cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
Concrete: The material that's 'too vast to imagine' - BBC
There is so much concrete in the world that soon it will outweigh all living matter – including us. In the latest in our Anthropo-Scene series, we explore the material's global reach, occasional beauty, and unimaginable scale.
Ages of human history have often been named after the materials that our ancestors mastered at that time: stone, bronze or iron.
If future archaeologists do the same for us, what material might they choose to define the 21st Century? Silicon? Plastic? Both are candidates, shaping the world for better and for worse. But if the decision were based on scale alone, then there can be only one answer: we are living in the age of concrete.
There are few human-made substances on Earth that are quite so ubiquitous. Concrete is what the philosopher-ecologist Timothy Morton calls a "hyperobject" – something so enormous and widespread that it cannot be fully contemplated with the mental faculties that we have. If you attempt to picture the entirety of the world's concrete in the mind's eye, you soon realise that it's impossible.
There is so much concrete in the world that soon it will outweigh all living matter – including us. In the latest in our Anthropo-Scene series, we explore the material's global reach, occasional beauty, and unimaginable scale.
Ages of human history have often been named after the materials that our ancestors mastered at that time: stone, bronze or iron.
If future archaeologists do the same for us, what material might they choose to define the 21st Century? Silicon? Plastic? Both are candidates, shaping the world for better and for worse. But if the decision were based on scale alone, then there can be only one answer: we are living in the age of concrete.
There are few human-made substances on Earth that are quite so ubiquitous. Concrete is what the philosopher-ecologist Timothy Morton calls a "hyperobject" – something so enormous and widespread that it cannot be fully contemplated with the mental faculties that we have. If you attempt to picture the entirety of the world's concrete in the mind's eye, you soon realise that it's impossible.