[๐] when the world doesn't need us anymore
small note: i am doing something cool for this post. in the top right corner you should see a box that says "play music". enjoy listening to veridis quo by daft punk while i write and spit a bunch of weird questions to you.
a few weeks ago, while wasting my time, i came across a podcast talking about the debunking of the whole homo naledi. to save you guys some time, this group of researchers found skeletons of this older cousin of ours in some tight chamber within a cave system in south africa. there was a netflix documentary where they claimed they discovered funerary rituals in the chamber they found the skeletons in, indicating these naledi were burying their dead. queue the shitshow. new york times is telling me that other species have various processes to deal with their dead, but what makes the hypothesis of naledi burying their dead so special is that humans, yes us, are thought to be the only species to do that so far. putting it sort of into perspective, naledi popped up a few tens of thousands of years before, and if they were doing this pretty "human" activity, then what makes us so different from early hominids, what makes us truly us?
im not here to philosophize on that, its a pretty open question. what i've always wondered though is how the world was both before and after us. how limited are we by this sub century period of human dominance called the anthropocene.
on the period before, we don't really know all that much. i want to believe we know about the last five thousand years of human history decently well. it might end up that we know nothing though, and that all these archeological digs have simply supported us in projecting our modern selves into the lives of the ones that came before us. would they have lived, talked, loved or died the same way we do today? what gives us the right to draw these vast conclusions based on what little we have left of these civilizations? the average human ends up forgotten within a few decades after their death, so what makes us think that the ones we do know about would provide any insight into the average life?
most of my pondering as of recent has been on the post apocalyptic, maybe the post humanist too. whether it be a biological or our own fault, we will inevitably have to face our mortality. we end up like naledi, with our bones being uncovered and inferences made about how we lived, what we ate, how we loved, and how we died. of course, it might be easy to infer many things about how we lived, simply given the effect we've had on the planet. i wonder though what stays with us locked in the ground. what stays unknown?
time plays a role in this of course. if we all just disappeared this instant, you could figure out most of everything there is to know, there's not a lot that hasn't been immortalized in some type of storage. id consider a century or two as the mark for a good chunk of information to be lost. google tells me a ssd would expire after a few years, and a hard drive would rust or something. the books that aren't in hermetic seals would probably rot. maybe a nuclear power plant explodes and wipes out the last cityscapes and museum. what's left after all that? maybe the golden discs on the voyager spacecraft? the last pieces of what we as humans were.
the topic of preservation comes to me while writing about this too... can we really trust ourselves with preserving our lives beyond our physical forms? should we even be doing it in the first place? so much of human history has happened for the sake of leaving a legacy. procreation could be though of as just leaving a genetic legacy, no? so could peeing in a pool maybe... leaving a will... building a home... and so on. maybe we dont fear our end, but rather we fear being forgotten, as a collective and especially as individuals. that leaves us with a good question... do we attribute the death of a civilization to its' last member, or to its last record?
i always liked games that explore the post apocalyptic, with my favorite being the horizon series. in a nutshell, the equivalent of blackrock creates war robots that are self sufficient, they go crazy and kill everyone and ruin the planet. a scientist creates an ai to orchestrate the remaking of the planet and humanity using these nicer animal looking robots. the ai repopulates humanity but fails at re-educating them, leaving humans that dont know that much about the world's past. luckily, the protagonist is a clone of the said scientist and has access to all the old systems, so she gets to both learn about the past and fight the reawakened evil robots.
the game itself is fun, but what i liked most about it was the process of discovery of this "ancient" culture from the eyes of what was essentially a completely different creature. split along thousands of years of history, aloy serves as practically the only link between the old and new world. the game is filled with mementos of the past, voice recordings of what brought the end of the world, holograms of daily life, journal entries, etc. adding that to the occasional leftover skyscraper, we can make some semblance of to the life the humans in the game lived before the disaster. its a bit of a cop out though, given that we already have so much background knowledge.
it'd be cool to see more games like iron lung (seen above), where we explore a landscape of skeletons and ancient ruins while stuck in a submarine. games solely focused on uncovering the past and letting the players do the mental work of decoding it all.
anyways, thats my bit of yapping. at the end of the day, in a few thousand years from now, the next species in our genus will come across our bones and random shit in the soil and draw up even weirder ideas than our naledi burial practice hypothesis. it all gets lost in translation, entropy increases, stuff degrades.