Christina+Suh's+Collapse+Reflection

2210, Seoul, Korea. The investigators find countless ruins of tall buildings and cars. They also find a ruin of a subway station– a highly developed one too, where air was surprisingly well ventilated regardless of the fact that it was underground. After investigating the subway station, they go up to a mountain that was once called the “Nam (South) Mountain.” On top of the mountain, they are able to see a full view of the ghost town. Their high-tech computer shows the original appearance of the once highly –actually, the most– populated city in Korea. They find many reasons that could have possibly forced the people to abandon this city: limited resources, high levels of pollution, overexposure to yellow dust...

This is what I thought of after watching the documentary, //The Collapse//. As the documentary showed scenes of investigators going around the abandoned cities in 2210, I imagined what those investigators might find in our own city, Seoul. One hour and 33 minutes, 40 seconds. The length of the documentary was at first, slightly overwhelming. However, as I watched the film, I became unaware of how long I was watching it. The documentary soon captivated me. Los Angeles, Beijing, Central Mexico– these cities that have enormous affects in our global society today, were only to be found in rusty old ruins in 2210. This came up to me as a shock. I thought our society was strong enough that it would never perish, and that the disappearance of ancient civilizations such as Maya and Rome only happened because they were not as developed as we are right now. However, this film revealed that I was wrong. Our society had some serious problems that were similar to the problems that the ancient civilizations had. These problems could possibly lead our society to also evaporate one day.

However, Diamond says we are different. We are able to look into the past and the future to prevent the destruction of our society. The ability to “think deep” will help us live on. If we are a little bit more wise, we would recognize the problems we have and try to solve them before they lead us to destruction. I certainly hope this is true; I wondered about the purpose of watching this film, and realized that we are the ones who could avert the fall of our modern civilizations. We, the children and young adults of the future, make up the generation that will play the biggest role in changing the society for the better.

I cannot assert whether we will be able to completely put an end to this trend of rising and falling of civilizations, but we definitely have the ability to at least slow down the process. This documentary has enlightened me of our future duties, and I certainly hope that more of our generation as well as our future generation would watch this film and receive the same impression as I did.