Change the World Wednesday – 28th Nov

I have to do it!

I have to do it to remain sane.

I have to write a CTWW post.

Oh, yum, yum, yum…

Wednesdays just aren’t Wednesday without one. I tried to give them up last week, but it made the week seem so empty, it was like trying to give up chocolate.

I know that Small Footprints needs a break, that she devotes a lot of time to CTWW and has a household to run and a 3D life to lead, whereas some, like me, live in a 2D world and housework involves doing the dishes and my washing once a week. The world for a hermit is vastly different to real people, so simple and undemanding.

There is no challenge as such, but rather a thought. A wander, if you like, into the far far distant future…

The Age We Made

Gaia Vince concludes her journey through the geological age humans have launched. After climate change and mass extinction, she now explores moves how the world’s cities and manufactured artefacts (from mobile phones to plastic bottles) might become ‘fossilised’ and incorporated into the geological record. Some are bound to survive in crushed form for the rest of the Earth’s existence. Any distant-future geologist would recognise them as strange features unique in the planet’s 4 billion year rock record: chaotic rock layers preserving urban rubble and underground tunnels – mudstones unnaturally rich in zinc, cadmium and mercury – and the occasional crushed mobile phone or plastic bottle transformed from polymer to delicate coal. These rocks and artificial ‘fossils’ will be evidence of a planetary shift into the new time period, which today’s geologists call the Anthropocene.

Click to listen to the BBC Discovery broadcast

So, as we have epochs of the past like the Jurassic and Triassic, those in the distant future will have the Anthropocene, us.

We are doomed to become the ‘past’ and studied much in the same way as we study our past… and so it will go on.

But a crucial question will be, if these intelligent beings from the past (us) could build and create such a world, why couldn’t they have prevented their own extinction?

Good question… next, that one is too hard to answer.

You can also listen to other episodes by visiting the BBC link.