What a long, strange trip it’s been, from apeman to hydrocarbon man. Is it time we humans aped Donald Trump and named a geological age after ourselves? I can see the argument laid out in this essay, but don’t we already know we’re masters of the universe? I don’t see how making it official is going to advance a greater ethos for the planet.
Rather, as human life becomes increasingly techno-gadgetized and accessorized, what I think we’ll see is a yearning for a simpler time, something along the lines of this classic, which spoke to the anxieties of a different era.
I’ll have some more serious posts later, but for now I just wanted to flag an interesting article in the New York Times from a couple of days ago about the issues visitors to national parks are running into as they become more dependent on various technologies and gadgets. The tone of the article is rather lighthearted, but this can be serious stuff. The issue we would always run into at Chaco was that people would depend on their GPS systems to try to get there, which would lead them seriously astray since the data the systems use for the isolated rural area around the park is often outdated and inaccurate. When people would call up asking for the address of the park so they could input it into the system we would do our best to explain to them that it wasn’t going to work, and that they really would be better off just following the directions on the website. We even put a warning on the directions page, in bold, explaining that while most of the roads their GPS identifies and recommends do exist, they’re not necessarily easy or even passable, especially for ordinary passenger cars. Some people still don’t listen, and end up calling the park on their cell phones from some random two-track road somewhere around the park. At that point they have no idea where they are, of course, so it becomes much harder to give them directions that will get them to the park successfully, and if they’ve gotten themselves stuck or broken down finding them to go help them out is even harder. It doesn’t help that the sort of people who tend to rely most on their GPS systems like this also tend to be the sort of people who are least accustomed to dirt roads, long distances, and other issues involved in traveling in isolated parts of the rural West.
Places like Grand Canyon and Yellowstone have vast armies of rangers to deal with this stuff, of course, but smaller, more obscure parks like Chaco have fewer rangers and more limited resources. So, a word of advice for people considering travel to parks, especially smaller ones: Trust the people at the parks when they tell you not to rely on your fancy technological toys. Listening to knowledgeable advice beforehand can save you a lot of trouble down the road.
From 3 Quarksdaily, an intriguing post flows from this question:
Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.”
The author, Sam Kean, argues that our collective behavior (or non-actions, when it comes to such problems as climate change), will make future generations wonder how humans in the 20th century could have been so clever as to split the atom and send a man to the moon.
Perhaps, but what would make me just as as suspect, if I were looking back at history in 2200, would be the tremendous technological leap between, say, 1870-1970. Quality of life, for those fortunate enough to reap the benefits, improved immeasurably. It’s hard to believe that happened in such a short time span.
Kean makes a more solid case when discussing our depth of time problem–that we have a habit of shortchanging the achievements of past civilizations:
A span of thousands of years is both extremely short and impenetrably long. It’s short because human nature will not change much in that time. Which means our human tendency to discount the past and pooh-pooh the achievements of antique cultures will not have diminished. Dismissing technical achievements in the remote past is especially tempting. We’re willing to believe that people philandered and murdered and philosophized uselessly like we do today, but we conveniently reserve the notion of technical progress for ourselves.
