The tiny spheroid that we call home hurtles through space as if there were no tomorrow. A thin surface of land and sea, still to be fully understood, covers a molten mass of which we know even less. Surrounding Planet Earth is a cocoon of atmosphere, which we understand rather better.

Times

Recently, we learned that indeed, there may be no tomorrow, since human-made changes are making an impact on the world's ecosystem that could bring to an end life as we have known it. This, in addition to the continuing possibility of a suicidal nuclear war, and the added threat of mass destruction posed by new technologies.

Time as examined by historians began just a few thousand years ago. Earlier geological ages either predated, or proceeded without, significant interference from our ancestors. Respectful in their own way of nature, ‘primitive’ human beings often worshipped the sun and moon, making sacrifices to appease them or the gods of nature. The emergence of Christianity in the West that was to dominate the world for three centuries or more brought about change in this relationship, introducing the idea that man could, or even should, control nature: ‘Sun and moon bow down before Him [God],’ declared a Church of England hymn composed as British imperial influence neared its peak. Confidence was great among some materialists, too. For example, the Soviet historian M. N. Pokrovsky declared in 1931, ‘It is easy to foresee that in future, when science and technique have attained to a perfection which we are as yet unable to visualise, nature will become soft wax in his [man’s] hands which he will be able to cast into whatever form he chooses.’ Sixty years later, by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, such confidence was all too obviously misplaced.

Nearly a century and a half earlier, in 1785, James Hutton read papers to the Royal Society of Edinburgh arguing that the earth had been in existence for much longer than the 6,000 years that appeared to be allowed by Bible, with ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’. A label for the postglacial geological epoch of ten to twelve thousand years was probably suggested by Sir Charles Lyell in 1833: ‘Holocene’, meaning ‘wholly recent’, gradually gained acceptance throughout Europe and beyond.