth experienced its hottest year on record (“State of the
Climate,” 2016), and nations from around the world sent representatives to
the United Nations’ 2015 Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France, to
negotiate an agreement to address climate change. The warming climate has
caused many international politicians, artists, lm stars, academics, acti vists
and ordinary citizens alike, to question what the future holds. Many scientists are referring to these changes with a neologism, “the Anthro pocene,”
rst proposed in a short essay by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize winning
atmospheric chemist, and Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, to designate a
new post-Holocene epoch marked by human-caused changes so vast that
they are being considered a geomorphic force of planetary scale (Crutzen
and Stoermer 2000).1 Both climate change and growing eco-social injustices aggravated by it have sparked a number of popular press stories about
the future of Earth, and quite a few movies and television series speculating about possibilities for colonizing and terraforming other planets when
Earth’s systems can no longer support life. The Martian (2015), starring
Matt Damon as a human attempting to grow food in the hostile, dry soils of
the red planet, is only the latest Hollywood blockbuster to speculate about
whether or not Earthlings, utilizing their wits and entrepreneurial spirit,
might nd ways to survive in outer space.2 |
