Scientific American September 1998 [antikvár]

From the Editors Go Ahead, Walk in the Mud Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandias describes the cracked and toppled statue of an ancient potentate: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The destruction of his once great empire might be mistaken as punishment for hubris. The grimmer reality is that Ozymandias could have been the soul of modesty and nature would have ground his works to powder just the same. Three and a half million years ago a trio of furry bipeds walked across an African savanna caked with damp volcanic ash. Maybe it was a happy family stroll on a Saturday afternoon; maybe they crept fearfully through a predator's hunting ground. We will never know (but we can present the best, most recent guess; see page 26 in "Preserving the Laetoli Footprints," by Neville Agnew and Martha Demas). Odds are that for those creatures, it was just another ordinary walk on another ordinary day. The hidden struggles of their lives, the glimmerings of hope and pride they nurtured are all gone forever. Meanwhile their muddy footprints have lasted 700 times longer than recorded history. Where is the poetic justice? We moderns can expect no better treatment. Wood rots, paper burns, stone splits, plastic corrodes, glass shatters, metal rusts. If humans disappeared tomorrow and no one was left to mow the lawns, paint the walls and fix the pipes, even the sturdiest of our concrete and steel structures would be mossy rubble in roughly 10,000 years. The irony is that already ancient stone monoliths like the Egyptian pyramids might be among the last artifacts to vanish from view. AN EARLY STEP in human evolution I"'o put it another way, imagine watching the events of rhe next million years on that uninhabited Earth, all compressed into a 100-minute feature film. Don't be late finding a seat in the theater: within the first 60 seconds nearly every large trace of civilization will have melted into the terrain. Nothing to do then but watch the forests grow (talk about a slow second act). Our world would survive as a stratum of buried junk. So future anthropologists may not be assessing the heights of our accomplishments from the Mona Lisa, or Shakespeare, or the Golden Gate Bridge, or a space shuttle. They may be measuring the tooth marks on our chewed pencils; checking the metallurgy of old screwdrivers; deducing rhe economy from phone books in landfills. Perhaps the act for which you will be longest remembered was something you wrote in a wet cement sidewalk when you were six years old: IWUZ HERE. JOHN RENNIE. Editor in Chief editors @ scia m. com