Human activities leave a signal in the geological record of the planet and will be there for millions of years.
Humanity is leaving a very detectable footprint in the Earth geological record on a global scale.
This includes the fall-out of the atomic tests of the 20thcentury, climate change is altering the chemical composition of the oceans.
And we are shifting more material per year than all natural erosion processes combined.
We are now living in the Anthropocene, the age of man.
The Anthropocene is the culmination of millions of years of Human expansion.
Initially, the Human species lived on the savannahs of East Africa, the original Human environment, on which they had no detectable impact because of the low population numbers.
Over time the Human species migrated out of Africa and by about a 1000 years ago they had invaded almost every biogeographical region of the globe, except for Antarctica.
When entering new areas Humans deliberately or by accident altered local environments to suit their needs.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution this process speeded up with the help of energy available in the form of fossil fuels, culminating in what many now regard as the Anthropocene.
We are creating a Human planet, the global Human made ecosystems in which we thrive. But in the second half of the 20th century we left our cradle, Earth, and ventured out into the solar system.
We send probes to every planet in the solar system, a process that was completed when the New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, the last of the so called classical planets in the solar system, on 14 July 2015.
With every planet explored, we expanded the Human environment. The solar system is now strewn with probes and landers, crashed rocket stages and disintegrated spacecraft.
We are materially as well as intellectually integrating the solar system into the Human sphere of influence. As a result the Human environment and history expands significantly.
Mining operations will be moved to the moon and other lifeless bodies in the solar system accompanied by the polluting and energy hungry industries that process the raw materials.
In addition we do not longer have to rely on the resources of a single planet and essentially open up our closed planetary economy.
Solar energy farms will harvest solar energy directly from unlimited solar light, using it for the production of hydrogen and transmitting it back to Earth, solving energy constraints.