AI in The Anthropocene
Saturday, 29 Aug 2026
The Anthropocene is the mostly scientific name given to the period of geological time, where humanity has become a planetary force of change - this is to say, that we are altering the earth at such a scale that it will be visible from space, and may be irrevocably recorded in the geological history of our plaent.
In general, we pin this to events such as the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the acceleration of the usage of fossil fuels, or to more recent events such as the first nuclear bomb test.
However, the most defining event of my generation is, without question, Climate change, or as I typically refer to it now, the Climate Apocalypse, for that is what it is.
What we know, is that the consumption of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas, combined with the impact on biodiversity loss, are rapidly moving the entire planet’s temperature to a point where the changes in weather, rainfall patterns, and temperature, will make large swathes of the planet unavoidably uninhabitable.
Scientific evidence for the catastrophic and self-infliced impact is so overwhelming, I’m not even going to bother linking to it. Instead, you can review the actual situation, all across the world.
Rising Temperatures
That the planet’s average temperature, across land and sea, globally, is increasing, is not in question. The impacts are unavoidable. Massive out-of-control wildfires and horrific storms are on every continent and landmass apart from Antarctica. You can look them up at leisure using GDACS but here are some headliners from 2026 so far:
- [Algeria], Argentina, and Australia
- Britain, Scotland, France and Spain
- India, China, and Nepal
- Canada and Southwest and Central & Eastern United States
The ocean, covering most of the planet’s surface, and providing a massive and significant reservoir of both CO2 and temperature buffers, is no different. The [Altantic] and Pacific oceans, and every other sea system besides, is reporting record temperatures.
Even in [Antarctica] and Greenland, systemic and massive ice mass loss is perturbing everything from the surface itself, to water flow, salinity, and weather patterns across the globe.
Finding Out
We have had, arguably, more than 50 years to find a smooth and risk-free path to decarbonising our economies, and clearly we have not done a decent job of that, in fact we have not really done very much at all.
We now face an uncomfortable truth: the tipping points are being reached, and exceeded, and we are still not reducing our overall emissions. The impacts of our historical emissions will remain with us for hundreds of years, if we do not drastically change our overall emissions, this will be thousands of years, and maybe even an extinction event.
With the forecast for El Niño being off the charts, the risk continues to grow.
We have reached a point where our ability to extract and leverage fossil fuel resources, is in the very near future, going to impact the food security, water access, and lifespan of most of humanity.
With that rather gloomy prelude, what does this have to do with AI, and even more to the point, with FreeBSD?