When the unthinkable becomes fascinating ………“and human existence was reduced to a thin strata in the geological record”

News stories ahead of Cop 26, that international meeting to discuss how to help the planet and pull it back from global catastrophe fill the airways.

A vision of the future, 1952

It is too serious a thing to make fun of so while at 72 I can be sanguine about the worst it can do to my lifestyle, I worry about our kids and their children, and the environment they will have to face.

Now I tend to be an optimist, but statements and recently announced policies of some of the powerful countries and those still reliant on fossil fuels do cast a doubt on just what can be achieved in Glasgow in a few days’ time.

When nature and humanity collide, 1952

So, my attention was drawn to a small item in the Radio 4 programme, Broadcasting House which occupies the 9am slot on Sunday, and amongst a discussion on which British City might win City of Culture status, a round up of what the Sunday newspapers had to say there was this piece on Cope 26.*

It was introduced by Justine Rowblatt with the chilling proposition that we lost that global battle, and “human existence was reduced to a thin strata in the geological record”.  In the light of the failed experiment which was the Age of the Dinosaurs, and work done to extract their fossils, it is perhaps not so fanciful an idea.

And yes I know I am cavalier with the word failed given that dinosaurs in their many different variations dominated the planet for about 165 million years.

But let’s stick with the premises, which is a sort of “if of history” which I am not over keen on but entertained me for a few minutes.

Essentially supposing some future intelligent species either of this planet or a visiting batch of tourists and interplanetary archaeologists were to explore what we left behind, roughly 100 million years into the future, what would there be for them to see?

The answer is a mixed bag.  Some of the coastal cities might have been submerged by rising waters and become “petrified”.  But what ever had survived of these vast urban areas anywhere would be limited to what existed underground, whether it be cellars, the subterranean transport networks or the deep concrete pillars which once held up the skyscrapers.

For sure there might be plastic detritus along with perhaps alarm clocks or mobile phones, but trying to make sense of their function might be beyond our visitors.  After all we know what they are because we made them.

The Succession of Life, 1952

In the same way I am often drawn back to a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s.  The account focuses on The Venusian Academy of Archaeology who had ponded for decades on the meaning of several objects recovered from the irradiated third planet circling the sun. 

It had been found by a research vessel high on one of the planet’s mountain ranges, consisted of part of a polished wood object, a thin strip of almost transparent celluloid and a metal object.  They had been hidden by a small band of survivors from the last of the Atom Wars, and remained undiscovered for centuries, until the small atomic clock attracted the attention of the passing Venusian spaceship.

The scientists of Venus took almost a century to create a device which would allow the strip of celluloid to be run at the right speed and project a series of images onto a giant screen, which was then beamed across the planet to all who wondered what the inhabitants of that third planet were like.

The result would keep archaeologists, behavioural scientists, and authors busy for decades, pondering on the images of two short creatures with tails and big ears, apparently shouting at each other, and jumping into a small four wheeled form of transport which they drove erratically and at great speed, bumping in to other such vehicles none of which sustained any damage.

It was a grim and frightening view and confirmed the Venusians opinion that their near neighbours had been a violent species who in all probability had destroyed themselves and the planet in an atomic Armageddon.

Many who watched the show were left with a sense of unease at the final clip which showed one of the creatures look directly into the screen, and smile, followed by the caption “That’s all Folks”.

It is a fanciful account but points to how easy we might have destroyed ourselves and still could, but also at how archaeologist and historians work from the data they have at their disposal, leading to historic descriptions as the Beaker People, and The Bronze Age.

How we think the Romans made our past, 1957

Leaving me with just one other example which comes from a BBC television schools programme which dated from the 1960s in which fictional archaeologists were trying to make sense of the artefacts they had uncovered.

Looking at a range of discoveries they concluded that from the vast collection of tea pots and coffee pots, the inhabitants of the planet were divided into the Coffee People and the Tea People.

So there you have it, reminding me of that observation of the future, written by Thomas Hobbs in 1650, who wrote “No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”**

And perhaps in some instances we make a conception of the past from what we know of the present.

Picture; from Adventure of the World, 1954, and Pictorial History, 1952, and A Valley Grows Up, Edward Osmond, 1957

*Broadcasting House, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010wl1

**Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650