You've made an excellent and entertaining case, though it feels like a better case for identifying the likely future signature than for naming the epoch. Even if we can't know what, a million years hence, the sedimentary/fossil record will look like, it seems a fair bet that human activity will have marked it. Hence the Anthropocene. I'm not crazy about the word - awkward and hinting at hubris - despite having built my writing around it. But it still seems the most appropriate, even if only as an editorial attempt to wake us up to the fate we're making. I like the sound and sense of Plasticene, as I like Stephen Pyne's Pyrocene (https://www.stephenpyne.com/disc.htm), but they seem only to capture a facet of the larger transformation.
https://geologyscience.com/geology-branches/paleontology/geologic-time-scale/
Better link to the time scale
You've made an excellent and entertaining case, though it feels like a better case for identifying the likely future signature than for naming the epoch. Even if we can't know what, a million years hence, the sedimentary/fossil record will look like, it seems a fair bet that human activity will have marked it. Hence the Anthropocene. I'm not crazy about the word - awkward and hinting at hubris - despite having built my writing around it. But it still seems the most appropriate, even if only as an editorial attempt to wake us up to the fate we're making. I like the sound and sense of Plasticene, as I like Stephen Pyne's Pyrocene (https://www.stephenpyne.com/disc.htm), but they seem only to capture a facet of the larger transformation.