The Future: 1957-2007

By Greg -

The 1957 Belvedere they pulled out of a time capsule Friday in Tulsa looks like it found the nuclear war they put it there to avoid.



It would've been better off in somebody's car port. You'd think that with 3000 years of experience preserving the dead for the afterlife and the hundreds of years we've had to learn what conditions were necessary for the artifacts we've uncovered to have been preserved for a thousand or more years, that the civic boosters in Tulsa could've have found an archivist more qualified than the engineer who designed the zip-lock bag, and a solution less ridiculous than a concrete vault under a foot of dirt and grass saturated year-round by rain and automated sprinklers.

It's symbolic of America's legacy, a glimpse into the history books of the future and what the United States of America is going to look like to schoolchildren years, centuries, millennia (should we be so lucky) hence: arrogant, ignorant and wasteful; or, more likely, a blank spot in history whose artifacts have all rusted away, remembered only for the fact that we consumed four billion years worth of fossil fuels in less than two centuries and brought civilization to the precipice of near-certain ruin. Should the cockroaches carry on we'll have been nothing but a brief storm in the biosphere. The crows or the whales, should they survive us, might tell jokes about a crazy animal that ran around setting itself on fire while rapidly multiplying, unchecked by instinct or common sense.

We'll have become a comic spectacle should we survive in the mythology of whatever sentient and conscious beings replace us, or, if not remembered, our legacy will be a rapidly decomposing and broken jigsaw of steel, concrete, radioactive waste, plastic, glass, and all the other combinations of elements we synthesized and extruded, combined and assembled to mock nature with. Humanity will have been erased, not as punishment, but because we were, in the end, short-lived and irrelevant.

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