The ghost of Christmas yet to come
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What will be left of human civilisation in the geological record 100 million years hence?
Justin Rowlatt speaks to the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz of Leicester University in an extended interview, speculating on the durability of the human legacy. We may take pride in our cathedrals, technologies and feats of engineering. But what strange fragments will survive long enough for aliens visiting our planet in the distant future to discover? And will it be enough for those future geologists to figure out what caused the mass extinction we will leave behind in the fossil record?
This is an extended version of an interview recorded for Justin's Geochemical History of Life on Earth, also available on the BBC World Service.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: Skull fossil artwork from the Modern Fossils collection by Christopher Locke. Credit: Christopher Locke/Heartless Machine)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Justin Rowlatt. Welcome to a special Christmas Eve episode of Business Daily. And when I say special, one of the pleasures of my job is that every now and then I get to interview someone who makes me see the world |
| 0:21.8 | in an entirely new way. And today, we are dedicating the entire program to one such |
| 0:28.3 | interviewee. He's no heavyweight name from the world of business or finance, but he still |
| 0:33.6 | packs a massive punch in the unsettling message he has for all of us humans. |
| 0:40.3 | And if you think that Christmas is the wrong time of year to deliver an unsettling message, |
| 0:45.3 | well, Charles Dickens would beg to disagree. The bell struck 12. |
| 1:06.0 | Scrooge looked about him for the ghost and saw it not. |
| 1:15.7 | As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, |
| 1:19.9 | he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, |
| 1:23.8 | and lifting up his eyes, |
| 1:26.4 | beheld a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him. |
| 1:37.3 | I am in the presence of the ghost of Christmas yet to come, said Scrooge. |
| 1:51.8 | The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand. My name is Jan Zelalyshevich. |
| 2:03.1 | I'm an emeritus professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester. |
| 2:06.8 | And I'm a geologist with the recent particular interest in the geology of the present and the future, which is the Anthropocene. |
| 2:18.3 | Well, our ghost of Christmas yet to come does speak. |
| 2:22.9 | And like the one in Dickens' Christmas Carol, |
| 2:25.6 | he invites us to peer into our collective grave. |
| 2:41.3 | Normally, geologists look at the surviving fragments of the distant past, |
| 2:45.9 | the fossils and the rocks to make sense of life millions of years ago. |
| 2:51.5 | But Jan's particular interest is in the future fossil record, |
| 2:55.2 | and the bewildering legacy we humans will leave. |
... |
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