The Long Now and Why Nuclear Power is a Bad Idea (Maybe)

Oftentimes, it is a mystery to me why my brain goes off in a particular direction. I have written before, on this blog, about having read an interesting book entitled The Clock of the Long Now. Having read that book is the reason why I try to use a 5-digit year in writing dates (for example, 02008 instead of 2008). It's a technique for trying to train myself to think on a longer term time scale. To think in terms of millennia instead of decades or centuries. I haven't yet fully trained myself on the 5-digit years (which is why sometimes I'll post a blog entry that mentions a 4-digit year and then go back and edit it afterwards--and I suspect there are times when the 4-digit year has simply slipped past my notice).

Anyway, I've recently been thinking about nuclear power, but I've been thinking about it with that "long now" mindset. So, where previously I had mostly taken the view that nuclear power is actually a good idea (better for the environment than burning fossil fuels, for example), I've recently been thinking about how fundamentally bad an idea it is. Not because of the potential for nuclear accidents (such as Three Mile Island or Chernobyl). I think that in that sense, nuclear power is actually pretty safe. We've been powering submarines with nuclear fuel for decades and to the best of my knowledge, there's been no consequence in terms of life or limb--and surely there has been less damage to the oceans from all of those thousands of miles travelled in nuclear submarines than has been caused by more conventionally powered boats covering the same number of miles.

What's been on my mind about the hazards of nuclear fuel is just how long they take to degrade. If we assume that it takes nuclear fuel 10,000 years to become inert, think of just how long that is, in terms of human history.

Let's take a quick look back at what wasn't around 10,000 years ago.

10,000 years ago:

There was no Islam, no Christianity, no Judaism, no Buddhism, no Jainism, no Hinduism, no Taoism.

Zeus, Odin, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, and Ganesha had not yet been imagined, let alone risen to prominence and (in most cases) fallen from grace.

There was no religion that you've ever heard of. This is not to say that religion did not exist. Humankind has an extraordinary capacity for making up stories to explain the unexplainable (and the frightening). It is my belief that humankind's default instinct is to explain thunder (a large-scale scary phenomenon) by making up a god. If I'm right about that, then in its most basic form, religion probably predates just about anything else in the history of human thought. Doesn't mean it's sensible, just means it's old.

10,000 years ago:

There was no Rome, no Greece, no Egypt, no China, no Inca Empire, no Mayan culture. There were no Vikings or Mongols or Visigoths or Olmecs or Toltecs. 10,000 years ago predates every great civilization you've ever heard of (except perhaps for some imaginary ones).

While armed conflict between tribes has probably existed since before the fully modern human emerged, the oldest war you've ever heard of happened less than 10,000 years ago. (Again, excepting for fiction.)

While bullies and chieftains and kings have surely existed for as long as people have congregated in groups (and pack leaders are prominent in much less socially "advanced" species than our own), the oldest ruler you've ever heard of had not been born 10,000 years ago.

10,000 years ago:

The cow had not been domesticated. Sure, there was farming, but it was very primitive.

10,000 years ago predates the English language (modern English, Middle English, Old English). That long ago, there was no French, or Spanish, or Russian, or Basque, or Chinese, or Japanese, or Hindi, or Roman, or Greek, or Navajo, or Hebrew or Aramaic. You've never heard of any language as old as 10,000 years ago (except perhaps some imaginary ones--anybody know how long a time ago Huttese was supposed to exist in a galaxy far away?).

10,000 years ago, there was no Iliad or Odyssey. There was no Code of Hammurabi. There were no Bible, no Talmud, no hieroglyphics, no Sanskrit or cuneiform writing. The book had not been invented, nor had the scroll. Most likely, nothing resembling paper had been invented.

Not only was there no recorded music. There was no way of recording music. Musical notation had not been invented yet. I suspect it's probably fair to guess that people have been playing something akin to drums and bamboo flutes and maracas for at least a few tens of thousands of years. However, with the exception of those and similarly primitive examples, it's pretty safe to assume that almost every musical instrument you're familiar with has been invented in the last 10,000 years. Surely the guitar, piano, harpsichord, trumpet, violin, lute, serpent, tambourine, and cymbal are extremely new developments.

10,000 years ago, metalsmithing was likely not a widespread art. Stone knapping existed, and people made weapons. Hunting was a widespread practice.

Clothing existed, but probably not any clothing you'd be willing to wear in public.

The great pyramids of Egypt had not been built 10,000 years ago, nor had the ziggurats. The ruins of Catal Huyuk may be approaching 10,000 years old at this point.

And that brings me to the important word here: Ruins. There is no structure built by human hands that has remained intact for the last 10,000 years. The closer you get to that age, the more completely ruined are the fragments. I'm not saying that people that long ago were not inventive. I'm not saying that they were not clever or sophisticated or advanced (whatever that means). I'm not saying they were not industrious and capable of doing great things. I'm simply saying that 10,000 years is an extremely long time to expect anything to last. Societies rise and fall. Religions rise and fall. Buildings rise and fall.

What we know for sure about people from that long ago is basically what we can infer, simply from our own existence: 10,000 years ago, people were able to find food and eat it. They congregated in close enough proximity that they were able to find mates. They had sex and made babies and raised children. They migrated. In a nutshell, that's probably the majority of what we know, for certain, of human society 10,000 years ago.

What we know of human nature is probably as true today as it was then and it will probably remain just as true 10,000 years from now. What does that mean? For the purpose of this train of thought, it means this: people are inquisitive and imaginative. That alone is enough to establish the danger of trying to store nuclear waste anywhere.

It is hubris to believe that the USA (or any other current nation) will still exist in 10,000 years. It is extremely unlikely that anyone will still use any language that is currently spoken. At best, there will probably be just a few experts who can decipher any of our languages in any meaningful way.

In the intervening centuries, surely there will be periods of increasing war and increasing peace. Surely there will be periods of increasing tribalism and increasing unity.

It's reasonable to expect that archaeology will to some extent go in and out of fashion. But surely, as long as people continue to exist, people will be digging and exploring.

Where on Earth humankind will migrate is anybody's guess. Historically, societies have tended to rise in areas with easy access to water. However, there's no telling how influential our current and future technologies will be in changing that trend.

The end result of that is that there's no place on the planet that we can be sure won't be explored. Which means that you can't simply "hide" your nuclear waste and reasonably hope that it won't be discovered and cause harm.

And you can't simply put up a sign saying "DANGER" and hope it will be heeded. Going back to the death of languages and the pattern of birth and death of religions and beliefs, it's absurd to believe that a sign, no matter how carefully and strongly worded, will be heeded. In fact, it's probably the case that the more warning you post and the more effort you put into making your stash inaccessible, the more effort will be taken in the future to get at it. Human nature means that the more difficult you make it to get at a treasure, the more valuable the treasure will become in the minds of future generations. Even if they understand the warnings, they may think those warnings to be pure hyperbole. It's possible that people in 2,000 years will doubt our ability to create nuclear power just as much as we doubt the ancient Egyptians to have done so.

If someone today digs up a chest of doubloons (and you know that people are searching), nobody is harmed. If someone in the future digs up a mountain full of thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel, the downside is potentially pretty disastrous.

So what's the solution?

I have no idea. Ethically, our policy makers should probably be thinking about such things. I wonder whether they do.

I guess that we could simply take the short view: that our responsibility is limited to the few dozen generations that are likely to still have any philosophical or emotional or intellectual connection at all to us. If we take that view, then yes, we can reasonably think that we have the power to protect our descendants. But if we take the long view, that becomes an increasingly absurd idea.

Meet the Donkephant! New T-Shirt Design

Well, after many months, I've finally put a new design on my on-line store. If you like the design, and want it on a shirt (or even if you don't especially like the design but want to show that you're a free thinker), you're invited to go there and order.

As always, comments are welcome.

Our Evolving Language?

Last week (a phrase that I believe pretty much always means "the week before this one"), I was listening to the radio, as I do regularly while at work. The day was Wednesday, July 25, and I was reminded of something that's been bothering me (mildly) for quite a while now.

The radio announcer mentioned the YouTube Debate that happened "last Monday". That debate had happened on Monday, July 23. That's a mere two days before the report I was listening to.

When I'm speaking, if it's a Wednesday, and I say "last Monday", what I mean is "the Monday of the previous week". That is, "9 days ago".

This is the idiomatic usage that I grew up with, and I believed that within the English speaking world, it was pretty much universal usage.

On a Wednesday, if I want to speak about something that happened two days earlier, I am happy to say "two days ago" or "on Monday". (Using a past tense verb in conjunction with this phrase clarifies that I'm speaking about the most recent Monday, rather than the upcoming Monday). I might even say "Monday", without using any sort of qualifier. But you won't catch me saying "last Monday" unless I'm mistaken about just how long ago the event happened.

Later the same day, again on the radio, I heard two mentions of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal that occurred in March 02007. Remember, I was listening to this report in July 02007. And twice in this one report, the scandal was mentioned as having broken "last March".

If it's July, and I say "last March", I do not mean "the most recent March". Instead, I mean "March of last year". If I mean to indicate "the most recent March", I will likely say "this March" or "in March", or "this past March". But I certainly would not say "last March". To me, "last March" means specifically not the March that occurred during this calendar year.

I started noticing people (mostly newscasters on both television and radio) using this (to me, bizarre) phraseology several years ago. More than about 15 years ago, I'm pretty sure I had never thought that saying "last Monday" or "last March" was an ambiguous usage. And now I'm pretty convinced that it's entirely ambiguous.

So my question to you, dear reader, is this:

Am I mistaken in believing that the usage and meaning of "last" has been undergoing an unnecessary and confusing transformation in recent years?

And here's The Repeal Of Gravity Blog's first poll ever:

This Morning's John McCain Town Hall Meeting, Claremont, NH

We went to our first presidential campaign town hall meeting today. This time was an event for John McCain at the American Legion hall in Claremont. I was surprised to get the phone invitation the other day from McCain's people. I guess he's courting the independent vote. As this will be our first presidential election cycle since moving to New Hampshire, I'm still not altogether certain of the process. From what I gather, we'll be allowed to choose which primary we want to cast our ballots in (assuming we wish to cast our ballots in either primary).

If you've read my campaign web site, you'll probably already be aware that I am, on principle, opposed to the whole two-party system. By extension, I'm also of the opinion that there ought not to be a primary election cycle. I think we'd all be much better off if we just went straight to the general election. Stop playing this game of trying to determine which of our like-minded people would best represent all of our fellow like-minded people when it comes time to vote against whichever of the like-minded people the opposing group of like-minded people has chosen to represent themselves in facing our like-minded representative. (Gorgeous sentence structure, no?)

What we should have is individuals, standing on their own beliefs, taking their own stances. If you want to run for president, run for president. Don't run for the opportunity to be chosen to run for president.

Ah, but that's my idealism poking through, isn't it?

The reality of our current system is that we have to work from within rather than from the outside. So, despite my opposition to the principles of giving political parties the power to determine who gets to be on the ballot in the general election, I very likely will end up voting in a primary election this time around. And frankly, I'm not at all sure which primary is likely to get my participation.

So I got invited and we went. I'll be happy to go to plenty of these events in the upcoming months, assuming I have the opportunity. The crowd was pretty small. My quick estimate put it at probably under 300 people. I figure that's reasonably intimate, considering the stakes. Beth got to ask the last question of the session. Overall, I'd say McCain's positions stood up to the sniff test better that I anticipated. He seems to be a reasonable guy who's willing to think about things and capable of thinking about things. That's vastly better than the guy who's in the White House right now.

I agree with McCain on some things, I disagree with him on others, and I respect his views on lots, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with him.

I'll probably blog more about specific issues in the coming days. At the moment I'd like to pick up on what may seem like a minor point in what he said.

He said that we need a line item veto.

I've gone through my own periods of thinking that the line item veto is a grand idea. I won't deny that. But I've since reconsidered. One big problem with the line item veto is that it will always seem like good idea when your guy (or gal) is in office. And it will always seem like a horrible idea when you're in the opposition.

Here's what I've been thinking more about recently:

What we need is to elect a president who will plainly tell congress (and mean it) that if they give him 200 individual (focused) bills that all make sense, he'll pass them. If they give him one bill that has 170 things that make sense and 30 things that don't, he'll veto the whole thing.

And we need to start electing congresspeople who agree to that principle.

If an idea can't stand on its own merits, it shouldn't be allowed to sneak in as a rider to some overarching bill.

McCain says that when the first pork barrel bill crosses his desk, he'll veto it and he'll make its authors famous. That's a pretty decent start. But what concerns me is this: What about the second one? What about the third?

You know they'll keep coming. I'm pretty sure McCain knows they'll keep coming. Until we have a meaningful shift within our legislative culture, I think we're doomed to having the bridge to nowhere and its kin.

If Bush had a line item veto, his war on science and reason would be much farther along at this point than he's managed to push it without the line item veto. He's hardly vetoed anything. When he has vetoed something, it's mostly been because it had provisions for funding stem cell research. He can justify that because he has that "conservative base" that supports such despicable positions. But if he faced dozens of smaller pro-science, pro-reason bills and kept consistently vetoing them, as he likely would love to do, I think even the support of that "conservative base" would begin to erode. It's one thing to take a stand on one issue (stem-cell research). It's quite another to take a stand on dozens, as I'm sure he would love to stop funding for a broad range of sciences, from evolution to mathematics to chemistry to physics. I'm pretty confident that Bush would consider quantum physics to be pure evil voodoo and the work of the devil, if he were aware enough to consider it at all.

Whether the ideas that currently hold sway in the world of theoretical physics will eventually pan out or not, there's certainly value in the exercise. There's benefit to working them through and pursuing them to see where they lead. If Bush had a line item veto, I'm pretty sure he would have gone a lot farther toward curtailing our brightest minds' progress in figuring out where they lead.

I figure that's enough for tonight. Sleep well.

Getting a Little Political -- Part 3

I watched some of the Republican debate the other night. There was a point at which the questioner asked for a show of hands of who does not believe in evolution. Much to my disgust, some hands went up.

I didn't catch whose hands those were, but I checked the New York Times online edition for the transcript, and they reported that the hands that went up belonged to Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo.

Assuming that the NYT transcript is correct, and assuming that the question's intent was clearly understood*, and assuming that we're not dealing with a semantic issue of what "believe in" means...these three men should automatically be deemed unelectable.

So here's where the semantic issue comes in:

Does "believe in evolution" mean "accept that evolution is a process that actually occurs"?

or...

Does "believe in evolution" mean "put your faith and trust in evolution"?

If it means the former, then Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo are addled. If it means the latter, then that's somewhat acceptable.

Here's where things get tricky: If you ask me whether "I believe in George W. Bush", my answer will be "No! No! NO!"

Does that mean that I am a denier of his existence? No. Certainly not. I believe he exists. I believe he's a dangerous ass. But I don't deny his existence.

So in that sense, I also don't believe in evolution, right? I don't put my faith in it. I don't believe it's working for my betterment. I don't believe it will provide any salvation to me or anyone else. I don't believe it will lead to an Eden here on Earth (or anywhere else). That's just dumb. But it is a process that happens in nature. So in that sense, you bet I believe in evolution. Just as I believe in fire. Just as I believe in gravity. Just as I believe in sexual reproduction among the mammals.

But I think that in common parlance "Do you believe in George W. Bush?" takes on one meaning and "Do you believe in evolution?" takes on another. It's a matter of semantics.

So, do we give them the benefit of the doubt? No way! Particularly not Brownback, who is a known fundamentalist religious nutjob. (For the record, I'm not saying that or casting any other aspersions on anyone's character here or anywhere else as a statement of fact, actionable as slander or libel. For the record, I'm saying it merely as a literary device. Call it parody. Call it satire. Call it what you like, but don't call it slander or libel, please!)

* Reading the transcript, the question seems less clear in its intent than it seemed as a spoken utterance. The questioner stumbled a bit on his phraseology. But having listened to it in real time, I believe the intent of the question was really quite apparent.

Thanks, Science Guy

I've said before and I'll surely say again that in my view, my generation is as much defined by Ultraman and Kung Fu Action Theater as by anything else. This may well define me as the lone member of "my generation". I'm not sure about whether that's the case or not. There may be others out there.

The bottom line on that definition probably amounts to little more than this: For better or for worse, my cultural awareness is and will likely always be something that (at least in part) is tinted by the influence of television. Whether that's ultimately a good or bad thing is not something that I'm interested in discussing at this point. (At least not during this blog entry.) However, I have mentioned it as simply a noteworthy scrap of information. Having said as much, I am willing to go on record as saying that neither is this truth a cause for great celebration nor is it one of the world's great tragedies. I'm quite certain that it falls somewhere on the line between those two extremes.

I bring this up as a way to getting to Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

A few nights ago, I was flipping between channels, when I happened to stop for a few minutes of Countdown With Keith Olberman (in which the part of Keith Olberman was being played by some other fellow whose face I didn't recognise and whose name I didn't catch). His guest for this segment was Bill Nye. They were discussing this fossil find (Tiktaalik, link 1, link 2).

Bill Nye said something that struck me as being very important, and I am extremely grateful for his having said it (even if it didn't reach nearly as large an audience as it needs to). I don't have the exact quote, so I'm paraphrasing here:

This notion of evolution as "improvement" is wrong. Improvement is a human idea and it has no bearing on the processes of evolution.

I bring this up because I think it's a very important concept. It is, in my view, one of the most fundamental concepts in our understanding of the universe.

"Evolution" does not equate with "improvement".
"Evolution" does not encompass "improvement".
"Evolution" does not engender "improvement".
And "evolution" does not imply "improvement".

The idea of improvement plays no role in the process of evolution. And I think that one of the great failings of our science education has been the failure to make this concept crystal clear.

This is one of the biggest problems I had in my high school biology class. Evolution is obvious. It makes sense. But to me, it always seemed that "improvement" was generally considered (if not outright taught) to be a strong overtone or a deep underpinning (take your pick) of the theory of evolution. And this always struck me as wrong, wrong, wrong.

It took me a while to come to terms with this discrepancy. And what I came up with all those years ago is exactly what Bill Nye said. In essence: I was not wrong in my understanding of how evolution works. My thought process was not at odds with science. Logic is logic, and rational thought is possible. The disconnect was merely an error of word association.

If you associate the word evolution with the word improvement, it won't make sense.

The reason: That association of words is nonsensical and illogical.

Thank you, Bill Nye, for saying so publicly.

It is fair to say that a fruit fly is just as evolved as a human being is. In fact, by some measures, it may be fair to say that a fruit fly is more evolved than is a human being. Certainly, a fruit fly's lineage includes many, many more generations than does a human being's. It takes us a long time to reach sexual maturity and to reproduce. In fact, it's probably fair to say that the human reproductive cycle is among the slowest in the animal kingdom. This does not mean that fruit flies are any better or worse than we are. We coexist. That's evidence of only one thing: Neither species has gone extinct yet. That is an observable fact. And there's no value judgement involved in saying so. By the same token, we are no more highly evolved than gorillas or chimps or monkeys or dogs. We have simply evolved along different (divergent) paths.

The idea that evolution is about adaptation is misleading. The idea that evolution is a process that is heading towards something (perfection?) is misguided. And the idea that evolution is about improvement is inaccurate.

Evolution is not about anything. It's just a natural process. It's simply the way things happen. And it is utterly indifferent to qualitative assessments.