Jonathan Power’s column reviews Martin Rees’s On the Future, noting that the last hundred centuries of agriculture and urbanization mark an abrupt acceleration in Earth’s history against a 4.5-billion-year backdrop of gradual change.

Astronomical findings place the Sun among roughly 100 billion stars in a galaxy that is itself one of at least 100 billion, with humans as “ashes of long-dead stars” and interstellar contact limited at best to radio signals over tens of thousands of years.

Power concludes that humanity’s brief existence on a “pale blue dot” requires prioritizing honesty, compassion and good governance over war and exploitation, since worrying about cosmic insignificance achieves nothing.

“Suppose aliens existed, and that some had been watching our planet for its entire forty-five million centuries, what would they have seen? Over most of that vast time-span, Earth’s appearance altered very gradually. Continents drifted; ice-cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved and became extinct.

“But just in a tiny sliver of Earth’s history—the last hundred centuries—the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signalled the start of agriculture—and then urbanization.”

We are at the very end of that “sliver”.

So begins a book by Martin Rees, Britain’s former Astronomer Royal, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity.

There is much in this short, very readable book—the disturbing, sometimes positive, sometimes........

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