A Challenge!

 Dear friends, I would like to propose a challenge...

I propose a challenge for anyone to create what seems to be a documentary, i.e., to all intents and purposes it will look and sound like a doco, but it will be all about the future, not the present and not the past.

It will be a sci-fi documentary which examines “future possibilities” from the standpoint of now. It won’t need to involve any of the standard sci-fi narrative formats such as “time travel”, “space wars”, “invasion by aliens”, “missions impossible”, it should be rather an attempt to “document the future” with or without a “storyline”, without “dramatisation” and without too much in the way of expensive CGI.

No matter how factual it may seem at any time, it will be entirely speculative, entirely hypothetical, because all we can go by in examining possibilities in the future are trends from the past till now, and extrapolate from now into the future.

Now you may be surprised to know that a very interesting documentary work already exists which meets this challenge. I saw it just the other day. It’s not a great movie, I don’t regard it as a masterpiece. It's very quiet and sober, and very sobering in its effect. You can view it on SBS “On Demand” if you have not seen it already.

It is very timely given that our federal government has just signed us up to nuclear powered submarines from America and potential strife in the future with China, whom Scomo has already been picking fights with now for a couple of years. And not content with China wiping our many of our primary producers in the fields of barley, wine, meat, even reducing their intake of our coal, he has now taken them on as a barking dog for the mighty USA.

So we will become a nuclear country whether we like it or not, and whether our neighbours such as New Zealand, Indonesia and Malaysia like it or not.

 

But that’s not really why I’m writing this piece. It’s just coincidental.

The doco (please excuse my shorthand here, saves me typing long words) in available to view on SBS “On Demand”. It is called “Into Eternity” and you can view it anytime you like for free.  

It’s about the problem facing the people of Finland in managing and storing their nuclear waste. And like all such problems it required a deep appreciation of the possibilities which may arise in the future. In the case of nuclear waste, the time span required to make provision for is “forever” and in this doco they decided to take a time frame of just 100,000 years. 

For a written summary of this futuristic project see Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository

These Finnish people (i.e., the State of Finland, the designers, the scientists, the technicians, and the general public) are only able to see ahead with clarity for the near future. Let’s say 50 - 100 years?  

But they are building a mineshaft (now and over the next few years) which will store their nuclear waste for millions of years, so the time frame they chose to consider deeply is 100,000 years from NOW.

However there is a problem in dealing with such a long period in the future, they admit they cannot know what the people who come after us will be like, what their world will be like, what their culture will be like, whether they will be advanced far beyond our technological culture of today, or whether they may have regressed into something which would seem like humans of 50,000 - 100,000 years ago: no writing, no tools more advanced than stone tools etc., in which case it will be difficult for them to open up the back filled deep mineshaft.

Will they have equipment like ours, or better, and will they even be able to take readings of radioactivity?

Will their language be so far advanced beyond what ours is today that they will not recognise any linguistic messages we leave behind such as HAZCHEM or the radioactive symbol which is almost universal now:

So they’re building a facility to bury the toxic waste for many years, but in 100,000 years the world we leave behind may be unrecognisable by any standard we know of today. It may even become uninhabitable by any humans in just a few thousand years. Various threats to life on Earth may leave our lovely planet a molten planet.

Or a drowned planet. As in the novel “The Drowned World” by J.G. Ballard, a world so drowned that people cannot even live on the 100th floor of remaining skyscrapers above the waterline. And don’t go down to the 90th floor because that’s where the alligators and crocodiles live and thrive!

So let’s go back to an earlier time when there was not much “writing “ around for humans to read.

We could talk about the Rosetta Stone, but I’ll let that go fo now, because it has been deciphered. It was a fortunate relic from history which was inscribed in three different languages, so translators of recent times could compare and contrast them in solving the puzzle of what it meant.

Let’s go back earlier to Dholavira in the Indus Valley 4000 years ago, to a sign which still defies translation. There’s a great deal of conjecture as to what it meant.

Dholavira is a Harappan site located in the Rann of Kutch, Gujarat. This 47 hectares (120 acres) quadrangular city is one of the largest mature Harappan sites, occupied from ca. 2650 BCE, declining slowly after about 2100 BCE.

One of the most exciting discoveries at Dholavira

is a large wooden "signboard" just outside the

north entrance to the citadel. 

This is actually one of the longest Indus inscriptions known. There are 10 symbols in the panel, each one is about 37 centimetres high and the board on which the letters were inscribed appears to have been about 3 meters long. 

One of the symbols is repeated 4 times.

"The symbols are made of white gypsum used like mosaic tiles, attached to a wooden background. At some point the wooden sign fell face down in the dirt, eventually rotting away but leaving the bricks in place in the ground. Bisht has said that this sign was in use in Stage IV, that belongs to the classical Harappan culture. Based on its location near the gate, this large inscription has been called a "sign board," suggesting that ancient Indus gateways, or at last this one, could have had some sort of signs associated with it that visitors to the city saw before or as they entered. However until the Indus script is deciphered, what the sign is saying still remains a mystery."

THAT MESSAGE WAS INSCRIBED ONLY ABOUT 4,000 YEARS BEFORE OUR TIME!

Other forms of writing had been invented in Sumer and Egypt before this sign was created. If we go back two thousand years earlier to about 6000 before the present we have no records of what we might describe as writing. Just for fun, can anyone decipher these two patterns from a cave wall in Spain?

There are many interpretations for similar markings which appear in different forms in other caves. I think we can clearly see the panel shown here as a pair separated by a split or cleavage between the rocks which is probably important, or significant. I don’t know why, I can only guess. Here’s a view showing more of the wall and the lighting creates a different impression of the cleavage in the rock face:

Although my mind is swimming with possible meanings for these graphic forms I do not have any certainty. Fortunately I have “Don’s Maps” to fall back on. Don calls these images “tectiforms”, so you can see that this term is applied even by people who know much more about this subject than I do.

https://donsmaps.com/altamirapaintings.html

“These tectiforms are in a gallery only one metre high by one metre wide, in the deepest part of the cave, the "Cola de caballo" (Horse tail). Cultural motivations brought people there at different times to draw and engrave these signs, 250 metres from the entrance. They entered the cave with wooden torches or fat lamps to be able to draw this group of reticulated (net shaped) signs, strictly compartmentalised and repeated next to the most prominent crack in this deep gallery.”

We cannot dismiss these as a form of “writing” but I would think that to most people of our time they would appear to be “diagrams” or some form of “map”, something denoting “spaces” and “sections”, but they give no clue as to the “contents” of the spaces.

 And yet these “geometric markings” are rare in caves of the period from 30 - 40,000 years ago, very different from the handprints and the animals which are depicted so brilliantly.

Back to the future...

One of my ever-recurring thoughts is about how knowledge comes and goes. Let’s take flat Earth v. round Earth:  I think the Greeks knew the earth was round, they were very good sailors and great at maths and geometry… and in the story of Theseus and Aegeus there’s a huge clue: 

Theseus departed for Crete. Upon his departure, Aegeus told him to put up white sails when returning if he was successful in killing the Minotaur. However, when Theseus returned, he forgot these instructions. When Aegeus saw the black sails coming into Athens, mistaken in his belief that his son had been slain, he killed himself by jumping from a height: according to some, from the Acropolis or another unnamed rock;[20] according to some Latin authors, into the sea which was therefore known as the Aegean Sea.[21]

In the version which I read in my youth Aegeus went to the high place so he could see the ship earlier than if he had been at sea level. I need to check this. I just have a really strong feeling that the Greeks being great sailors would have had plenty of clues about the curvature of the Earth, long before Thales prediction of an eclipse...

The eclipse of Thales was a solar eclipse that was, according to The Histories of Herodotus, accurately predicted by the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus. If Herodotus's account is accurate, this eclipse is the earliest recorded as being known in advance of its occurrence.

OKAY… then until Copernicus and Christopher Columbus and others in the 15th Century CE came along… flat Earth theory prevailed in many parts of the “civilised world”, meaning “Europe and some parts of Asia, but maybe not everywhere where other people lived who were not considered so civilised.

THE EXTINCTION OF ENTIRE LANGUAGES

We certainly know that language can be lost. How many of us could read any “english text” from the time of Harold and William of Normandy, c.1066?

We could certainly read Latin text from that time (well, all passably educated European scholars could), but English over the years has changed so dramatically and in so many ways it is unrecognizable. 

To read an English text of 1000 years ago you would have to be a real specialist scholar. But if we discovered a text from England written between 500 and 1066, lets say about 700 CE, a time before the reign of Alfred the Great, would it be decipherable?

So while we imagine that the world of the future will be full of complex languages, from English, European, Chinese, Arabic… which one or two would you bet on remaining viable in 2000 years time?

And which ones might quietly slip out of use? I don’t wish to start a war here, but if we take the Finnish as an example, with only a population of 5.6 million people, who would bet on the Finnish language surviving 2000 years, 20,000 years, or 100,000?

You might think a symbol such as one of the above radioactive warnings will survive really well because it is used by such a huge portion of people alive today in our world population nearing 8 Billion.

We may think of the trefoil nuclear warning sign as universal 

but less than 6% of the world's population may recognise it 

(Credit: Getty Images)

MOVING RIGHT ALONG

Now when we talk about “FUTUROLOGY” or predictions for the near or distant future we are already in a very difficult territory. Let’s go back just a few years to that time when our world was ticking over from 1999 to 2000!

Do you recall the fear that was generated that all our computers and internet gizmos would go down because of the DATE limit of 2000? It didn’t happen, but “the fear” of it was swirling around the world for a few years before the dreaded date ticked over.

If at the dawn of the new MILLENIUM, let’s say sometime in the year 2000, if someone had predicted to you that one day the World Trade Centre’s twin towers would be destroyed by two airplanes crashing into them way up high, and that both would fall to the ground… would you have believed this prediction? I don’t think you would. I think you would have thought someone who said that was an absolute lunatic. But if someone was to predict an attack on another landmark somewhere in the world today, you would perhaps give it more consideration.

Another example: if you heard someone saying in the year 2000 that in a few years time America will have a black President, would you have believed them? I don’t think so.

 

And even after Ebola broke out in Africa and was defeated by modern medicine, if someone like Bill Gates had got up on TED TALKS in 2015 and said there is always the chance that a virus might come along which will do more damage to our world than Ebola has done, would you have believed him? I think you would not have believed him and I didn’t, but he was right. Who could have predicted Covid 19? And even if they had predicted it, who could have predicted how much damage it has done internationally?

 https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=dz

So if I say something really silly to you now, will you believe me?

Here’s goes, remember I have freely admitted it is something really silly:

In a few years from now, I hope we will not be alive to witness it, a giant object is going to come our way from “interstellar space”. Got it? it is not yet inside our solar system, not even close, it’s out there, lurking about ¼ of the way from our Solar stem and ¾ of the way from the nearest stars Alpha Centauri and Proxima… and it is a big mother. It’s much bigger than the one which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, ten times larger. 

And boy, is it travelling! It’s moving very fast, faster than a speeding bullet, faster than Superman, even faster than our speediest space probes which are moving at about 60,000 km per hour.

Now the good news is that this big mother ain’t gonna hit the Earth. Great. It’s gonna be a close shave, but it will not directly hit the Earth so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.  But now for the bad news. It is going to hit the moon! Our lovely moon is going to be bumped. We’re not sure yet from which angle it will hit the moon, either full on like a billiard ball hitting a target ball from behind, or from 45 degrees either side, or from an oblique angle such as 80 degrees, one side or the other.

Now if you’ve played billiards or snooker you know that all these versions can send a target ball flying away from the cue ball. If a big mother comet hit our moon in any of these scenarios it could be bumped right out of orbit. Remember the moon is very much smaller than Earth so the impact would be much greater than if it hit Earth. The moon's mass is only about 1.2 percent of Earth's mass. Put another way, Earth weighs 81 times more than the moon. 

You’ll also appreciate that it matters a great deal whether this big object hits the moon at such an angle that it sends it into close orbit around the Earth, or pushes it further away. I guess “further out” is better, because if it pushes the moon too close to the Earth, BINGO! we’re cooked. We’re in deep shit, and where’s Bruce Willis when you need him? Sorry, he’s been gone a while.

Of course this scenario is just like many another doomsday scenario, Melancholia, Armageddon, you name it, take your pick, there’s heaps of them around. Are you sick and tired of them all? Why do we take any notice of them? Aren’t we in enough trouble already?

We know for certain that our serene moon has taken a great many hits from flying objects in space, it’s pockmarked face tells us all we need to know about how many hits old Man in the Moon has taken over time. You may not know this, but the Moon used to be much larger in the sky million so years ago, because it was then much closer. Imagine if we were able to see it like this if people had been around 3 billion years ago:

Okay, there were no people around to see it like that when it was such a huge event in our skies. It has drifted away, a friends drift apart. It’s drifting a just few centimetres away every year, about a metre every 10 years, or 10 metres every 100 years. Not gonna lose sleep over that one. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/07/11/what-did-the-moon-look-like-from-earth-4-billion-years-ago/?sh=7686c311515b

However if the moon took a big hit which moved it closer, and from a very large object travelling at great speed, with such force that it was nudged into a closer orbit by say one kilometre per year, gravity would bring it ever close and then we would be in the deep end.

Let’s imagine that the object might be as large as a US aircraft carrier, travelling at 100,000 km per hour. If such and object struck the moon from any angle it would cause some sort of shift in its orbit around the Earth

 

The really good news is that my little doomsday scenario is just something I made up. I can’t recall hearing it from anyone else and it really is hard to find people who believe it might happen. The version given in the film Melancholia is not the same, because that was meant to be a star approaching Earth, most improbable.

We have recently had some close calls. 

We only get a clear warning of such large objects when they have already entered our solar system, closer than Pluto and Uranus perhaps… when they are out in deep space beyond the planets in what is called the “Oort Cloud” they are generally not yet visible to us.

But we don’t need the Moon to be cannoned into Earth for a catastrophe do we? There’s a whole lot of options which frighten all of us. Is there anyone who feels confident that we are getting on top of the runaway greenhouse effect? I mean other than Scott Morrison and his mob.

So let’s agree for the time being that prediction is a very difficult game, even on the shortest time scale. I’ve been tossing around predictions with Bill Mousoulis about the 2021 AFL season all the year since March… one of which was “Will we even get to the Grand Final?” … well it’s only a few days away now. But can anyone anywhere predict the outcome of The Demons v. The Doggies? Will it be as close as a 1 point or one goal game? Will one side win by a good margin, e.g., 3 goals? Or more, say 7 goals. We cannot predict.

 

And who would have thought at this time last year that the Tigers after winning the Grand Final of 2020 would not make the top 8 in 2021?

So let’s not kid ourselves that we are good at predicting the future. Not even for a mere 10 years. A few months ago I was railing about the shitty deal we had with the submarines on order with France.

In just one day last week Scomo has taken us on a whole new trajectory into an equally unpredictable future… whereas the submarine project budget with the French was blowing out, almost double over 5 years, the budget for the deal we are making with the Yanks is totally unknown and unknowable. It could be many times more expensive than the deal we had with the French. And who knows, delivery of the first sub could be further away than it would have been with the French… how could we ever know about these things. And how could our incredibly intelligent politicians know anything about anything?

So back to the future.

What will our world be like 100 years from now?

What will it be like 1000 years from now.

Will it even be habitable 1000 years from now?

So why are the bloody Finns worrying about 100,000 years from now?

Will I live long enough to see humans landing on Mars? I know Elon has his VISION and it is grand and it may be do-able. But I don’t think I will live to see it when I’m 97 (2040) but I’m very confident to say he will not achieve it by 2040. I admit I could be wrong!

I do think it will happen.  What the US have done in space is astonishing. What the Chinese are now doing is also astonishing. I think that humans will achieve a Mars colony but I don’t know why we should do so!

What does it matter if we do or if we do not? Does it really matter if Matt Damon grows some potatoes on Mars or if they create a greenhouse covering a couple of acres/hectares full of veggies and fruit?  Will it benefit any more than a few dozen people on Earth?

So friends, in this unpredictable world, I “dips me lid” to the Finnish people for their brave attempt to bury their nuclear waste in their own back yard, not knowing if people in the future will even be able to read the signs warning of a very great danger. I also know that here in Australia we would never agree to bury our nuclear waste in our own back yard, even though it is much more extensive than Finland’s back yard.

And I imagine the Scomo and his mates days’s are numbered now that Porter has resigned (or been forced to resign) and their majority in the House is on a knife’s edge.

But will a Labor government break with the USA and the new nuclear sub deal?

OVER AND OUT!

pt