(I must admit, first off, that I am cheating ever so slightly. What follows is an idea, not a report from a completed project. However, it is an idea that a number of people are behind and, once the opportunity and resources present themselves, I plan on manifesting as soon as possible.) 'Be the change you wish to see in the world.' - Gandhi
After posting Experimental Archaeology of the Future I heard from several individuals -- James Hester and Vinay Gupta, inter alia -- who have already been pursuing this line of thought. The above-linked article by James Hester gives a sketch of the idea. I was interested to note that Mr. Hester has been involved in historical re-enactment (and I should mention that “historical pre-enactment” is a great term to cover the symmetrical extrapolation of this into the future), which I previously wrote about in Falling in Love with Medieval Armed Combat.
Both experimental archaeology of the past and experimental archaeology of the future are perfect examples of how human beings are sometimes impacted to a greater degree by learning experiences that involve the whole person. We’re all familiar, of course, with intemperate condemnations of mere “book learning,” but, being myself an enthusiast of books and book learning, I in no way wish to disparage this approach to knowledge. However, this is not the only approach to knowledge, and in some cases it is not the most effective approach to knowledge.
I have an upcoming blog post in which I discuss this extensively in a theoretical context, and I will provide a link here when the post is up; when I was writing this soon-to-appear post, experimental archaeology had not occurred to me as an example of my thesis, so I would like to connect to two ex post facto.
With these examples of potential experimental archaeology of the future, which I suggested yesterday would need funding on the level of “big science” to be a reality, and my post from a few days before that, Origins of Life Research as Space Science, in which I suggested scaling up origins of life research by building an artificial habitat in Earth orbit where life could be studied on a large scale for a long duration, it should be obvious that it would be a relatively easy matter to fund scientific civilization at a much higher level than in now the case. How much a civilization driven by science actually spends on scientific research is probably a determining factor in the existential viability of that civilization and its ongoing status as a scientific civilization.
