Creatures of the dawn: How radioactivity unlocked deep time

In September 1928, these new responsibilities to humanity’s deep future were presciently articulated by the geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, two months before he died.

When a journalist interviewed him in his Chicago study, Chamberlin gave a crinkled smile and said he was “a declared believer in large opportunity” for humanity.

Chamberlin pointed to the fact that humanity had only just discovered the “enormous energies” corked up in atoms. “So I think we are really just in the beginning of things, just beginning to learn how to think”. Our speciesis like an infant, he continued. “From the standpoint of the Earth, I am an advocate of a great future”.

More than most, he had already pondered the ethical implications of a ballooning future. Across a 60-year career, he had pioneered theories about climate change: proposing, in 1899, that CO2 causes global warming. He even suggested human activities are altering Earth’s future climate. This demands “altruistic purpose”, in regulating present “action”, to safeguard “generations that may live tens of thousands of years hence”.

And in June 1898 – a month before Curie glacial introduced the term radio-activité – Chamberlin was asserting that our ignorance regarding subatomic processes means that we should be suspicious of Kelvin’s estimates of a meagre future.

When advances in nuclear physics rapidly proved him right on his bullish predictions for Earth’s prospects, he began insisting that the expanding future demands heightening responsibility.

By 1903, he was, on these grounds, claiming that the best actions are those that – compounding over time – snowball into “great things” in the “long ages” ahead.

The “protracted influence” of altruistic actions, rippling forward through eons, amplifies their positive “contribution”. But, by the same token, the same applies to the “ulterior” impact of damaging actions. Prudence therefore demands being mindful of our usage of Earth’s finite “resources”, he sagely suggested.