Parag Khanna is the author of Connectography (2016) and The Future is Asian (2019). Michael Ferrari is managing partner at Atlas Research Innovations and a senior fellow at the Wharton School.

“If you look at Google Earth, it’s springtime everywhere,” explains Gopal Shah, Google Earth’s product manager, in a YouTube interview. In a TED talk he boasts that Google Earth is “cloud-free,” since the clouds and their shadows are edited out.

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX.

What does it mean to be alive right now? Right now. Right this second, right this epoch, as mankind alters the Earth beyond recognition.

We should never have called it Earth. Three quarters of the planet’s surface is saltwater, and most of it does not lap at tranquil beaches for our amusement. The ocean is deep; things are lost at sea.

Here comes private space travel — with cocktails, retro-futuristic Philippe Starck designs and Wi-Fi. Just $55 million a trip!

After three record-breaking hurricanes hammered America last year, the influential spiritual healer Heather Askinosie wrote a blog post for the Earth.

Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in your mind, hanging in space. Spin it around a bit; kick the tires. Now change one thing about that world.

The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.

A series of energy revolutions—some natural, some technological—built upon one another to give us our rich, diverse biosphere.

Human-engineered structures and gadgets from cities to cellphones now represent an enormous mass weight of nearly 30 trillion tonnes on the planet, or vastly more than the world’s forests or life in the oceans.

Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s environmental reach left a mark in sediments worldwide.

Bringing children into a disintegrating environment used to be a theoretical fear. Now it’s a very real one The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the bigger ones a person will make in life – often the biggest.

“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

Today The Doomsday Clock will have its time recalibrated. In 2015 the scientists set the hands to 23.57 - "due to climate change, the modernization of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia, and the problem of nuclear waste." Is the apocalypse closer or further away? Watch the result live at 13.30 EST. There's really only one way it can go.

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular.

There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of scientists.

The ultimate fate of waste plastic is hazy – but we know future geologists will find traces of a fleeting era written in the stones. Welcome to the Plasticene ONE million years from now, geologists exploring our planet's concrete-coated crust will uncover strange signs of civilisations past.

“The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.”