We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.

Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.

We're talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action, so I'm going to leave it to the reader.

It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.