Humanity and its future is a recurring topic of science fiction. Whether it is an apocalyptic future directly inspired by biblical stories, the pessimistic vision of writers on the world and humanity, observations related to the concerns and anxieties of the changes that surround us or whether it is a promising and conquering future where the entire universe revolves around the human being in all the splendor of his ambition, his rage to live, to discover and to master everything that crosses his path, we writers always approach this science fiction topic with the ambition to ask questions and answer them at the same time.
And of course, our aspirations are always and above all to invite the reader to a philosophical, spiritual and sociological but also scientific reflection.
Let's dive if you want into what will be used for this reflection. I have chosen as a setting for the evolution of my characters who will be your guides in this analysis, two eras and more particularly two eras of man.
The first, a time in the history of the Earth and of humanity, opened with the industrial revolution in the 18th century and thus succeeding the Holocene, during which the human species became a major geological force governing the state, the functioning and evolution of the planet.
Without knowing it, we have changed geological eras. We have left the ten thousand years of the Holocene era which, due to its warm and stable temperature, saw the birth of agriculture and industry, after the last great Pleistocene glaciation. And we have entered the Anthropocene, the era of man, this era in which man has become the main geophysical force on the planet, capable of modifying his environment. — (Audrey, “Welcome to a new geological era, the Anthropocene”, in Le Monde, January 14, 2011)
The Anthropocene would correspond to the moment when man became the massively determining factor in the geological evolution of the planet. A living species, ours, is breaking the age-old balance in an accelerated fashion, including by threatening its own survival. — (Catherine Portevin, “The Anthropocene”, in Philosophie Magazine, October 5, 2012)
Popularized by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Paul Crutzen in 1995, the word anthropocene refers to the period that began when human activities left their mark on the entire planet. The Earth, it is understood, has entered a new geological period, marked by the irreversible imprint of humanity on the planet - the Anthropocene, therefore, literally “the age of man”. — (Guillaume Lachenal, “Here lies the anthropocene”, in Liberation, November 13, 2019)
The second era chosen is the one that follows the first one chronologically. The age of man, the era of man, as we will call it here, has therefore lasted since humanity left its irreversible imprint on the planet. But that era is coming to an end. Not because man disappears, but because man changes, so we are entering what was called The New Era. Ours, meanwhile, the one we know, in which we evolve, the one that broke away from the Holocene, will henceforth be called the old era.