Deep Time Tour (Douban score 9.2)
The world beneath our feet is not only inhabited by darkness and death, but also with hidden humanity and a long civilization. We are the creators of this era and the ancestors of the future world.
But can we be good ancestors?
In different eras and different cultures, the same three tasks have recurred:
Bury precious things, obtain valuable resources, dispose of harmful substances.
Burial: memories, precious things, information, fragile lives;
Access: information, wealth, revelation, ore, insights;
Disposal: waste, trauma, poison, secrets;
Today brings to you the best walking literature, nature writer and poet of our time [British] writers, Robert McFarlane's latest masterpiece, Journey to Deep Time.
From the Sinolithic skeletal collections, deep-sea laboratories, forest mycorrhizal networks, to twin dungeons, underground no-star rivers, wartime mass graves, to cave rock walls, ice mortars, nuclear waste disposal repositories... You'll see things you wish you'd always remember, and you'll see things you'd rather never witness.
fossil
What exactly is "deep time"?
"Deep time" is the concept of geological time, which is the unit of time in the underground world. Its measure of time makes humanity seem insignificant because its units are "worlds" and "universes." And we are now in only the "Anthropocene" in it, measured in deep time, "Homo sapiens" will disappear from the earth in the blink of an eye.
In the deep world, mountains, rivers, trees, rocks, etc. are all "alive", all have their own memories, and they slowly compile ancient stories about creation and annihilation in burial.
Let's follow The Book of McFarlane's underground "Odyssey" from planning to writing, walking tens of thousands of kilometers, seeking 26 languages, spanning 69 disciplines, and exploring the secrets of the deep time together:
First stop: Uk
cave
Mendip
Mendip is known as the land of mining, the country of caves and the country of tombs.
Go deep into the Cave of Aveline in Mendip, find a burial house that remains more than 10,000 years ago, and marvel at the funerary culture that existed here for more than 10,000 years.
Why did ancient humans who lived in different regions and had different beliefs have similar funerary cultures?
The burials in the discovered kofuns illustrate a belief that is widespread in different cultures: burial is a journey to the afterlife, and that human objects will be used in the journey.
Robert Pogue Harrison also wrote in his book "The Land of the Dead", a study of human funerary customs, that "the primary meaning of man is burial." The land we live in is our only ultimate destination, and it has been the case for hundreds of thousands of years.
Russian potash mines
Bobi Potash Mine
The mine's underground tunnels run through the wilderness and the sea, with a southwest branch of the passage located below the wilderness valley and extending deep into North Yorkshire, while the northeast branch stretches under the North Sea, crossing the ocean route to the vast open sea.
You may never have imagined that as you walk in the wilderness and sail the seas, there is also a group of people in the ground deep under your feet, struggling to mine salt mines and transport them around the world.
At the same time, the "time projection room" under the mine road is doing dark matter research and discovery work that may not exist, waiting for the signal of Cygnus, waiting to reveal the mystery of the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
Underground potash mines
For the many unsolved mysteries of the universe, the study of dark matter that may not exist, people have to wonder whether God exists. Don't rush to make up your mind, friends, at least the scientists who study dark matter believe it, can you say he doesn't believe in science?
It's just that science, as a human perception of the world, has its own limitations. There are not many people who believe in the existence of God, and some people also believe that science cannot find "evidence" of God's existence, even if you say that you have found evidence, it must have nothing to do with God, because God cannot leave a handle.
The salt mines formed by the sedimentation of ancient organisms nourish us in future generations, and from a deep perspective, what will we leave behind after the Anthropocene? Is it love?
Wrong, plastic, pig bones, and lead-207, which are the deep strata of the Anthropocene
Lower forest
The lower forest of the Epping Forest
Lower forest: organisms above the soil and under the canopy, fungi, moss, lichens, shrubs and saplings, etc., this is a middle ground.
The tree-fungus underground symbiotic network (muwei net) is a study of subsurface ecological science, which studies a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.
A network of fungi can distribute resources among plants, sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus can be shared between different trees in a forest, a dead tree will spread its nutrients through the network and contribute to the collective, and a sick tree can get more resource support from its neighbors, just like the ancient ultimate collective socialism.
Is such a forest a superorganism? It exists in places where we can see but can't see clearly.
If there is any model to explain the wooden web, it is the model of "socialism" and "free market", both of which cram the cognition of human politics into a science that transcends human beings.
Virgin forest
In the "free market" model, forests full of intrinsic ties should be seen as a competitive system in which all members are within a cost-benefit framework, acting for the benefit of the individual, regulating each other through a "reward and punishment mechanism".
In the "socialist" model, trees take care of each other, share resources through a network of fungi, and trees in good condition support those with poor conditions.
The ideology of perfection of human society, which we have been searching for, exists at our feet every day, where it has functioned perfectly at every moment from ancient times to the present.
Of course, this can also be said to be a model and argument artificially designed to cater to the practical values of human beings, perhaps the wooden web is much more complex than we humans temporarily recognize; or because of the existence of free will, the complexity of human society is far more than the wooden web.
Stop 2: Europe
The Catacombs of Paris
An invisible city in Paris, France
Do you know what's underground in Paris? It is a cobweb-like cave.
Paris was built on a cave system, a grand technical system of tunnels that connected ancient cellars, limestone quarries, caves and catacombs, and since the beginning of the middle century, people have been stepping into and walking through it.
The geological hard limestone is the foundation of the above-ground architecture of Paris, and the large-scale mining of underground limestone began at the end of the twelfth century, and the history of quarrying for more than 600 years has made the underground of southern Paris form a quarry cave (catacomb) covering nine above-ground administrative districts, and a network of more than two hundred miles composed of stone caves, stone chambers and stone corridors.
Here, the author embarks on a week-long journey through the underground caves of Paris, exploring the dark history behind the glamorous Paris.
Starry sky snow mountain river
River of No Stars, Italy
The Snæšiej Mountains on the border of Slovenia and Croatia are the birthplace of the Timavo River, a starless river that means a river leading to hell.
For geographical reasons, the rushing river suddenly flowed into the ground and disappeared in the village of Skchyan, and after about twenty-two miles of underground rush, it resurfaced near Duino and joined the Adriatic Sea.
To this day, only about fifteen percent of the underground section of the Timavo River is known to the world.
The natural scenery along the route is beautiful and spectacular at a glance, if you don't consider the dark human history it once was. Multiple dive points and sinkholes of the river also bury the past of civilization and brutal world wars, so Anselm said, "I think innocent landscapes don't exist...".
But to rely solely on that dark history to interpret a place is tantamount to depriving it of the possibility of the future, refusing to repair, and abandoning hope. The river of time never stops, and all the places on the earth, visible and invisible, magnificent and beautiful, modern backward, are a landscape after the alternating role of "light and dark".
Third stop: North
mural
Red Dancer, Norway
In the Painted Caves of the Bronze Age in the Arctic, there are line drawings of red dancers.
Cave Lofoten Islands, located at 68 degrees north latitude, in the Courhelaren Caves (Caves of Hell), the past ridges or sea routes are extremely dangerous. In winter, one person climbs over the treacherous snow-capped mountains and cliffs and through the rocky coastline of the windswept wind, only to find the lines that have only been heard and obsessed with.
These figures have been dancing non-stop for thousands of years, as if the deceased is stretching out his hand on the other side, touching the hands of the living through stones, the palms of the hands against each other, and the fingertips touching each other. An indescribable emotion surged up, and people couldn't help but cry bitterly.
Offshore oil rigs
Andoya Island, Norway
The Norwegian government's dependence on crude oil by the state apparatus and the sharp decline in crude oil production today have made exploration and collection of new offshore fields more frequent, and lobbying for the inhabitants of Andoya Island is one of them.
Oil and gas companies and consumers tacitly keep the exploitation of resources and the costs of exploitation out of the public eye, so as not to burden vested interests. After all, the market needs alienated labor, hidden infrastructure, and strategically hidden slow violence of environmental degradation and rapid violence of accident outbreaks.
......
In the follow-up journey, McFarlen went deep into the Nordic glaciers, went to the blue ice mortar to experience the dangers of life and death, and went to the nuclear waste repository to peek into the future of mankind...
Doomsday Seed Bank
The journey of the underground dark world, examined from a deep perspective and "scale", makes the underground world journey that was originally thought to be the least related to human beings become a book with the closest relationship with human beings.
The author takes his own travel experiences and thoughts as the story line, interspersed with a piece of history and a vivid story, connecting his entire underground journey of knowledge, opening a new door for us and providing a new perspective on the world.
This dark journey from a deep time perspective, McFarlane took nearly 10 years from planning to writing. With a keen awareness of the current state of existence, with the broad knowledge of humanistic scholars and the responsibility of intellectuals, he personally went to the fields, walked tens of thousands of kilometers on foot, verified 26 languages, spanned 69 disciplines, and wrote an underground "Odyssey" that has been linked for hundreds of millions of years, which was commented by the New York Times Book Review Weekly as "the door of light in the dark age".
Brazilian slums
The giant wheel of human "cultural progress" and economic development will never stop its progress, nor will it be transferred by human self-consciousness at all, just like a flood beast of nature, wrapped around us and moving forward.
"'Humanity' itself has become a geological process." Colin Waters, a geologist at the British Geological Survey, said, "The main geological force that shapes the planet – it is no longer rivers, ice or winds, but humans." ”
As early as 2000, the concept of the "Anthropocene" was first proposed by the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Krutzen. He believes that the earth has bid farewell to the geological age "Holocene" that began 11,700 years ago, and that rapid population and economic development have had a huge impact on the global environment.
The earth's strata are now divided into 4 Zeus, 14 generations and 12 epochs, and then divided into "worlds" below the epoch, and the conventional time unit is divided into millions of years, if the Anthropocene is determined, then we are now in: the Penozoic Cenozoic Quaternary Anthropocene.
This is not just a simple addition to geological age, it marks that the great changes in human activities on the earth have ushered in a new geological era.
What if this article could arouse your interest in the book Journey to Deep Time? It is recommended that everyone buy it home and read it well, no matter when the good book is bought home, it is not too late, and everyone is welcome to discuss it together in the comment area.
Wen 丨 Seven days to read a book
Editor丨 Seven days to read the book