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Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

As scientists have discovered - or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified - we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene. Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers.

We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.

As a species, we tend to be doers, forever shaping and reshaping the world to better suit our purposes.

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

Humanity evolves when we realise that animals have the same rights to the Earth as we do.

Human beings are just animals who will just eat and take advantage of any source of energy until it runs out, and then there'll be catastrophe.

It is interesting that the U.S. has this very strong proportion of the population that rejects scientific conclusions about the age of the Earth and about evolutionary relationships between species, including humans.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.