There is a debate among scientists. Actually, more of a problem. How can we tell people of the future not to go into nuclear waste sites? How do we know our sign will last? How do we know that in the future people will be able to read English? Or read at all? What if they wander in 200,000 years from now and inadvertently wipe out their species?
The people in charge of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project settled on a warning that reads: “This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
So far anyway, that’s the best we’ve got.
But nuclear waste won’t be the only thing we leave behind. Future humans could unearth Rumi, Goethe, Bernini, Maya Angelou, Alexandre Dumas and think: Amazing. These people were beautiful, thoughtful, wondrous creatures, capable of depth and consciousness and profound beauty.
Or they could find a season of The Swan. And think: Well, that explains the warning.
We know a bit about what future people will think because a new documentary, The Swan: Behind the Mirror, turns us into the future people.
If you didn’t watch The Swan when it aired in 2004, buckle up: This was a reality show in which a few dozen women were sent to Los Angeles to undergo…you name it. Facelifts, tummy tucks, nose jobs, whatever it’s called when you take fat from here and inject it there, breast implants, intense exercise, calorie-restrictive diets, new hair, new teeth, new everything. They couldn’t see their friends, family, or a reflective surface for three months.
In 2004, at the end of the show’s first season, this publication called it the “surgical interpretation of Cinderella,” which is definitely one way to describe cutting up a woman until the prince thinks she’s cute.
“They weren’t women whose faces and bodies had betrayed them. They were women whose faces and bodies had barely had time to form.”
