Landfills as Humanity's best assets.


   The landfills are a lot more valuable than a source of raw materials:
they contain an enormous amount of information that is not obtainable
from any other source and can be used to reconstruct the detailed history
of technology, samples of handwriting and personal archives of most of
the population, fingerprints and DNA samples of practically every person,
and everything else imaginable.
   
   A sufficiently advanced civilization might be able to create any raw
material from vacuum, but nobody can create the history of our civilization
(hopefully the most valuable resource on this planet) out of vacuum, and
the single richest source of historical data is the landfills.

   I would expect that an appropriate combination of nanotech, AI and data
storage technologies to info-mine the landfills may be available in about
50 years from now.

   Don't sell your landfill cheap!

		- Alexander Chislenko <sasha1@netcom.com>  09/14/93
Home page: http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html