Drawing from the philosophy of the Finland facilities toured in Into Eternity and what we’ve discussed in class about the opposite approach -monumental signs used to indicate nuclear waste as “hazard!-pay-attention-yet-don’t”-… I’m starting to write about these semiotic endeavors and critiquing their suppositions for my VCS sci-fi class! I’ve been researching the documents produced by the Futures Panel of the 1990’s, a team of archeologists, linguists, semioticians, etc. hired for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant development project. The team had to probability theorize various societies that would likely lead to “human interference”. Some of the scenarios are super fascinating and sci-fi literature in their own right. Various news outlets recently picked up this history I’ve seen via google search…but, in the PDF from the DOE, Page c-40 of a summary I will attach here outlines a really amusing scenario called A Feminist World, 2091 for 100 years out. It killed me… basically speculates on a female dommed popuation and mass ideology that devalues aggressive male science and therefore ignores the signs at WIPP. Here’s the document
-Elise 🙂
One thought on “Futures Panel 1990”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Oh wow… this is so interesting. The whole document is interesting, but browsing it I probably would have missed the part about a feminist-dominated future. Reading this makes me, as a feminist scientist, absolutely furious and disgusted… which is ironic and ultimately a bit of a distraction from the core question of trying to prepare nuclear waste sites for an uncertain future. It makes me quite aware of the “male arrogance” in this report, which ironically is the kind of reasoning that they think feminists would apply to reject all of science. The implicit assumption that there is some association between rigorous science and maleness is so problematic. Anyway, this is really weird and creepy. Thank you for sharing… I am wholly disturbed! FYI for others the page number is 165. Definitely worth a read.