Humans have caused so many changes to our planet that some experts say we're on par with mass extinctions of eons past. We are equivalent to the asteroid that crushed most of the dinosaurs or the Great Dying that wiped out nearly all life on Earth. Some have proposed calling our current geological age the "Anthropocene," derived from the Greek word "anthropo" for "human."
While it may sound like an accomplishment being able to wield so much influence we can alter our home planet, human activity has done so in dangerously unsustainable ways. Indeed, according to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have caused so many extinctions in the last 500 years that it would have taken 18,000 years for those same genera to have naturally vanished if we had never existed. After all, animals go extinct regularly on geological timescales, but this mass extinction is largely human-driven.
