http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/science/whatever-we-dig-up-well-end-up-buried.html 2016-09-20 10:10:06 Whatever We Dig Up, We’ll End Up Buried In our search for discovery and meaning, we always look up and out, while we hardly know anything about what is going on, or what went on, under our own feet. === In 1974, a farmer was digging a well in the countryside outside of Xi’an, the ancient imperial capital of China, when he started pulling up bricks, arrowheads and pieces of terra cotta. It turns out there was an entire army underneath his field — some 7,000 terra cotta warriors, complete with horses and weapons, buried 2,300 years ago to protect the tomb of I was thinking of that farmer as I walked through the streets of what was once So I was strolling through former fast-food restaurants, brothels and palaces, trying to imagine the good life of our ancestors, under a burning sun and the looming volcano. Back home the world was celebrating the I have no doubt that sometime in the next century human artifacts will visit Proxima b, as it is known, to check out some of those fantasies. But it struck me that in our search for mystery and discovery and meaning we always look up and out there. At the same time we hardly know anything about what is going on, or what went on, under our own feet. What have we already known, or built, and forgotten? We bury history, and history buries us. We walk around on a carapace of ignorance and forgetfulness. A few hundred miles north of Pompeii, another example, perhaps courtesy of global Judging by a wax reconstruction, he would look perfectly at home in Brooklyn or some other locale where eccentric clothing and ironic beards are fashionable. He is believed to have been killed by an arrow to the shoulder and a blow to the head. We know his blood type — O positive, the same as mine — and that he was lactose intolerant. But nobody knows why he was killed or who he really was. I found myself wondering if, when they are finally ever done with him, they would give him a decent burial. And I can’t help wondering if there are more out there like him, waiting to be uncovered, collected and preserved by the ice the way the dry valleys in Antarctica collect meteorites from Mars. What else lies beneath our feet? In Finland, workers are The caves of Europe are haunted by the prehistoric dreams and visions of our own ancestors. But the deepest and most mysterious storehouse of all might be our minds. On a plateau above Bolzano, a walking trail threads through Tyrolean villages with the chalky white teeth of One of them caught my eye: “The interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the unconscious in the psychic life.” Modern science, not to mention the feminist movement, has demolished much of Freud’s work and such notions as penis envy. But I doubt anyone would disagree with what I take to be the main message of all of this psychic plumbing: What we don’t know about ourselves can come back and hurt us. I plodded along wondering what dreams might rumble the long sleep of Ötzi and Qin, those bookends of prehistory. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead. It isn’t even past.” And we keep making more of it, layering it deeper. A couple days after I was in Pompeii, an Nature keeps shrugging, and whatever is not buried will disappear under the waves. My colleague Justin Gillis reported recently that the rise in ocean levels predicted by climate change scientists The storm is coming, to what end only the poets and musicians can imagine. All we know about astronomy and geology tells us that, in a billion years or so as the sun brightens and the oceans evaporate, life on I came home to find the remains of But one of the local tabloids had a photo of a surfer being bounced far above a wave. Just because we have to die doesn’t mean we can’t party.