Humanity took a giant leap when it stepped on the Moon. But it wasn't the only one. For thousands of years we have explored, occupied, exploited, and transformed the planet. In recent decades, we have caused more change than in our entire existence. We have surpassed the limits of Earth not only through space exploration, but because we extract resources from nature faster than it can replenish them. We are in the Anthropocene, the age of humans. How did we get here?

ONE SECOND IN THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET

Earth is 4.6 billion years old. We humans are 200,000 years old. This means that if the history of the planet were summarized in one day, we would only appear in the last second. This did not prevent us from building cities, deforesting forests, excavating soils, polluting the oceans and the air, nor from driving other species to extinction, while we became more than 7 billion people. In the face of changes in climate, atmosphere, rivers, and biodiversity, scientists point out that the planet is no longer the same as the one our ancestors encountered, nor the same as the geological epoch in which we have lived for the last 12,000 years, the Holocene, in which the Earth's climate was conducive to our development. Now, they are researching at what point in our history we entered this new epoch, profoundly marked by us, the Anthropocene.

HUMANITY'S LONG JOURNEY

Humanity has traveled a 60,000-year journey from Africa to other continents. It crossed deserts, seas, forests, glaciers, mountain ranges, facing an ice age. Along the way, it created languages, tools, traditions, ways of living and understanding the world. It also learned to cultivate and domesticate animals, showing signs that it was beginning to understand the cycles of nature and the behavior of other species. We reached all the continents 10,000 years ago, and humanity had diversified. Now there were Ethiopian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Sumerian, Hindu, Hia, Greek, Roman, Aboriginal, Melanesian, Inuit, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Maya, Aztec, Inca, Tupi, Pataxó, Nambikwara, Guarani, and countless other peoples.

FIRST TRACES OF OUR PRESENCE

Along with agriculture came the possibility of storing food. With this, some peoples abandoned the simple structure of hunting and gathering, which led them to wander endlessly, for one of cultivation, which formed the basis of the first settlements. The cradles of cities, these places began to be built about 4,000 years ago on the banks of great rivers, such as the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Yellow River in China, the Ganges and Indus in India, the Eurotas in Greece, the Po in Italy, the Rio Grande de Santiago and the Balsas in Mexico. Like hieroglyphs and ancient monuments, these were the first marks we left on the planet. The potential for agriculture would further increase with irrigation canals, plows, and crop rotation, but the cycle of nature itself ensured the regeneration of what was extracted by these peoples.

DOMAIN OF MEMORY, TIME, AND MEASUREMENTS

Five thousand years ago, the development of writing allowed us to control memory, beginning with cuneiform writing which used drawings. Two hundred years later, the observation of the Moon led us to create the first calendars and, with that, we controlled time. The first mathematical texts emerged four thousand years ago in Babylon and Egypt, allowing us to control the measurements of the world. We continued to develop ways of understanding the planet, nature, other species, and ourselves. Information also began to cross the planet from 1440 onwards, with the invention of the printing press, which allowed for mass printing, much faster than any previous technique. Lenses were also created in 1608, microscopes in 1665, in addition to theories about human evolution, the solar system, the cosmos, genetics, and much more.

TERRA UNKNOWN

Scattered across the planet, some peoples became great empires, others remained isolated. Europeans, Africans, and Asians had known each other for a long time, but for centuries they had no contact with the lands they would come to call America and Oceania. The cartography of the planet remained unfinished until the great navigations of the 16th to 18th centuries, when Europeans discovered the territories and peoples of the New World. These expeditions allowed for the ‘discovery of the planet’ as we know it today: six continents, five oceans, hundreds of archipelagos, and thousands of species. But this was a period marked both by the fascination of the discoveries and by the enslavement and decimation of entire peoples. It was also the time when a network of trade routes crossed continents and oceans, encompassing the entire planet.

THE PLANET ENTERS THE WAKE OF INDUSTRY

The planet's landscape began to change radically with the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Factories, machines, inventions, and new occupations removed people from their homes and the countryside, where they were artisans and farmers, to work in the industries of the urban centers that were emerging in Europe and the United States. The invention of steam engines initiated the consumption of fossil fuels, which served as an energy source for industries, replacing animal traction, wind power, and the heat of wood. From then on, coal, oil, and natural gas increasingly drove technological progress. By the 19th century, the entire world was linked to the same model of economic development that transformed nature into a source of resources, and no longer a habitat.

CONCRETE JUNGLES

The marks of humanity on the planet became larger and more evident from the 19th century onwards. Starting with the population and large cities. In England, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, London reached 1 million inhabitants in 1800, being the first modern city to have this number of residents. By 1900, there were already 12 cities with this population, and 15% of the world's population, which was around 1.65 billion, lived in urban areas. These numbers continued to increase. In 1927, there were 2 billion people on the planet; In 1950, the population exceeded 2.5 billion, and in 1960, it reached 3 billion. By the turn of the millennium, the world population was approaching 6 billion, and almost half of it lived in cities. More than 400 cities had over 1 million inhabitants, and 19 had more than 10 million. This growth in just one century becomes even more significant when considering that it took humanity, from its origin 200,000 years ago, until 1800, to reach one billion. Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. Forty-four cities have between 5 and 10 million inhabitants, and 29 have more than 10 million.

EARTH'S OVERLOAD

The accelerated growth of the world's population in the 20th century was accompanied by an increase in the consumption of fossil fuels, food, water, products, and minerals. If nature was once able to replenish what we extracted, this was no longer the case in the 1970s, when the amount of natural resources exploited in a year became greater than nature's capacity to replenish them in the same period. In 1971, we exceeded this limit in December, in 1981, in November; currently, the 'planet's overload' occurs in August. The pressure on the planet is so high that it would take a year and a half for nature to replenish what we consume in a year. But this does not mean that there is an equal distribution of its resources. Inequality is one of the hallmarks of the globalized capitalist world: an American consumes about 11 times more than an African or South Asian and has a carbon footprint 250 times greater than that of an Ethiopian.

ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS

The indiscriminate exploitation of nature has also caused major environmental disasters. Accidents at nuclear power plants such as Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011 continue to claim victims. In 2010 and 2011, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and the Campos Basin damaged habitats and resulted in the loss of human and marine life. The collapse of the Fundão dam in 2015, the largest environmental disaster in Brazil to date, strangled the Rio Doce and affected the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in Minas Gerais.

CONNECTED WORLD

The crossing of long distances was facilitated by the invention of ships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. The speed of information also increased after the printing press, with the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. For these to be possible, cities required the construction of systems with thousands of wires and lead pipes that crossed the subsoil – later replaced by copper cables and, later still, fiber optics. Today, a global conversation takes place in real time through cell phones, the internet, and new information and communication technologies. It crosses the planet via SMS, tweets, and hashtags. The power to communicate is literally in our hands, and the world seems smaller, increasingly connected.

A FINITE PLANET

A new perspective of Earth began to be revealed as all these changes occurred. It was then that humanity could see the planet, its home for 200,000 years, from outer space. The first to have this chance was the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, who was captivated by the blue light surrounding the planet. Then, in 1968, it was the turn of the three Americans aboard Apollo 8 who orbited the Moon and saw Earth from 386,000 kilometers away. Astronaut Bill Anders captured this moment, photographing the surface of the Moon and a hemisphere illuminated by the Sun. Our power has taken us beyond the planet. Today, we make plans to return to the Moon, search for water on Mars, and look for planets outside the Solar System.

Today, we are more than 7 billion people. At this distance, our presence on Earth goes unnoticed, except at night, by the city lights. The beautiful blue color covers the deforestation, droughts, scarcity of fresh water, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, and pollution of the oceans and atmosphere caused by us. But, seen from so far away, we finally understand that the planet has limits, that, contrary to what the current development model leads us to believe, it is finite. And, if we continue at this pace, research indicates that we will need the resources of three planet Earths to meet the demands of the world's population by 2050.