The weekend just past was slightly deviated from my usual schedule. On Saturday, I visited one of the biggest national museums in the country. The museum exhibits a wide range of items of the universe and the earth including the plants, animals and human biology.
I am usually not so thrilled about visiting museums. Since the city I am residing is acclaimed for the cultivation of understanding the nature and its diversity, I took the opportunity to join LC and her bf after her belated birthday celebration at a japanese restaurant.
We only managed to spend 4 hours in the museum due to an extremely long lunch eating sukiyaki. The museum consists three divisions and a number of organization wide service departments. It covers millions of specimens for its heterogenous collections, everything from pollen to whales and from minerals to DNA. Due to the shortage of time, we only manged to visit some of the sections.
I checked out the historical section, exhibiting how lifes were evolved since the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. As I sauntered the exhibit hallway, I was so fascinated to view the changes and transformations of the earth as if I'd been there to witness all the events taken place. When the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was hot, vulcanoes were active and the planet´s surface was bombarded by meteorites. Since then, the Earth has cooled, massive continents have formed and been destroyed, mountains have grown and been worn down. The atmosphere has filled with oxygen created by living organisms. Giant dinosaurs roamed the continents for million years and mysteriously disappeared for allowing the first mammals to take place. The most recent additions to the evolutionary chain is the thinking man - man. Many animals were already extinct since then. Some are yet to be. All these events were summarized and displayed thoroughly in the exhibition hall.
Many questions pondered my mind while I was there. As the earth and all lives continue to evolve (old species extinct and new species forming), what will lives be in future? Will Homo sapiens disappear for other new creatures to dominate? Even we do not project that far, what will our future generations look like, say >100 years later? Will our daily activities be manipulated by high throughput robotic technologies only? What will the mentality of these future men be? Will they think the same as us? Will they be as curious as we are now about the history of the earth? Will they share the same living habit? Can they travel to other planets for vacations as if they are visiting their neighbour countries? Will there be any museums still? If there will be, a new section will definitely be added to cover items from the past millennium and centuries. Additional chapters will also be compiled into the future history textbook about the current 'us'. Who knows, pictures of the tools that we are using now and a picture of us performing our daily activities will be snapped and exhibited hundred years later in museums, or whatever a new name for a place to exhibit historical objects then?
What will lives be in future? I continue to ponder......
♥ every page of my imagination
