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We are turning the future into the dump of the present

As the Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity said more than a decade ago, we have made the future the dump of the present. And the reason, we add, is clear: all destruction of the past to "make room" for the present transforms the future into a dump full of those rubble, debris and refuse that, accumulated, we call "civilization."

A clear and recent example of this intentional destruction of the past to "build" the present (but not the future) occurred in January of this year near the town of Moab, Utah, when construction machines from the Bureau of Land Management (BML) of the United States government destroyed 112-million-year-old dinosaur footprints.

Hoping to replace a walkway where visitors walk to see the fossilized footprints of dinosaurs, the machines went over those footprints and excavated on that site, thus destroying in minutes and irreversibly something that had lasted millions and millions of years. 

As a result of that destruction, there is no longer a reason to visit the site. However, and as a maximum expression of absurdity, after an interval, new walkways were installed for visitors, who will now be able to walk in a more comfortable and safe way to see up close the marks left by the tracks of the large machines.

Perhaps in 100 million years the archaeologists and paleontologists of the future will discover the tracks left by the bulldozers and excavators and they will wonder what kind of civilization could destroy some 200 very old footprints of 10 different species of animals so easily. Perhaps those archaeologists of the future will conclude that it was not a "civilization" at all, but barbarism.

In this context, as Innerarity rightly points out, we have left it “in the hands of bad lawyers”, and, therefore, we live “at the expense of the future”, that is, we have become “completely irresponsible” with respect to the future. And that irresponsibility towards the future begins precisely with the destruction of the past because we want everything “right now”. 

That short-term thinking and action is mostly oriented to satisfying the narcissistic needs of those momentarily in power, thus disregarding our duties "linked to the long term." The pandemic and the current wars aptly illustrate this situation, where the focus seems to “fix” the past and not to build a future. 

Therefore, the fact that machines of the United States federal government destroyed dinosaur footprints on land in a state that bears the name of an indigenous tribe (the Ute, or people of the mountains) becomes a symbol of technology trampling everything from the past that the new technology decides should not be part of the future.

A question then arises, what else is being trampled on, be it by technology or by narrow-minded

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