Meditations on the next 10,000 years
"This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."
"The very exercise of designing, building, and viewing the markers creates a powerful testimony addressed to today's society about the full environmental, social, and economic costs of using nuclear materials. We can never know if we indeed have successfully communicated with our descendants 400 generations removed, but we can, in any case, perhaps convey an important message to ourselves."
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-- Excerpts from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter |
The excerpts from this report from Sandia National Laboratories on proposed methods of marking a nuclear waste dump site for future generations fascinated me, and chilled me, and also even instilled a bit of hope in me. It got me thinking about the enormous responsibility toward the future that we of the nuclear age have taken upon ourselves.
Just the idea of specifically trying to come up with anything that will last for 10,000 years is, in a word, ambitious. But to attempt to devise a way to warn people millennia in the future of a lethal danger that we created adds a dimension of urgency and responsibility that, say, the project to create a clock that will run for 10,000 years lacks. As a friend remarked to me after reading this document, it's like knowing the solution to a mystery that doesn't yet exist.
I felt this strange chill as I read about the messages that would be contained at the WIPP site and viewed the artist's conceptions of different versions of menacing landscapes meant to deter the future curious from exploring such a place too closely. Chilled by the very idea that we not only could, but would produce something that endangers our descendents for the next 400 generations. Chilled by imagining myself as one of those descendents, hundreds or thousands of years from now, encountering this site of danger and potential death. It's like imagining Howard Carter and his fellow archeologists opening the pyramids nearly a century ago and succumbing to mysterious deaths, one by one.
Take a look at those drawings of mysterious and foreboding landscapes proposed to help signify a place of deadliness. Imagine yourself thousands of years from now and think of how much our language will have changed by then. A sign in today's English would likely mean nothing to you. Maybe the pictograms would get the message across. Would you flee in fear, or would you be intrigued and investigate further, never quite sure of the consequences?
The Tiamat series of books -- The Snow Queen, World's End, and The Summer Queen -- by Joan Vinge, one of my favorite authors, include this theme. It's excellent fodder for science fiction, especially for an author with a background in anthropology. I'll try not to spoil the books for those who haven't read them yet (and you should!).
The universe of the Tiamat series included sibyls, of whom you could ask questions and receive answers comprised of the combined knowledge of the peoples of the Hegemonic worlds. Sibyls were marked with a trefoil symbol which ought to look familiar to us, but which had lost their original meaning in the far future. Because that meaning had mutated over time, and because people screwed with all kinds of things on the world of Tiamat without fully understanding what they were doing, they eventually created a situation which had vast, destructive implications for the whole Hegemony. Crucial information had been destroyed or corrupted through these actions, and billions of people across many star systems could have suffered because of it. Moon Dawntreader Summer, the queen of Tiamat, was called upon to solve a mystery whose origins lay thousands of years in the past.
This is the kind of situation that comes to mind when I read about WIPP. What kind of legacy are we leaving for our posterity? Will it be a legacy of contamination, of illness and desolation? Or will it be one of concern for their well-being? Will we go on our merry way, using up all our resources and leaving a wasteland in our wake, or will we learn to consider the impact of our actions on not just the next seven generations, but the next 400? Will we make it difficult for them, or easy? Despair, or hope?
I believe that the answers to these questions will ultimately reveal much about the collective character of those of us who have the power to decide. This is where the hope comes in. Because there are people like those who wrote the Sandia Lab report, I have hope that eventually we will find a way to make amends to our descendants by doing what we can to mitigate the damage of our various current stupidities. At the very least, it makes me glad to know that someone's thinking about how to warn them of the dangers we're leaving them.
We humans have a choice before us: We can do everything possible to make our descendants revile us, or we can do everything possible to make them respect us. Which path will we choose?
begun mid-2000, completed March 17, 2001
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