WASHINGTON — People are changing Earth so much, warming and polluting it, that many scientists are calling the time we live in the Anthropocene — the age of humans.

Science calls the past 12,000 years the Holocene, Greek for “entirely recent.” But the way humans and their industries are altering the planet, especially its climate, has caused an increasing number of scientists to use the word Anthropocene to describe when and where we are.

“We’re changing the Earth. There is no question about that, I’ve seen it from space,” said eight-time spacewalking astronaut John Grunsfeld, now associate administrator for science at NASA. He said that when he looked down from orbit, there was no place he could see on the planet that didn’t have the mark of man. So he uses the term Anthropocene, he said, “because we’re intelligent enough to recognize it.”

W. John Kress, acting undersecretary of science for the Smithsonian, said the Smithsonian is embracing the term because “for us it kind of combines the scientific and the cultural in one word.”

“Never in its 4.6 billion-year-old history has the Earth been so affected by one species as it is being affected now by humans,” Kress said.