Science and the Future 851 is on newsstands. Our cover story:the great adventure of the lost cities. Presentation in text and video by Dominique Leglu, the editorial director.
The cover of Sciences et Avenir 851.
We all have something of an explorer in us. Child, it is undeniable, as soon as arms and legs allow to propel oneself out of the cradle through the vast world. For some adults, the exploration never stopped. In our western countries, it has even been able to take, as the geographer and historian Christian Grataloup deciphers, a romantic Indiana Jones-style turn. Jungles or deserts, stairways overgrown with roots, hostile mountains riddled with caves with hidden treasures… In fact, to scientifically describe the “lost cities”, and largely unknown to us, that our great reporter Bernadette Arnaud brings to life this month in Science and Future , specialists continue to face sun or monsoons, spiders and snakes, feet in clay or sand, wide-eyed to unlock certain secrets still buried. It is a field obligation that is not given to everyone. But once practiced, it risks seizing the practitioner so well that it turns to passion. The key, in fact, is the discovery of extraordinary places, which dot the mind with question marks.
"What ancestral stories are you running after, stranger?"
What heights did these cities once reach? Why did they end up disappearing? Should we see in this a brutal, “natural” destruction, such as caused by a tsunami engulfing walls and pilasters, jars and other jewels? Or an inhuman end during a pitiless war, when a conquered city is a razed city?... Should we guess, on the contrary, an abandonment in a slow agony? Change of civilization; disappearance of trade routes; displacement of power elsewhere; oblivion… The extraordinary photo on page 39, with the head of a Buddha emerging from the pitiless interlacing of a cheese maker* seems to question us:what are you looking for, stranger? What ancestral stories are you running after? What are you reinventing? This is what the file reveals, off the beaten track! This is what many other pages of the magazine will undoubtedly reveal, with the 2018 research.
Their foretaste can be found in the 2017 retrospective. Thus, this exploration, which will continue, of unsuspected cavities in the great pyramid of Cheops. The passion there will never be denied. As in the quest, oh so perilous, of the suppression of certain diseases, thanks to a modification of the genome on human embryos. The manipulations have started and bet is taken that they will not stop. As to what ethics they will follow, that is the question. In this year of revision in France of the laws of bioethics, there is no doubt that the possible quest for a child if not "perfect", at least dedicated to better health thanks to genetics, will be at the heart of discussions. everything fundamental. The exploration of man by man, too, continues.
* It earned its author Mathew Browne the award for historical photographer of the year.