Ep274: How to Warn Future Humans of the Mess We've Made
This week we continue our Spring Forward season by discussing an essay by Matt Jones that first appeared in The New England Review and was then republished by The Lit Hub. The essay, titled "How Can We Warn Future Humans of the Poison We Buried Underground?", is a kind of thought experiment brought on by an actual project, in which a team of thinkers was tasked with coming up with a way to communicate to future societies that we'd buried nuclear waste under a specific spot in the desert. The essay delves into various ways that futurists think of possible futures, and the inherent optimist in even imagining a future. We also talk about what the future of food looked like to people in the middle part of the twentieth century, and atomic gardens, and Betty Crocker's Recipe Card Library.