Internet favorite: nuclear waste, the distant future, and invisible danger

I was reading Hiroshima when a friend emailed me about this project--how can we communicate the dangers of nuclear waste disposal sites to the mind-bogglingly distant future? These things stay dangerous 10,000 years, at which point "today's written languages are unlikely to survive."

This site, related to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, gave me nightmares and colored all my recent walks through the city.

The goal is to make a repulsive, unnatural place, that even without languages clearly telegraphs the following points:

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.

I'm fascinated by the way the researchers reach into the distant past to think about what is universally beautiful or horrible to humans. For example, obelisks, spheres, cubes and other perfect geometric forms would show that the waste site is sacred in a good/important/valuable way. So many of the concepts include purposefully distorted forms--like a series of rectangular prisms that are all hacked off. It's clear that we knew how to make perfect things, and deliberately chose not to. 

For another, the researchers promote the idea of spending a huge amount of work crafting cheap and common materials. "Doing substantial work on materials of little value suggests that the place is not commemorative of phenomena highly valued by the culture that made it, but as marking something important yet quite unvalued ...not a treasure, but its opposite...a location of highly devalued material ("dangerous garbage" or an "un-treasure")."

Some light reading about aliens

I've really been enjoying this article called Alien Minds by Susan Schneider, a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut. I've often heard that it's likely that if we ever encounter aliens, they'll be postbiological-- more like superintelligent machines. Schneider sketches out this possibility, noting how humanity is getting more cyborgy already:

"...in the United States the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started to develop neural implants that interface directly with the nervous system, regulating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis, depression, and Crohn’s disease."

And then the article gets even more interesting--Schneider explores what it would be like inside the "mind" of a superintelligent alien. Would they be conscious? This reminds me of this classic piece on personal identity by Derek Parfit. Schneider casually points out:

"...even humans wishing to upload their minds will fail to transfer their consciousness. Although they may copy their memories onto a computational format, their consciousness will not transfer..."

It makes me both sad and excited to try to picture the distant future.

For further reading: The Fermi Paradox, in all its terrifying glory

source for the schneider: kottke!

On the way to the Calf of Man, 2010

Kathleen, an experienced sailor, was terrified this whole ride. The winds were so strong with us on the way out that everything was silent. She said she'd never sail in those conditions because it's so easy to lose control. But the Manx man steering the boat was one of the toughest-looking people I've ever seen, with some of the gnarliest, most faded tattoos.