A Visitor to the Future - 59 - Cultural Conservation
Another question came to mind as I finished up my quick note. "Can I ask? You mentioned that this plant has been here for five hundred years, but the actual reactor part was decomissioned hundreds of years ago. Why is the area only now being reclaimed?"
Malcolm walked backwards slightly and leaned against the nearby wall, arms crossed. His Proxy loomed next to him, unmoving. "This plant was preserved as a historical example. It was one of the most successful sodium-potassium alloy coolant designs of the time - so it was intially kept as a sort of museum. But we realised a couple of months back that no-one had so much as visited in about a hundred years. Better to reclaim this area and return it to nature if no-one is using it. We're scanning everything, of course - if we wanted to, we could recreate this site down to the last brick."
"That's part of the cultural and historical heritage aspect you mentioned, right?" I said.
"Right," said Malcolm, "You'd be amazed what we find when we're doing these projects - that's the reason we have to be so careful to find everything that might be of cultural significance. People often hide things in odd places. Did you know we found the last surviving copy of the projection, The Final Ship to the West in a demolished apartment complex? And now it's one of the most popular projections in the Consortium."
"No way!" exclaimed Sarkona, "That was you? I love that projection, what a great example of late 2100s cinematography!"
Malcolm nodded, "I can still hardly believe it. And that's not all that we've found over the years. We've located ancient burial sites, crashed satellites, and even a secret cold-war era bunker. Admittedly that last one was completely collapsed, but still, it was interesting. All because we were reclaiming areas. Anything we find - those items lost to time - end up being made available to the whole Consortium, which makes us popular with archaeologists."
"Are there any sites that you definitely won't reclaim? Things you'd just leave as is?" I asked.
"I think you've got the wrong impression," said Waiola, "Though I would personally prefer we leave the Earth completely alone, I would not advocate to reclaim something that someone else feels they need - their home, their city, and so on. We only reclaim what is no longer needed, or is a possible hazard to the Earth in the long term. Though with so much of the population choosing to live off-world these days, we are slowly decreasing the total population level of the Earth - which suits me just fine."
"Generally speaking, we would never reclaim sites of significant historical or cultural importance either," replied Malcolm, "For example, the Notre-Dame. For those we focus on preservation and protection instead - even if sometimes we've replaced every support beam in the building, they still stand. Oh - and also religious sites. There aren't many of those left these days, but those that remain are looked after."
Malcolm's comment was something else to consider later. I wasn't religious myself so I hadn't considered how that would fit into the Consortium as a whole. I wrote down a brief reminder to look into it later.
"What's the most interesting project you've worked on lately?" Sarkona asked Malcolm.
"Oh, we're reclaiming the US Coast-to-Coast Highway currently - that's very interesting, there's almost eight hundred years of history there. I just came here these past few weeks for a break from the work."
Sarkona looked shocked and went silent, expression contemplative. I looked at them, concerned, but they seemed wrapped up in some revelation of their own and didn't seem to notice. I turned back to Malcolm and Waiola.
"What about the most difficult project you've worked on?" I asked.
"Ah, that's an easy one," said Malcolm, "The sea-level project. That's been outstanding for several hundred years. While many of us would like to work on lowering the sea level of the Earth to pre-climate change level, there are a lot of people who object to that, so we've not made much progress."
"Who would object?" I questioned, surprised that anyone would want to keep things as they were, given my trip to the Netherlands.
Waiola stepped up to answer, "Though the lower sea level reflects a more natural state of the Earth, lowering it would present issues. There are entire coastal cities that would no longer be on the coasts, ways of life that rely on the sea level currently being where it is. We are talking about changing the sea level to what it was over a thousand years ago - that is not what anyone from today is used to. The Carbon Arrest Point happened in 2317 - since then, the sea level of today is what most people are used to - cryocontained like yourself being the exception. Even from a wildlife point of view, lowering the sea level would endanger the habitats and habits of wildlife formed around the new sea level. So the sea-level project is largely based around maintaining the status quo, not reversing that damage."
"That's not to say we've accepted that entirely though," said Malcolm, "We've spent a lot of time building new habitats and altering local conditions to ensure that any of the wildlife adversely affected by the sea level rise have what they need to live. We've also restored a large amount of species made extinct by the rise - though unfortunately some were lost forever."
I couldn't wrap my head around the scale of what they were saying. I pictured the wildlife preserves of my own time and tried to multiply that to every coastline on the planet - but the maths just didn't work in my own head. I'd have to go and see some for myself to fully understand it - after all, this would have been done over the course of hundreds of years.
"From what you've said so far," I asked, "It seems like people are very involved in the whole reclamation project. Given what I've learned about the Consortium I have to ask - can't the Consortium handle all of this? Why have people on site, involved in the deconstruction at all?"
"The Consortium could handle the whole clean-up process," said Waiola, "But it shouldn't. People made all this mess - if we let the Consortium clean everything up automatically, it almost feels like we're ignoring the problems that we as a society have made. Repairing the damage to the Earth should be a part of our cultural history and heritage too, not a problem we hand-waved and had the Consortium tidy up. We must learn from our past mistakes."
"Well said," said Malcolm, with a pointing gesture to acknowledge her point, "We do automate a lot of things, though. We want to understand and fully absorb the work being done, not manually tidy up every brick. That's why we use things like Proxies, drones, and other equipment to deconstruct on an industrial scale."