Altered Carbon Show Quotes

when the victors rewrite history, it's just another kind of war, waged after the battlefield killing is done to murder the memory of the defeated.

Contamination from plastic pollution is a terrestrial problem as much as it is a marine problem. Humans have altered the earth with roads, mines, buildings, ditches, dams, and dumps to the degree that our era deserves a name--the Anthropocene. Natural history is punctuated by changes in life, due either to rapid evolution or catastrophic extinction, and evidence of change is sometimes marked by well-preserved, widely distributed fossils. What is our fossil equivalent? Some suggest it's black carbon from the Industrial Revolution, which shows up in the seafloor and ice caps, or it's radioactive isotopes from the mid-twentieth-century nuclear tests. Now, with evidence of plastic, transported by wind and waves, blanketing Earth from the seafloor to the tops of mountains, it is arguable that plastic is the best index fossil that represents us. Even if we stop polluting the planet with plastic today, we will have to live with a layer of microplastics that will represent this moment in natural history, when a single species so deeply affected the planet for a short while.