The answer depends entirely on which framework you’re using, and several of them are true at once. Geologically, we live in the Holocene epoch, specifically its most recent subdivision, the Meghalayan stage, which began about 4,250 years ago. Culturally and technologically, many historians place us in the Information Age, a period defined by digital computing and global connectivity. And then there’s the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch recognizing humanity as a planetary force, which geologists formally considered and then rejected in 2024. These labels aren’t competing answers so much as different lenses trained on the same moment, and understanding how they overlap reveals something genuinely strange about the period we inhabit.
The Holocene Is Still Officially Running
If you open an up-to-date geological time scale, the current epoch is the Holocene, and it has been since the end of the last ice age roughly 11,700 years ago. The Holocene sits within the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era, and in 2018 it was formally split into three stages. The oldest is the Greenlandian, covering the early post-glacial period. The middle stage, the Northgrippian, begins around 8,236 years before 2000 CE, marked by a sharp cooling event recorded in a Greenland ice core. The most recent, the Meghalayan, starts around 4,250 years before 2000 CE, anchored by evidence of a global drought preserved in a cave formation in northeastern India.1Journal of Quaternary Science. Subdividing the Holocene Series/Epoch: formalization of stages/ages and subseries/subepochs, and designation of GSSPs and auxiliary stratotypes These subdivisions were formally ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences in June 2018.2Episodes. Formal ratification of the subdivision of the Holocene Series/Epoch (Quaternary System/Period): two new Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSPs) and three new stages/subseries
The Holocene is the shortest epoch on the geological time scale. The one before it, the Pleistocene, lasted about 2.6 million years. By contrast, the Holocene’s roughly 11,700-year span is a geological blink, yet it encompasses everything from the invention of agriculture to the launch of satellites. That compression matters, because it raises a question geologists have been arguing about for more than a decade: has human activity pushed the Earth system into something new enough to deserve its own epoch?
The Anthropocene Proposal and Its Rejection
The term “Anthropocene” has been floating around since the early 2000s, and it entered formal scientific review through the Anthropocene Working Group, a team of researchers tasked with evaluating whether the concept met the criteria for a new geological epoch. In 2023, the group submitted a formal proposal to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, suggesting that the Anthropocene began around 1950, with a “golden spike” (the technical term for the physical marker in rock or sediment that defines the boundary) located in the lake-bed sediments of Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada.3Paragrana. Dating the Dawn of the Anthropocene
The proposal was rejected. After fifteen years of debate, the commission voted against it, concluding that the proposal did not meet the criteria for establishing a new geological epoch.4Journal of Quaternary Science. The Anthropocene: Proposal, rejection, consequences, alternatives, and a lesson The rejection was widely reported as geologists saying no to the Anthropocene.5PubMed. Geologists reject the Anthropocene as Earth’s new epoch – after 15 years of debate This doesn’t mean scientists doubt that humans have transformed the planet. The objection was procedural and definitional: whether the evidence fits the specific rules for drawing a line on the geological time scale. Many of the researchers who voted against the proposal still use “Anthropocene” informally to describe the present era of human dominance.
The rejection left the Anthropocene without formal geological status. It remains a widely used concept in Earth system science, ecology, and the humanities, but as of now it is not an official unit of geological time. You are living in the Meghalayan stage of the Holocene epoch, on paper.
What the Geological Evidence Actually Shows
Even without formal epoch status, the physical evidence that something dramatic happened to Earth’s systems around the mid-twentieth century is hard to dismiss. The Crawford Lake site chosen for the proposed golden spike preserves annual layers of sediment (varves) going back centuries, and the signals embedded in those layers tell a striking story. Spheroidal carbonaceous particles, tiny soot balls produced by burning fossil fuels, spike dramatically in the early 1950s, with concentrations roughly quadrupling within a few years. Plutonium isotopes from nuclear weapons testing appear sharply between the late 1940s and early 1950s, peaking in the mid-1960s as above-ground testing reached its height.6PubMed Central. The varved succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a candidate Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene series
Crawford Lake isn’t unique. A global compilation of high-precision-dated records from 137 sites across every continent found that diverse markers of human activity surged in near-unison starting in 1952, give or take three years. Whether you look at sediment chemistry in Antarctica, lake cores in East Asia, peat bogs in Europe, or coral records in the Pacific, the same fingerprints show up in the same narrow window.7PubMed Central. Toward defining the Anthropocene onset using a rapid increase in anthropogenic fingerprints in global geological archives The synchrony is what makes the mid-twentieth century stand out from earlier periods of human impact. Humans have been reshaping landscapes for thousands of years, but the simultaneous, planetwide acceleration visible in the 1950s is without precedent in the geological record.
The Great Acceleration
Scientists call this post-1950 surge the “Great Acceleration,” a term drawn from a set of graphs originally published in 2004 that tracked two dozen social and environmental indicators from 1750 to the present. The socioeconomic trends, including population growth, energy use, water consumption, and international tourism, all bend sharply upward after 1950. The Earth system indicators, including atmospheric carbon dioxide, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss, and surface temperature, follow the same trajectory.8The Anthropocene Review. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration Updated versions of these graphs through 2010 showed that economic activity continued growing rapidly and most Earth system indicators kept rising, with only a handful (like stratospheric ozone loss) showing signs of leveling off.
One particularly vivid measure of this transformation: as of roughly 2020, the total mass of everything humans have built, including concrete, steel, asphalt, glass, and plastic, equals or exceeds the mass of all living things on Earth. That figure, about 1.1 teratonnes, has been doubling approximately every twenty years.9PubMed. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass In other words, the weight of our cities, roads, and infrastructure now rivals the weight of every tree, fish, insect, and bacterium combined. That crossover point, reached within the lifetimes of people alive today, captures something about the present era that no single label quite manages.
The Sixth Mass Extinction
The flip side of all that building is biological loss. Analyses of vertebrate extinction rates find that species are disappearing at roughly a hundred times the natural background rate over the past century, a pace consistent with the early stages of what researchers call the sixth mass extinction.10PubMed Central. Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction But outright extinction of species is only part of the picture. Looking at population-level data paints an even starker picture: among nearly half of all known vertebrate species examined in one global analysis, about a third were shrinking in both population size and geographic range. Among 177 well-studied mammal species, every single one had lost at least 30 percent of its range, and over 40 percent had experienced severe declines of 80 percent or more.11PubMed Central. Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines
The process appears to be accelerating. Species that have already been pushed to the brink tend to cluster geographically in regions of high human impact, meaning their decline drags down other species that depend on them. Extinction breeds more extinction through cascading ecological disruption.12PubMed Central. Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction Whether or not you call the present era the Anthropocene, the biological signature is real and it will be readable in the fossil record millions of years from now.
Planetary Boundaries and How Many We’ve Crossed
A complementary way to characterize the present era is through the planetary boundaries framework, which attempts to define the safe operating space for human civilization based on nine critical Earth system processes. A 2023 update found that six of the nine boundaries have been transgressed: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus cycles), and the introduction of novel entities like synthetic chemicals and plastics. Ocean acidification is close to being breached. Aerosol loading exceeds the boundary regionally. Only stratospheric ozone has shown slight recovery.13PubMed Central. Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries
The word “boundary” can be misleading. Crossing a planetary boundary doesn’t mean instant catastrophe; it means the Earth system has moved outside the conditions that characterized the stable Holocene and into territory where abrupt or irreversible changes become more likely. The fact that six out of nine have been crossed, with the transgression level increasing for all of them, suggests the present moment is not a gradual drift but a rapid departure from the conditions under which human civilizations developed.
The Information Age as a Cultural Periodization
All of the above describes our era in physical and biological terms. Culturally, the most common label for the present is the Information Age, sometimes called the Digital Age, generally understood to have begun in the latter decades of the twentieth century with the rise of personal computing, the internet, and mobile connectivity. Unlike geological epochs, cultural periodizations don’t come with formal ratification by international committees. They emerge by rough consensus among historians and commentators, and their boundaries are fuzzy. Some date the Information Age from the invention of the transistor in 1947; others point to the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s.
What makes the Information Age label meaningful is the shift it describes in how economies and societies are organized. For most of human history, wealth was tied to land and physical labor. The Industrial Age, spanning roughly the late eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, moved the center of gravity to factories and energy. The Information Age moved it again, to data processing and knowledge work. The majority of economic output in high-income countries now comes from services, software, and information management rather than physical manufacturing.
There’s growing discussion about whether artificial intelligence represents a further transition, possibly into a distinct technological paradigm beyond the Information Age. Research tracking AI patent activity found that AI innovators increased by about 338 percent between the early 2000s and mid-2010s, and companies filing AI patents tended to dramatically increase their non-AI patent output as well, suggesting the technology acts as a catalyst across sectors.14ScienceDirect (Structural Change and Economic Dynamics). Is artificial intelligence leading to a new technological paradigm? Whether this amounts to a new “era” or a phase within the Information Age is a question without a settled answer, partly because we’re still inside the transition.
Alternative Framings and Why They Matter
Not everyone is satisfied with “Anthropocene” as a description of the current era of environmental change, even as an informal term. The word implies that all humans share equal responsibility for planetary transformation, which critics argue obscures the highly unequal distribution of industrial activity and resource consumption. One prominent alternative is the “Capitalocene,” advanced by the environmental historian Jason W. Moore, which emphasizes the role of capital accumulation and specific economic systems in driving planetary change rather than humanity as a whole.15The Anthropocene Review. From the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene and beyond
These naming debates are not purely academic. How you periodize history shapes what you think caused the problems and therefore what solutions seem possible. If the crisis began with the species Homo sapiens becoming too numerous and too clever, the implication is that the problem is deeply rooted in human nature. If it began with a particular mode of economic organization that emerged in the sixteenth or eighteenth century, then political and economic restructuring becomes the relevant response. The labels carry freight.
How the Present Compares to Deep Time
One way to grasp how unusual the current moment is, regardless of what you call it, is to compare it to events deep in Earth’s past. The most commonly cited analogue is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, a rapid warming event about 56 million years ago caused by a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere. The PETM is the closest thing the geological record offers to what’s happening now, and the comparison is not comforting. Modern anthropogenic carbon emission rates are roughly nine to ten times higher than estimated rates during the onset of the PETM.16Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology. Temporal Scaling of Carbon Emission and Accumulation Rates: Modern Anthropogenic Emissions Compared to Estimates of PETM Onset Accumulation If current emission trends continue, we could accumulate PETM-scale atmospheric carbon in as few as five to ten human generations.
Temperature change tells a similar story. The mean rate of warming since 1750 exceeds the PETM warming rate by about an order of magnitude and outpaces the warming rate at the end of the last ice age by a similar factor.17PubMed. Cenozoic mean greenhouse gases and temperature changes with reference to the Anthropocene The PETM lasted thousands of years and caused widespread ecological upheaval, including major shifts in ocean chemistry and the extinction of many deep-sea organisms. The fact that we are pushing comparable amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but far more quickly gives scientists reason to suspect the ecological consequences could be at least as severe, and potentially harder for ecosystems to adapt to because the pace leaves less time for evolutionary adjustment.
An Astrobiological Perspective on Planetary Eras
There’s a less commonly discussed but genuinely fascinating angle on what era we’re in: the view from astrobiology. A group of researchers have proposed that Earth’s entry into what we loosely call the Anthropocene might represent a predictable stage in planetary evolution, one that could happen on any world where a technological species arises. They developed a classification scheme for planets based on the thermodynamic state of their coupled systems, distinguishing between worlds with no biosphere, worlds with a biosphere, and worlds with what they call an “agency-dominated biosphere,” meaning a planet where an energy-intensive technological species has become the primary driver of planetary processes.18Anthropocene. Earth as a Hybrid Planet: The Anthropocene in an Evolutionary Astrobiological Context
Related modeling work has explored the generic dynamics of what happens when a civilization harvests planetary resources and feeds waste products back into its environment. Using simplified mathematical models, researchers showed that several trajectories are possible, some leading to sustainability, others to population collapse, others to a degraded but stable equilibrium.19PubMed. The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution of Exo-Civilizations and Their Planetary Feedback The point isn’t that alien civilizations exist (that remains unknown) but that the transition Earth is experiencing may be a general phenomenon, something any sufficiently energy-hungry species would trigger on any planet with the right conditions. From this vantage, the question “what era are we in” becomes “what stage is this planet in,” and the answer is that we’re at a fork where the long-term trajectory hasn’t yet been determined.
Artifacts Beyond Earth
One more way to think about our era, and this one rarely comes up in geological or cultural discussions: we are the first period in Earth’s history that has left physical traces on other worlds. Since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, humans have deposited hardware on the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn’s moon Titan, and several asteroids and comets. A growing body of work in what researchers call planetary geoarchaeology examines these off-world artifacts the same way archaeologists study human-made objects on Earth, analyzing site formation processes and the traces our presence leaves in extraterrestrial sediments and surfaces.20Geoarchaeology. Planetary geoarchaeology as a new frontier in archaeological science: Evaluating site formation processes on Earth’s Moon
There are now spent rocket stages in solar orbit, flags and footprints in lunar regolith, and decommissioned rovers slowly being buried by Martian dust. These artifacts will persist for geological timescales on worlds with no erosion or weathering. Whatever we call the present era on Earth, it is the first that has written itself into the geological record of other bodies in the solar system. The Apollo landing sites on the Moon, undisturbed by wind or water, may outlast every trace of our civilization on this planet.