what do you think will be seen from space 1000 years hence?
if you zoom in on this pic you could just make out the ruined towers on that ridge
It is impossible to stand at the edge of the Great Wall and not think of the Beacons of Gondor. At least, it's impossible if you're a fantasy nerd like me who's watched The Return of the King a half-dozen times. It's something about the ridges that spread out before you and the ruined towers extending to the horizon that provokes a desire to get up somewhere, light a really big fire and wait, hoping to see another tower in the distance take up your signal. In the film, there's an epic appeal to the Lighting of the Beacons because it's one of these few moments that acknowledges a greater society at work, that makes one imagine what sort of events warranted building up this network of outposts on lonely mountains and what sort of sense of duty must fill the minds of their caretakers. So much of Lord of the Rings focuses on this fractious, messy fellowship who are, sure, made up of a variety of characters from different nations and races, loosely joined by ancient bonds of cooperation and respect. But the Beacons are this shift as a kingdom awakens to war and summons its allies. It's no longer just about Gandalf and Legolas and Pippin, but about Merry riding with the Rohirrim and Aragorn taking on his mantle of rulership.
We looked out over the Great Wall, stretching into the haze of distance and ayun asked me what I thought people would marvel at a thousand years from now, and what great things we would leave behind. I kind of shrugged and said that it probably depended on what our future would be like.
The pessimist's future says that we will run out of a source of cheap energy before we manage to find a replacement; that our oil will be exhausted before nuclear fusion is stabilised or before hydrogen scales up; and the two centuries following the Industrial Revolution will prove to have been a singular, momentous and ultimately futile blip in the long scale of history. We will collapse, 90% of us will die as access to petrochemical based fertilizers vanish and takes our food with them, and we will look at our interstates and cloverleaf flyovers with this sort of wisful bitterness. Like, what were we thinking, using all of that gasoline to just drive alone to the gym?
The optimist's future might be about flying cars and space elevators, and even in this perhaps our interstates will wither and atrophy as we spend more of our time travelling by suborbital shuttles and high speed zeppelins. So, despite not knowing which way we'd go, I still said to her that I would imagine, a thousand years in the future, our descendants would wander the empty interstates on, perhaps bicycles or NuHorses or retro cars that still look and sound like 1961 Ford Mustangs but are powered by miniature captive suns chambered in their unobtainium hearts. They would have copies of On The Road or Thelma and Louise and they'd make a week of driving this stretch, stopping in travel plazas that have been swallowed up by nature, and keeping their vehicle aimed for the horizon, trying to picture themselves in our shoes and being slightly envious of us while also thinking we were a little crazy or deprived, and being happy to have their present.
Because that's what we call progress, and we must always believe that we're stepping forward, even if we can't see the steps that we made a thousand years ago.