How could a single species that appeared in the last .0045% of planetary time have disrupted the life-support system that has nourished evolution for 4.5 billion years? And how can we survive the crisis of this moment?

This is the ongoing conversation that This Moment on Earth invites you to join, and to tune in for starting April 16.

We humans don’t often think about the long stretch of time that brought us forth. We are daily caught up in work and side-hustles, caring for children and parents, and the ever-accelerating pace of life. But KQED Science wants to recognize this moment in its evolutionary context, because in the arc of evolution we may find stories that restore the depths of our humanness.

Say you were to walk a mile for each one billion years of Earth’s evolution, a 4.5-mile walk. You’d come across the earliest form of life very quickly, at less than a half mile.

Not until your walk is nearly over — not until the last 24 inches — do you reach humans. The industrial revolution – that gaseous, belching hunger that birthed washing machines, world travel and semiconductor chips, and now traps us on a warming planet – that’s just the width of a human hair on the tail end of our evolutionary history.

Tethered to computers and cars, we may feel like we derive from machines, but we do not. We derive from Earth: from soil, sunlight, air and water. We got our eyes from fish, and our spine from a sort of sea worm. The carbon atoms in our skin were once perhaps a bird’s bones or a leaf.

We arose from life’s planetary history; now we perch on the edge of our own cataclysm, and the question before us is how to survive through this moment.

What do we need to do or become in order to participate with the life-support systems of Earth? How do we build homes and transportation systems that offer us a future rather than a trap? How do we talk with children, or process the grief we feel? What stories can we offer one another along this journey?

We’ve been asking you to tell us your climate change stories: what emotion you feel about it and how you process that, what you do in your personal or work life, and how you envision a sustainable human future.

This Moment on Earth will bring your stories into a broader conversation on the air and on this page. We invite you to listen, read and participate.

Tell us your climate change story.