or How to stop people from going into the hole
Text&Image Alžbeta Szabová
Sometimes we are forced to shift perspectives and look at our current situation from an imagined future in order to think about a problem we’re dealing with. If we ask questions about the legacy of our age, history can help us understand how it is to look back at the times long gone. When we are constructing our image of history, we’re limited by having to do so with the remains that have carried on from the past. As evidence is carried off with the wind, the probability of creating a truthful reconstruction lessens, and we’re stuck picking up the few pieces which we have left; as time marches on, signs of human influence dissipate. We only have a few paintings from ancient Greece that withstood the past millennia, and the only thing that remains of entire cities is their brief mentions in writing. Who knows how much has been washed away with rain, re-purposed, built over and decomposed, until no trace of what formerly was can be found, and no one knows to even search for the past. But, new discoveries can still be made that can fill out the blanks, and sometimes by people who were never even looking for them. History appears unexpectedly, and when it does, its creations can be seen by the living again.
Coincidence and luck can lead to a sudden change in our knowledge - it was a couple of boys who discovered the Lascaux cave filled with palaeolithic paintings when they went to rescue their dog that had fallen in. While we associate prehistory with cave paintings, it is probably not the case that prehistoric people had only been creating art inside caves, but those cave paintings are now the only remnants that have survived. And in some cases, that is probably for the better, for it is not only a myriad of painted bison one might find in a cave, but also death. Many caves have been discovered in the past centuries and then consequently sealed off and filled with warning signs after they became the final resting places of adventurers, scouts or unlucky passers-by. The deaths we know about are nasty, and the ones we do not know about are numerous. There are assumptions being made about how possible it is that a lot of missing people in remote areas have met their fate by stumbling on a sinkhole of an extensive cave system. Being enthusiastic about caving can mean one might find oneself stuck upside down in a hole in the ground (and this hole probably has a silly name like“the Birth Canal”) and remain there until others seal them in with cement so no one else can become permanently stuck.
This article will, however, not be about the past and the inevitable entropy of time but about the legacies that outlive the imaginary “us” that gets assigned to humanity, and what remains after our period of history is long gone.
Within caves, history can stand still. Right now, arguably the biggest scientific breakthrough of the last century - nuclear power - has created waste that we know will outlive us, waste that will last for longer than human history exists. It is possible that ten thousand years from now, there will be contemporary architecture, art or literature that carries on. But we know for sure that not even plastics can compare to the longevity of nuclear waste. So far, radioactive waste has been mostly disposed of the same way as unlucky cavers: buried in a deep hole and filled with cement. Since this waste needs to be out of reach far into an incomprehensibly distant future in order to keep people out of these radioactive burial sites, there needs to be a way to create a communication plan that spans tens of thousands of years into the future.
So, when we know certain parts of the Earth should remain untouched, lest some adventurous discoverers face a cruel demise, what can be done? The site has to be avoided, and the markings maintained. This is not in itself an engineering task - it is not that difficult to bury something. The problem lies in stopping people from digging it back up. Since the issues arise from the actions of future societies, social scientists must come onto the scene. Nothing can be written, for language will change, but pictures aimed at making people avoid the site might also make them think that there is a treasure inside (we can now go and see the ancient Egyptian messages to “Keep Out” displayed in museum exhibitions). The sense of danger must then be conveyed differently.
One team of researchers from the 90’s, while designing adeterrent for a nuclear repository in New Mexico, proposed the creation of something monumental, which would motivate future generations to revere the structure protecting the ancient markers. At the same time, the site must look repellant in order for the danger to be apparent. The idea is to go beyond hostile architecture, into the evil and menacing. Some examples include an enormous spike field, a big black circle of concrete which makes a part of a landscape unusable because it radiates heat all day long, or a grid of black cubes that also emanate heat so you boil if you go in between them. Other plans have ventured more into the realm of science fiction. With hope that where scientific knowledge gets lost to time, myths and legends prevail, the proposal to found a religious order tasked with protecting these sites was born. And my favourite: the breeding of special cats that glow when
radiation is near.
None of these plans have (to my great dismay) been carried out since their proposal at the end of the last century, but the lack of long-term solutions for contemporary problems remains. When trying to address climate change and being swept away by existential dread about the following century, we hardly want to think of what will be here in ten thousand years. But (this one is for the anthropologist readers) the next time a family member asks you what it exactly is that anthropologists do, you can tell them that at least some of them have been thinking ahead. And thanks to them - long after we are all gone - there might be a really weird enormous spike pit in New Mexico.
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