The Evolution of the Planet

The appearance of humans on planet Earth, and you have to hang around about four and a half billion years before you get humans, it's a big, big deal. We're the first species that can exchange information so richly that information accumulates across generations. So with human beings over 200,000 years, this process of accumulating information has got faster and faster and faster. And the result is we've got more and more powerful until today we dominate change on an entire planet. The entire planet's changing and it's changing in my lifetime because suddenly there is this collective being which is humans who sort of rule the biosphere.