You have made it.

You arrived at the end of Alice Obscira's

adventurous advent calendar, these 20 episodes,

and the last day of the Human Experiment Theme Week.

If you've been listening along for this whole thing,

I just love you.

Thank you for hanging out with me this month.

Yesterday, we took the pessimist view of the future, this vision of

impending doom and preparing for desperate survival. But as you might be able to guess,

it is not really my view of things. I'm maybe a fool, but I am a

somewhat optimistic one. I wanted to end this series of episodes with an

optimistic vision of the future, this vision that is this holds promise we can only start to imagine, and that it's worth investing in projects

we will never see completed for great-great-grandchildren we will never meet.

There may be no better example of this than the forest of the future library in Norway,

a project basically no one alive today will see completed. And yet, it is all the more worth doing because of it.

Thank you for joining me on this little adventure over the last four weeks. We'll be back with new episodes on Monday. See you then. The forest starts before the forest. It's the in a way because when you start walking it's like all filters go away and then you come to this clearing.

It's a very tiny, tiny forest within the big forest.

There are tall trees all around, and there are some tall trees left, but then you have these small ones that are growing and it's silent.

And you can hear birds, the wind, you can hear the rain if it's raining. We just sit down, we actually listen to the forest and that in itself is a very emotional experience

to sit there together with this crowd and that are there, silent, just listening.

I'm too unthera and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places.

Today we are going into a forest in Norway where once a year a ritual takes place.

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