Salt of the Earth

Quincy recently visited an 800 year old salt mine in Turda, Romania.  While it was decommissioned 30 years ago, it has been reopened as a surreal amusement park of sorts where a person can do anything from enjoying a ride on a Ferris wheel to playing ping pong with a friend while hundreds of feet below the surface.  The architecture and lighting in the mine is akin to something you would expect in a futuristic science fiction movie.  Ironically, we forget that salt was a commodity of extreme value for centuries and was the cause of wars.  While we take things "with a grain of salt" these days this shift in value makes us wonder what will become the surreal amusement parks of our not so distant future- oil fields?  Strategic military bases?  What else?  And what will replace them as a commodity so precious they are  worth killing for?

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