What If a Future Civilization Lives On Antarctica? | Unveiled

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What if a Future Civilization Lives on Antarctica?</h4>

Antarctica, our most mysterious continent, lay theorized but undiscovered until the 19th century. It took almost another century for anybody to make their way to the south pole, on the only truly uninhabited landmass on our planet. But could humans someday live there in far larger numbers?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if a future civilization lives on Antarctica?

Despite Antarctica’s hostile and isolated environment, humans have lived there on and off for more than one hundred years. There were a handful of exploration expeditions in the first half of the 1800s, but the biggest Antarctic endeavors didn’t begin until the very end of that century… and, in the 1900s, humans moved onto some Antarctic islands to set up whaling stations. Today, whaling is at best controversial, and is now illegal in many parts of the world. It’s been banned internationally since 1986, although not all countries observe this. But it was huge in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and with overfishing decimating whale populations further north, the untouched Antarctic became compelling. In fact, exploiting whale and seal populations was the first major reason people went to Antarctica at all. It wasn’t until much later that we began going to explore for exploration’s sake, rather than for profit.

Thankfully, though, the practice of whaling did almost end completely, and plundering the continent is no longer the reason for human habitation there. Broadly, Antarctica is today split into different sections, designated to various countries to use for scientific research. Disturbing the environment in any way is not really allowed anymore, nor is using Antarctica for military purposes. The biggest settlement, then, is McMurdo Station, a science base operated by the United States – although, interestingly, the US doesn’t actually claim any territory on the continent. In summer, when McMurdo is most populous, there are around 1,000 residents; being allowed to live there is often a career highlight and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the researchers selected to go. But Antarctica still isn’t entirely free of commercial enterprise, either;  there are for-profit Antarctic cruise companies, for example, and some even make landfall and allow paying tourists onto the land itself, albeit with strict rules about what they can and can’t do. Some even visit those eerie, abandoned whaling stations that were once a hub of activity. Evidently, then, Antarctica is a unique and intriguing destination, and in many ways a desirable one - although it isn’t accessible to many. 

Nevertheless, a few people have lived on Antarctica for an extraordinarily long time. A British explorer named Ken Blaiklock, for instance, spent 14 years there, though not consecutively. With current technology, the landscape for living in Antarctica is very different from how it was for those whalers of yesteryear. They lived there before even the invention of aviation, meaning that the only way to get back was via long and treacherous voyages on ships - leaving them even more isolated. Also, while there’s now electricity powering the outposts, and most even have the internet, those are relatively new developments - not so long ago, nothing like that existed. Contemporary Antarctic locales are at the forefront of satellite internet, too, which doesn’t require the installation of complex infrastructure, like cables. And so, slowly but surely, modern communities are growing on Antarctica, albeit communities that are carefully operated and managed. So, does this mean that more will follow?

For many, humans likely wouldn’t migrate this far south en masse unless they were faced with climate disaster - at which point, Antarctica perhaps looks a good option. With the Arctic far smaller by comparison and made up primarily of ice, Antarctica is a full landmass with ice only on top. If the planet were to get too hot and we needed to live somewhere cold, then Antarctica might even be the only option - although not every model arrives at this particular conclusion. That said, in a reality where Antarctic migration was necessary, then the protection of its unique wilderness would likely, suddenly come second to ensuring our species survives. 

But, nevermind the reasons for it, whether a sizable number of people were ever enticed to Antarctica on another quest or forced there due to climate change, what might life be like down there for an advanced civilization like our own? One built by humans for humans, but in the coldest place on Earth?

Well, while we often associate urban cities as being the antithesis of nature and inherently destructive to the environment, it doesn’t actually need to be that way. There are many movements to build sustainable (or green) cities, already ongoing all across the world. It’s a major goal of the United Nations. These cities aim to minimize how much they disturb the environment they’re constructed within… albeit often retroactively, as it wasn’t necessarily how they were originally designed and built. However, we do know that it is possible for urbanization to meet nature and not ruin it all. Before the industrial revolution, many human settlements existed alongside nature without affecting it too much. And, in the future, we perhaps could feasibly do this in Antarctica. What’s more, with no retrospective action needed, because we would be building Antarctic infrastructure mostly from scratch. This would offer the perfect opportunity to invest in green solutions – and, indeed, wind turbines do already exist on the continent to power its outposts. Antarctica could also be a great place for solar energy, though, as the extreme days for half of the year would enable energy stockpiling in large reserves and batteries, to help in the long, dark winters. Meanwhile, those wind turbines would continue to work year-round. Add in tidal generators along the lengthy Antarctic coastline, and the prospects look even better. In fact, Princess Elisabeth Station, an outpost built by Belgium in 2009, is already a zero-emission installation, making use of wind and solar power and leading by example. 

It could be, then, that a long-term human presence wouldn’t automatically mean terrible things would happen to the continent. But how would the people themselves adapt to living there? For one, extreme isolation might be a problem… but, then again, if you were part of a large enough settlement, with plenty of people around you, it might not be so bad. Especially with internet access to the rest of the world - assuming that there was a rest of the world after whatever it was that led to the construction of our city in Antarctica! But then there is the other big factor: the temperature. The coldest recorded temperature in Antarctica is −128.6 °F - pretty chilly. Mind you, that was well inland; the average temperature on the coast is around 14.0 °F. Still cold, but not insane. And, of course, for thousands of years, humans have lived in extremely cold places, like the far north of Canada, Greenland, Siberia, and Scandinavia. Societies in these cold places have even thrived, like the Vikings, living in close communities and wearing heavy clothes to protect against the cold. 

Humans are adaptable creatures, and it only takes a few weeks for us to acclimatize to cold temperatures. Many scientists who have lived on Antarctica, for example, get so used to it that they don’t even wear the huge coats that most of us imagine must be necessary. So the cold perhaps WOULD eventually start to feel much more manageable.That doesn’t mean that - in this alternate, Antarctic-centric world - we wouldn’t still all need to be careful, however, particularly while outside, and especially during the winter. Elsewhere, some early Antarctic explorers reportedly acclimatized in more extreme ways, through drastic measures like throwing buckets of icy, Antarctic water all over themselves, thereby exposing them to the worst of the cold and getting them used to it faster. That was around a hundred years ago, though. We’d likely at least have central heating and reliable buildings in this hypothesized future, so perhaps it needn’t be quite such a shock.

Finally, though, food would also be tricky. We wouldn’t want to revert to the early days of whaling, because that wouldn’t represent a truly sustainable life on the continent. Meanwhile, at present you’re not even allowed to TOUCH the penguins if you visit Antarctica, and have to be as considerate to them as possible, so people definitely won’t approve of you trying to eat them. Without relying on shipping large quantities of food from other parts of the world, then - which also wouldn’t be especially eco-friendly - we’d likely have to resort to methods similar to what we’re planning to use in space exploration. Things like greenhouses and large hydroponics labs would be required to manufacture large amounts of food. It could also be a predominantly vegetarian or even vegan society, since it wouldn’t be ideal to bring livestock down to Antarctica and disrupt its ecosystem that way, either - by introducing invasive species like cows, chickens, and pigs. By this point in the future, maybe we’ll have mastered growing tasty, cultured meat in labs. We’d certainly need to be well skilled in growing fruits and vegetables in climate-controlled buildings. But if it’s seemingly possible to do all that on the likes of Mars or the moon, then it’s absolutely possible to do it on Antarctica, too.  Astronaut food, here we come!

What do YOU think? Should humanity use all its knowledge to build a huge, eco-friendly city on Antarctica? Will it ever need to?

In the end, keeping Antarctica pristine for scientific and environmental research is probably going to continue to be the status quo, and for good reason. But, it IS possible to live there, and doing so could even prove to be the first step towards leaving Earth entirely - so alien is our southernmost land. And that’s what would happen if a future civilization were to live on Antarctica.