Deep Time Reckoning

Abstract

A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.

Geology as Unconforming Infrastructure For the Hosting of Nuclear Waste

“…The engineering out of human agency, nevertheless, requires a whole range of human artefacts both material and conceptual. Amongst these, one of the most significant is the conceptual separation of categories of time and space, the 'deep time' of the subsurface, and the 'human time' of the surface world (Ialenti 2020).…”

“…Deep time is a geological and ultimately cosmological concept that scholars of nuclear technologies routinely deploy to draw attention to the exceptionally enduring vitality of radioactive matter (Hecht 2012(Hecht , 2018Ialenti 2020Ialenti , 2022Irvine 2014Irvine , 2020Morton 2013). Geologists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists immerse themselves in the study of deep time as they explore both the origins and the demise of planets, stars, and universes.…”

Boiling sand, metallic fire

“…Studying them ethnographically reveals an often‐overlooked temporal tension at the heart of what causes nuclear waste accidents: occupational hazards lingering on from past Cold War nuclear weapons production operations, hazards that can be exacerbated by 21st‐century technopolitical reward structures. The question, with drum breaches, was not how to design facilities to contain radioactive waste for thousands or millions of years (Ialenti 2020a). It was how to navigate near‐term workplace risks that, if left uncorrected by the DOE, will perpetuate health risks posed by past moments of US nuclear weapons manufacture.…”

“…They can, moreover, spark forward‐looking modes of global political advocacy (Fortun 2001) as well as retrospective modes of false closure provided by state accident inquiries (Hilgartner 2007). In the case of nuclear waste, this technopolitics can be stretched into the distant future (Ialenti 2020a). Plutonium‐239, after all, has a half‐life of 24,100 years.…”

Drum breach: Operational temporalities, error politics and WIPP’s kitty litter nuclear waste accident

“…Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years; uranium-235, over seven hundred million years. These ‘exceptional temporal schemes’ (Saraç-Lesavre, 2016: 25) have sparked productive debates about the ethical, regulatory and epistemic challenges of protecting distant future generations from radioactive inheritances (Ialenti, 2020a). 3 Nuclear waste repositories require many decades of organizational continuity throughout their R&D, construction, licensing, operations and decommissioning phases (Pescatore and Vári, 2006).…”