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One way to view the history of science is as a repeated puncturing of humanity’s claims to be special.
看待科學史的一種方式是把它看作是對人類聲稱自我特殊性的一再戳穿。
In scientific terms Homo sapiens is an oddly hairless species of ape that has existed for 200,000 years—an eyeblink in Earth’s 4.5bn-year history.
用科學術語來說，智人是一種奇怪的無毛猿類，已經存在了20萬年——不過在地球45億年的歷史中只是一眨眼的功夫。
For the past couple of decades, though, some scientists have been arguing that perhaps humans do deserve a bit of special recognition after all.
然而，在過去的幾十年里，一些科學家一直在爭論，也許人類的確應該得到一些特殊的認可。
In 2000 Paul Crutzen, a Dutch meteorologist and chemist, suggested that human influence over Earth was sufficiently profound that its effects would remain visible in the geological record for millions of years.
2000年，荷蘭氣象學家和化學家保羅·克魯岑提出，人類對地球的影響非常深遠，其影響將在數百萬年的地質記錄中保持可見。
For that reason, he argued, it was time to bring down the curtain on the Holocene—the current geological epoch, which has lasted for the past 12,000 years or so—and ring in a new one: the Anthropocene.
基于這個原因，他認為，是時候為持續了大約12000年的全新世——目前的地質時代劃上句號，并且開啟一個新的時代:人類世。
The idea quickly caught on.
這個想法很快就流行起來。
In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group (awg), an appendage of the International Union of Geological Sciences (iugs), voted in favour of adopting it in principle.
2016年，國際地質科學聯合會的附屬機構，人類世工作組投票贊成在原則上采用這一標準。
And on July 11th it suggested a precise geological feature, dating back to the 1950s, that could mark the Anthropocene’s beginning.
7月11日，它提出了一個精確的地質特征，可以追溯到20世紀50年代，這可能標志著人類世的開始。
The committee recommended bestowing the honour upon sediments laid down at the bottom of Crawford Lake, a flooded sinkhole about 20 miles from Toronto.
委員會建議將這一榮譽授予克勞福德湖底的沉積物，克勞福德湖底是一個被洪水淹沒的天坑，距離多倫多約20英里。
The beginning of the Holocene was marked by a natural warming of the climate and the retreat of the world’s ice sheets.
全新世開始的標志是氣候的自然變暖和世界冰蓋的縮減。
The idea behind the Anthropocene is that human activity has disturbed the planet on a similarly grand scale.
人類世背后的觀點是，人類活動對地球造成了類宏大規模的干擾。
Humans have boosted the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by about half in the past 250 years, to its highest level in around 3m years.
在過去的250年里，人類使大氣中的二氧化碳濃度增加了大約一半，達到了300萬年來的最高水平。
That spike will be clearly visible to geologists 100,000 years from now, assuming any exist, and may have delayed the start of the next ice age by tens of thousands of years.
假設它在10萬年后仍然存在的話，那時的地質學家將清晰地發現這個尖峰，它可能將下一個冰河時代的開始推遲數萬年。
