LAUSR

> LUCIUS: What will he find out there, doctor? > > Close-up of Zaius. His face is a mask, his tone enigmatic. > > ZAIUS: His destiny . Mineralogists of a certain age may recognize the above exchange from the 1968 script of Planet of the Apes , a film that expertly parlayed the dread of humankind’s imminent demise into a blockbuster movie. In the famous closing shot, George Taylor—the astronaut played by Charlton Heston—curses humanity as he enters the Forbidden Zone and sees the Statue of Liberty buried chest-high in sand. “Oh, my God! I am back! I am home…You maniacs! You blew it up!” he exclaims when he realizes that his voyage has propelled him forward in time but not in space. The question of what we might find were we to (re)visit the Earth millions of years hence has advanced from science fiction to serious geoscience, and the apprehension in our expectation is embodied by the concept of the Anthropocene. For those geologists who have themselves been on an interstellar excursion for the past two decades and are unaware of the debate, the Anthropocene is a proposed addition to the Geological Time Scale that would terminate the Holocene Epoch at some point in the recent past and mark a new epoch that signals the emergence of humans as a planet-shaping force. First pitched by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), the …