Vita Sapien Diagram

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Meet the Anthronaut. Formed from a nautilus shell and a human skull, the Anthronaut reminds us that some species live for hundreds of millions of years and that others shuffle off the mortal coil quite quickly. If humans can en-masse reignite our innate spiritual bond to nature, our species might persist on Earth deep into the Long Future.

In the diagram below, the lower blue oval represents the past 1.2 million years with the Earth cycling between ice ages. The red dashed line shows the planet heating up as a result of human carbon emissions. Humans will either control the heating - by euthanizing the fossil fuel industry and drawing a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere - or the heating will continue into the Hothouse which will kill-off most life on Earth, with humans amongst the first to go. 

If we are to enter the Verdant Age, we need a global, mass spiritual awakening to nature and the behavior that follows from this. The Vita Sapien Diagram is based in the 2018 science paper linked below: Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 

Also on this page, Vita Sapien founder Guy Lane interviews Prof Will Steffen, lead author of the paper on the contemporary understanding of the climate crisis.