Our technologies have gotten way ahead of our ability to control or even understand their effects, largely because we don't know how to look far enough ahead. This is why our society has not grasped the seriousness of disrupting the global climate or causing mass extinctions.
We need to understand, how our special moment of human existence fits into the larger scales of cosmic time. We live in the middle of the best period for life on Earth!
That period began about half a billion years ago, when - thanks to micro-organisms - the earth acquired the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we all breath today. That's when all the large creatures started to evolve.
It will end in about half a billion years, when the increasing heat of the sun evaporates all the water which will ultimately be lost.
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