Quicksand
Page 5
The artist lived 1,300 generations ago. They belonged to what we now call the Aurignacian culture, named after the site of an archaeological find in Aurignac in France, which also produced many cave paintings.
One day in April 2013, I pay a visit to the British Museum in London where a replica of the lion man is being exhibited temporarily. It is a very special experience, standing in front of the little sculpture and gazing into the eyes of the ivory figure.
He can see me, I think. And I can see him.
Without knowing why, I suddenly get the feeling that I recognise him.
11
Ice
A few hundred years ago nobody believed there had been such things as ice ages.
One of the significant undertakings of the nineteenth century was establishing the timing of the very cold periods that had affected parts of the planet at fairly regular intervals. The layers of ice, which could be several kilometres thick, had compressed the earth’s crust and transformed the landscape into a covering of gravel.
Among those who came to play an important role in our understanding of the history of the world and the recurrent ice ages was a scientist called Milutin Milankovitch. He was an interdisciplinary scientific team all by himself, as he possessed extensive expertise in a range of fields, including mathematics, engineering and astronomy.
The first scientist to argue seriously that there had been recurrent ice ages throughout our history was the glaciologist Louis Agassiz. Several others followed in his footsteps, but they were never able to explain satisfactorily the reasons why these ice ages occurred regularly but with different strengths and not always in the same places.
It was not until, in the middle of the First World War, Milankovitch decided to try to explain the cycles once and for all that a crucial step in our understanding of climate changes could be taken.
Milankovitch maintained that the explanation for the enormous temperature changes must have to do with the effect of the sun on the earth. That might seem to be blindingly obvious, but it didn’t explain the big differences that occurred at intervals of thousands of years. Milankovitch used his comprehensive mathematical and astronomical expertise to calculate changes in the passage of the earth around the sun and the rotation around its own axis. He eventually realised that the earth was affected not only by the magnetic forces of the sun, but also by the gravitation from the moon and other planets in the solar system, especially Saturn and Jupiter. After a number of years’ work he concluded that there were three factors affecting the differing movement patterns of the earth.
The first was that different forces contributed to changes in the rotation pattern of the earth around the sun. The second was that the angle between the axis of the earth and the rotation pattern kept changing. And the third depended on the direction of the earth’s axis.
This means that the light of the sun illuminating the earth changed over slow cycles. When the beams were at their lowest level, the winter snow did not have time to melt away, especially in the northern hemisphere, and so the snow lay continuously from year to year, which in turn meant that the climate became even colder.
Today the earth’s axis is pointing to somewhere close to the Pole Star – but this is not a permanent state of affairs. In about 10,000 to 12,000 years from now it will be pointing to somewhere near the star Vega. The change will continue to take place over many thousands of years until it is once again pointing at the Pole Star – but by then the Pole Star will also have moved because the universe is in a state of perpetual motion.
It is possible to measure the length of ice ages by investigating how much water at any given point is captured by the earth’s covering of ice. It is possible nowadays to predict with a high degree of accuracy when the various ice ages will occur, how long they will last, and what the climate will be like between them. About 5,000 years from now the mountain chain that runs through Sweden and Norway will be covered by permanent ice. The crust of the earth will have been pressed down by about three hundred metres, which means in turn that sea level will have dropped by between five and fifty metres. Nearly all our archipelagos will disappear, and never return.
This ice age will be followed by a period characterised by a somewhat milder climate. But it is unlikely that many people will be living in Sweden then: it will simply be too cold.
Another ice age will reach its culmination in about 20,000 years. The ice will reach a thickness of about 1,500 metres. That ice age will be followed by a warmer period, which researchers predict will be quite similar to the climate of today’s Greenland. The parts of Sweden that are not covered in ice will have constant frost in the ground, and agriculture will be impossible. Perhaps groups of hunters and fishermen will be able to roam around what is currently the southern and western coast of Sweden, but otherwise the country will be deserted.
The coldest ice age will reach its culmination about 60,000 years from now. By then the ice covering Stockholm could well be about 2,500 metres deep. When the ice eventually melts the sea will be about a hundred metres above what is currently high-water level.
Then it will gradually become warmer. In about 120,000 years’ time the climate could well be similar to what it is today.
So eight or nine ice ages will come and go before what we have hidden away in our underground caverns is no longer dangerous.
A key question is, of course: how can the earth’s crust be pressed down so deep without those underground caverns being damaged, collapsing or being crushed?
The answer is simple. A mountain that is pressed down retains its original form. The only thing that changes is the thickness of the heavy layer of ice, and the fact that what is currently the surface of the earth lies lower down.
Milutin Milankovitch died in 1958. He couldn’t anticipate much of recent research into climate and ice ages, but he lived long enough to experience both atom bombs and hydrogen bombs. As the learned scientist he was, he must have wondered how nuclear power and its waste would be affected by the various cycles of climate change the earth would undergo.
There is a photograph of him, taken when he was about thirty-years old. He is very well dressed, standing by a table. His face is sensitive and his smile suggests a mixture of shyness and self-confidence.
He is one of those scientists that nowadays only a few specialists know about, although his work enabling us to understand the past and to draw apart the veils concealing the future was outstanding in every way.
But do we now know everything about the ice ages lying in wait for us? Are all the secrets and riddles solved or answered?
No. Questions receive answers, but answers always lead to new questions.
This very morning an invisible bird is singing in our garden for the first time this spring. I naturally assume it is the same bird that sat in the bushes singing last year. I imagine that there is something in its trills that can only be produced by this bird, this year as well as last.
We live in a country of invisible birds and seasons. In a period of 100,000 years there are 400,000 seasons. Or let us say 380,000 seasons if we omit the ice ages when no seasons can be discerned.
The numbers are bewildering and cannot be grasped by our emotions or our intellect.
It is like looking into a mirror and being uncertain about whose face it really is you can see in the glass.
When everything becomes too complicated and difficult to comprehend, I generally look at a black-and-white photograph on my wall. It is of me as a nine-year-old, sitting at a desk in Sveg primary school. When I see that face, full of curiosity and confidence that everything is possible in life, I can feel the strength to understand coming back to me.
The short ice age inside myself is over. Everything is back to normal again. All truths continue to be provisional. Searching for an overview can begin once again.
I can’t imagine that there is anything more important than that.
12
Turning time in a different direction
Everything I imagine will be a guess. Archaeologists can embark on expeditions into the past in various ways, and nowadays we have an increasingly astonishing DNA analysis to help us understand what happened in the distant past.
But the future doesn’t fascinate us in the same way as the past because there is nothing we can be sure about, nothing we can relate to via our own lives. Our imagination simply can’t cope with what life will be like so far beyond our temporal horizons.
Nevertheless, there are some things we know for sure about what will happen thousands of years into the future. Quite a lot, in fact. But at the same time we have an unknown factor that did not affect earlier generations: how will climate changes brought about by humans affect various processes?
Forty thousand years from now dramatic events will have taken place – we can’t say exactly when, only that they will happen. We are already heading there, even if the road is long. It is leading in a specific direction, towards an ice age that will take place somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years from now, and which will affect our part of the world.
When the ice age arrives, Sweden will be covered by a layer of ice almost a kilometre thick. All human buildings will be buried and destroyed underneath the ice. Houses, towns, bridges, and everything we have collected in museums, libraries and underground storehouses, or dug down into the earth as treasure.
After that ice age our climate will become gradually warmer. People – assuming there are any left – will be able to move into areas where the climate is tolerable. We shall once again be nomads, fishermen and hunter-gatherers. Humans will be back in square one, everything must begin all over again.
We cannot know if the brains of these people will have undergone some basic change compared with those in earlier historical epochs, but all the education that humans underwent throughout the ages will have disappeared. If a mobile phone or a computer survives the ice age, it will be a totally incomprehensible phenomenon. Perhaps something that fell down from some unknown planet in the universe? Something handed down by unknown gods?
When thunder rumbles there will be nothing to suggest that it is not due once again to a god riding around in his chariot with a hammer held in his raised hand. He probably won’t be called Thor, but old myths are often recreated – not as imitations, but as something that never existed before, as there are no memories remaining from those times.
Time itself has lost its memory.
Can I envisage all this? As images I can conjure up in my mind? As logical consequences of convincing arguments produced by interdisciplinary scientific research? I don’t know if I can. Sometimes I am convinced I can see what is coming, but just as often I am doubtful.
An iceberg almost three kilometres high that covers large areas including Sweden? One only needs to go for a three-kilometre walk and imagine the distance covered as a staircase leading up into the sky in order to understand the impossibility of seeing that future.
One day all the ice will melt again. If we had the possibility of glimpsing even for a few seconds the world revealed after the ice melted, we wouldn’t recognise any of the landscape. We would be confronted by new mountains, new beaches, new bays. A whole new map would have been drawn by the ice, and we would find no trace of the past no matter how hard we searched: all we would see would be the silent gravel.
But what I have just said is not quite right. There will in fact be something left after the extinction of our civilisation.
One or more underground nuclear waste stations.
13
A journey into the nether regions
We drove by car from Gothenburg to the other side of Sweden, to Oskarshamn. In contrast with all the hostility I endured in my attempts to visit Onkalo, I was well received in Oskarshamn. There didn’t appear to be any kind of secrecy attached to their activities, which is as it should be, of course. Here they are working to assure future generations that everything possible is being done to ensure that the poisonous nuclear waste is safely shut away in secure stores.
I speak to a manager. She makes the only possible statement about the nature of her work: ‘It has nothing to do with my personal views about nuclear power – but as it exists, somebody has to take care of the waste.’
We travel down through a series of lift shafts bored into the rock and come to a depth that should be too deep for the approaching permafrost to reach, and to damage the copper capsules in which it is now reckoned the nuclear waste will be stored, in caverns made in rock that has not moved since time immemorial. When the waste eventually becomes harmless, we will discover whether what is essentially a guess today is correct or not. The best-case scenario is that the seal on the 100,000-year-old storage facility will not have been broken.
But we are not able to pray to whatever gods we might believe in for permission to make a visit into a future time when we will have been dead for thousands of years. Nor do we know if there will be any descendants of ours on the land exposed after the melting away of the ice, thinking that they are standing in a country that was once called Sweden.
It is not plausible. Not possible. Even the memories of humans are finite. Legends and myths will also die. If there is in fact a dream about a country that once existed and was called Sweden, it will be no more than a faint reflection of a legend that people will have no real reason for believing. Our reality, our rich memories of artistic and scientific triumphs and human defeats, will have been transformed into a mere saga. Atlantis and Sweden will then have something in common: nobody will be sure that either place really existed.
Nevertheless, we know what we hope for. We hope those people will have no idea that there is radioactive waste directly beneath their feet, a fatal clock that is still ticking away.
That is the memory that today’s people plan to leave behind for future generations – that nobody will remember it.
The last thing we leave behind us is something we hide away so that nobody will be able to find it.
Not ever.
14
The young medical student
The doctor who gave me the news about my cancer was called Mona. It was ‘serious’, and in addition it was probably ‘incurable’. There was, in any case, no doubt about the implications for the rest of my life. The medics would set in motion the treatment they considered most appropriate. But nobody could give any guarantees.
Mona was a perfect example of what is meant by ‘medical care’. She was well prepared, she spoke calmly and clearly, and she made time to listen to my questions. Time stood still in her consulting room. She must have had other patients waiting for her, but just now I was the one in there. She took her time and the consultation didn’t end until she was certain that I didn’t have any more questions.
Then I acquired Bengt Bergman as my consultant – although of course all the cancer specialists worked together. Every case of cancer is unique, but it is also a cooperative undertaking from which views and suggestions for action can be discussed and an agreed basis produced for continued treatment.
Needless to say, during that time I often thought about other doctors I had come into contact with during my life. Anyone who has lived for as long as I have will have come across quite a few, in various countries and in various more or less dramatic circumstances.
And new generations are appearing all the time.
Cecilia and Krister have a son, a young man who has just begun studying medicine at university in the northern Swedish town of Umeå. If I understand the situation correctly, he has already decided the subject in which he will eventually specialise: he wants to become a neurologist. I never ask him why, but I can guess his reasons.
‘We live in a universe which we can only partially understand and map out. But inside us we all have another universe which we actually know just as little about. Our brains.’
I understand him. Assuming that is in fact the way he thinks. He doesn’t just en
visage himself as a highly specialised doctor at some point in the future: he wants to be one of those people who venture out into unexplored territory, just like those who in the past set out to find the source of the River Nile or a negotiable route to the North Pole. Or have more recently created the spaceships that are now on the way out of our solar system and into absolute silence and darkness.
I have never had a longing to venture out into the universe, but I can sometimes feel jealous of those who research into the human mind. And perhaps especially those who study the human memory. Why? I am hardly the researcher type – I wouldn’t have enough patience. But I can well imagine that it must be a mind-blowing adventure to try to penetrate the human brain, where we all store a vast number of experiences, thoughts – memories, in fact. And perhaps one day to understand how this inner universe is constructed.
Can we possibly one day discover what is involved in thinking? Not just the chemical processes in which neutrons play a significant role, but what we could perhaps call the human soul.
Throughout history the memory has often been compared to a palace with an endless number of halls in which all our constantly growing collection of memories are placed on various levels or various shelves.
The first person we know of who made this comparison was the Greek poet Simonides, who lived in the fifth century BC according to our method of measuring time.
It is said that he once found himself present at a party in a palace. After he had gone home, the roof suddenly collapsed, killing all those he had just been talking and eating and drinking with. Living people who suddenly no longer existed. When he realised that he could still conjure up everything in his mind’s eye, in the tiniest detail, exactly as it had been before the roof caved in, he began to think about the possibility that the palace existed equally as much in his own inner world as in the outside world. But the difference was that the ceiling hadn’t collapsed inside his brain.