Abstract
We face the end of an era of abundance. The world is running out of geological time. A generation ago, every person on the face of the Earth had a year of time on deposit in the geological column— 4.5 billion years of deep time for 4.5 billion people.No longer! Earth's population has been growing faster than time has been passing, and with 6.5 billion people afoot, the average person's share of the geological column has shrunk to 252 days. At this rate of population growth, the supply of unexplored strata may melt away before the glaciers disappear, threatening a mass extinction of Earth scientists. Dividing the geological column equitably among the geoscientists alive today would allow each scarcely a millennium's worth of strata as the focus of their life's work, yet most commence their careers with thesis titles that lay claim to whole periods and epochs—a million‐to‐one disparity between supply and demand.
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