The event horizon : Homo Prometheus and the climate catastrophe / Andrew Y. Glikson.
Glikson, A. Y.
2021
QC903
Available Online

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Title The event horizon : Homo Prometheus and the climate catastrophe / Andrew Y. Glikson.
Author Glikson, A. Y.
ISBN 9783030547349 (electronic bk.)
3030547345 (electronic bk.)
3030547337
9783030547332
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54734-9
Imprint Cham : Springer, 2021.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (142 pages)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1007/978-3-030-54734-9 doi
Call Number QC903
Dewey Decimal Classification 363.738/74
Summary With the advent of global warming and the nuclear arms race, humans are rapidly approaching a moment of truth. Technologically supreme, they manifest their dreams and nightmares in the real world through science, art, adventures and brutal wars, a paradox symbolized by a candle lighting the dark yet burning away to extinction, as discussed in this book. As these lines are being written, fires are burning on several continents, the Earth's ice sheets are melting and the oceans are rising, threatening to flood the planet's coastal zones and river valleys, where civilization arose and humans live and grow food. With the exception of birds like hawks, black kites and fire raptors, humans are the only life form utilizing fire, creating developments they can hardly control. For more than a million years, gathered around campfires during the long nights, mesmerized by the flickering life-like dance of the flames, prehistoric humans acquired imagination, a yearning for omnipotence, premonitions of death, cravings for immortality and conceiving the supernatural. Humans live in realms of perceptions, dreams, myths and legends, in denial of critical facts, waking up for a brief moment to witness a world that is as beautiful as it is cruel. Existentialist philosophy offers a way of coping with the unthinkable. Looking into the future produces fear, an instinctive response that can obsess the human mind and create a conflict between the intuitive reptilian brain and the growing neocortex, with dire consequences. As contrasted with Stapledon's Last and first Man, where an advanced human species mourns the fate of the Earth, Homo sapiens continues to transfer every extractable molecule of carbon from the Earth to the atmosphere, the lungs of the biosphere, ensuring the demise of the planetary life support system."
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Digital File Characteristics text file
PDF
Source of Description Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed December 17, 2020).
Available in Other Form Event Horizon: Homo Prometheus and the Climate Catastrophe.
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Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
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Prologue: From Homo Prometheus to Terra Incognita
Greenhouse gases and mass extinction of species
The K-T impact-triggered hyperthermal event
The Paleocene-Eocene boundary Thermal Maximum
Cenozoic climates
Human origins
Fire and human intelligence
The Gods and the death cult
The war against the forests
Fatal energies
The Anthropocene hyperthermal Collapse of the Earth's life support systems
The Fatal species
An Epilogue.

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