What’s the 300 year plan, people?
Petroglyphs in Valley of Fire (Moapa Valley, Nevada)
I am sitting on the 35th floor of the Palazzo tower at the Venetian in Las Vegas. My view from the window is the sprawling city, with the beautiful backdrop of mountains rising to meet the horizon. And smack in the middle of this is a giant, lit-up dome showcasing advertisements intermixed with mesmerizing, flowing designs that have the same effect as a screensaver. You might have heard about this newest and greatest addition to Vegas…it’s called the Sphere. Right now, U2 is playing concerts there, and on their off nights, a film by Daron Aronofsky called Postcard from Earth is playing. He created the film especially for The Sphere. It’s a series of incredible shots of nature and seats that vibrate, wind that blows…so you can feel like you’re actually there with the incredible images surrounding you. I couldn’t quite justify the $169 it would cost to see it, so maybe I have no idea what I am talking about…but it feels like one more heartbreaking paradox of Vegas. We’re buying our popcorn and alcohol, and paying $170 a ticket to go watch the nature we are killing. I ran into someone on the elevator who was talking about having seen it the night before. Curious, I asked him, “Was there a message to it?”
“No,” he replied. “Just incredible images and you could feel the wind and your seat would shake with the elephants running all around you. It felt like you were there.”
Hmm…no message though? I mean even if there isn’t a narrator spelling it out to you…wouldn’t a message come through somehow? Maybe something like, what are we doing, people? Where is our 300 year plan? How are we going to stop killing this earth?
I couldn’t quite believe this one movie-goer’s experience, so I went searching, and apparently there was a message. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal the message was, “warning of reckless consumption. Reminders of natural, and man-made, beauty are prevalent [in the film].” The future plan that Aronofsky imagined in this film is that humans leave the planet so that it can heal. Our most heroic action as a species is to leave? Nevermind that we would absolutely kill what’s left of the planet with carbon emissions trying to evacuate the human population to space. Or that the trillions of dollars we would spend building spacecraft could have been spent helping the planet while we stayed. Really, most articles I found discussed the experience and marveled at human technological capabilities far more than they focused on the message. And, as my friend in the elevator demonstrated…the message of the film was completely ignorable next to the technology that was being showcased.
The day before, when we arrived in Vegas, I convinced my husband that the one thing that would help me survive this trip (I was keeping him company while he attended a conference for work) was to drive to one of the many National Parks that are just a few hours away. So, upon arriving we rented a car and drove an hour away to the Valley of Fire. It’s an ancient sea bed filled with layerings of the most vibrant red and white rocks. On one of the hikes, the rocks along the canyon were covered in petroglyphs dating back to 1,500 years ago. The heat was pelting down as we stumbled through the red sand, immersed in the faces we saw looking back at us from the rocks and the petroglyphs where humans began to leave their mark over a thousand years ago. What would their 300 year plan have been if they were here now? I couldn’t help but think that they would have better ideas than my contemporaries. What did the rocks that were millions of years old think about what they have witnessed in this time? I wished I could hear them.
I didn’t have to pay $170 and sit inside an enormous snowglobe to be utterly humbled by the experience of the heat, the sand, the rocks, the enormous sense of time, the immensity of the life that has come before me and the hope for the life that will come after I am gone. All I had to do was go outside and pay attention.
The 3 days in Vegas continued to unfold in this absurdly synchronous way. I continued through my introspective, unsettled walks through the Strip, and listened to various podcasts. On the last day, I listened to a conversation with Joshua Schrei and his words summed up my grief for humans and all of our misguided, sometimes dumbfounding inability to think ahead more than a few years. Here are the words that traveled into my ears and down to my heart, “We need to let things temper. There is a tempering process that happens over time…Our modern myth is that everything is on a growth trajectory. But, in fact, if we were more aligned with Nature, we would see and notice that this is not how things work. Instead it is cyclical, spiral, an ebb and a flow. Technologies unlocked and then guarded deeply. Can humans create containers around certain technologies? We don’t see it when we’re in it. I would like to encourage a capacity to learn to see it when we are in it. Part of why we don’t see it is because of the narratives we buy into when we are in it…We have to change the mythic narratives around some of these technologies. Interconnected, embodied narratives might shift our sense of responsibility to the whole…with A.I. we are dealing with powers that are mythic in scope…We have a culture that encourages the apprentice to tinker with things without the leadership of elders saying, ‘Hey, maybe we should proceed cautiously. Maybe don’t tinker with that just yet…This is potentially really powerful. Let’s sit with this for 10 years and have some deep councils and decide how we should proceed with this.’
Maybe then we could come up with a 300 year plan.
References:
Exploring the Mythic Landscape with Wisdom 2.0: A conversation with Joshua Schrei and Soren Gordhamer on Patreon for The Emerald Podcast.
Sphere’s ‘Postcard’ is about Earth and Out of this World
