The question of how to mark the places where we store nuclear waste such that people in the distant future won’t do things like build towns or nurseries or farms on top or inside of them is one of my favorite transmedia design challenges. It’s a thought experiment that asks us to imagine a way to communicate with a diverse and unknowable range of cultures and attitudes across a vast gulf of time. Nuclear waste can take upwards of 20,000 years to decay.

Solutions to the problem, such as those proposed by the Human Interference Task Force, a workgroup formed in 1981 by the US government, include the construction of monumental reinforced concrete architectural elements (obelisks, pyramids, and so on, all inscribed with a range of frightening DANGER! symbols), the breeding of super-friendly genetically-engineered cats that change color in the presence of radioactivity, and the establishment of a multi-millennium-scale religious order or “atomic priesthood”.

More info: Wikipedia: Human Interference Task Force, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia

Everything that has happened since the time of Augustus Caesar takes up only 6.25% of the time that the Lion man of the Hohlenstein Stadel has been around for.

A lion headed figure, first called the lion man (German: Löwenmensch, literally “lion person”), then the lion lady (German: Löwenfrau), is an ivory sculpture that is the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world and one of the oldest known sculptures in general. The sculpture has also been interpreted as anthropomorphic, giving human characteristics to an animal, although it may have represented an unfactual presence deity. The figurine was determined to be about 32,000 years old by carbon dating material from the same layer in which the sculpture was found. It is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture. (wikipedia)

From Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics:

…let us imagine an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. Let us fix our attention not on the line as line, but on the action which traces it. Let us consider that this action, in spite of its duration, is indivisible if one supposes that it goes on without stopping; that, if we intercalate a stop in it, we make two actions of it instead of one and that each of these actions will then be the indivisible of which we speak; that it is not the moving act itself which is never indivisible, but the motionless line it lays down beneath it like a track in space. Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration. (165)

I wonder how Bergson’s meditations on time and free will would have played out had he been able to mess around with the Khronos Projector, a time-spatializing Processing sketch by Alvaro Cassinelli. This online instance is a stripped-down version of Cassinelli’s 2005 installation:

The Khronos projector unties time and space in a pre-recorded movie sequence, opening the door for an infinite number of interactive visualizations. Using the Khronos  projector, event’s causality become relative to the spatial path we decide to walk on the image, allowing for a multiple interpretation of the recorded facts. In this sense, the Khronos projector can be seen as an exploratory interface that transforms a movie sequence into a spatio-temporal sculpture for people to explore at their own pace and will. (Khronos Projector)

See also: Tango, Zbigniew Rybcynski

You wrote for The Believer on the “many worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics — which also plays a role in your book. Where is the scientific consensus on that these days? Are there many universes?

There was recently a 50th anniversary symposium on the subject at Oxford. The BBC made a documentary that seemed to say that there was almost no debate, that everyone takes it as the reality. But it does have pretty big flaws, especially in probability theory. It’s an emotionally appealing idea, but it’s still open to debate.

If there are infinite universes created by every…

Decision point.

Right, decision point, does that mean that there’s a parallel universe where, right now, everything is the same except that half my face is covered in purple polka dots and there’s an elephant sitting at the corner table, flapping its wings?

Yeah, I think that is what it means.

Thank you! I’ve asked scientists about that and they never answer my question.

There are also universes where the laws of our universe don’t apply.

But that would mean that there’d have to be one — or infinite ones — where the “many worlds interpretation” didn’t obtain! Hmmm, suddenly we’re sucked into a black hole of interpretive vertigo… in other science news, there’s also a lot of meteorology in your book. How much do you actually know about the subject?

I’m interested in it, but I’m more interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science. It feels rife with clarity, and yet you don’t understand what it means. And I think that’s beautiful. (bookslut.com)

UPDATE: also check out parts 1, 2, and 3 of the BBC Atom series.