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HOW TO RIDE ANALOGIES ACROSS DEEP TIME

12020 CE: A solitary farmer looks out over her pasture, surrounded by a green forest of heath trees. She lives in a sparse land once called Finland, on a fertile island plot once called Olkiluoto. The area is an island no longer. What was once a coastal bay is now dotted with small lakes, peat bogs, and mires with white sphagnum mosses and grassy sedge plants. The Eurajoki and Lapijoki Rivers drain out into the sea. When the farmer goes fishing at the lake nearby, she catches pike. She watches a beaver swim about. Sometimes she feels somber. She recalls the freshwater ringed seals that once shared her country before their extinction. She has no idea that, deep beneath her feet, lies an ancestral deposit of copper, iron, clay, and radioactive debris. This is a highly classified secret—leaked to the public several times over the millennia, but now forgotten. Yet even the government’s knowledge of the burial site is poor. Most records were destroyed in a global war in the year 3112. It was then that ancient forecasts of the site, found in the 2012 Safety Case report “Complementary Considerations,” were lost to history. But the farmer does know the mythical stories of Lohikäärme: a dangerous, flying, salmon-colored venomous snake that kills anyone who dares dig too close to his underground cave. She and the other farmers in the area grow crops of peas, sugar beet, and wheat. They balk at the superstitious fools who tell them the monster living beneath their feet is real.

CRATERS, CORPSES, MUDROCK, AND NAILS

Seventy-three million or so years ago, a meteorite slammed into what is today called South Ostrobothnia, Finland. The serene Lake Lappajärvi now rests in the twenty-three-kilometer-wide crater that was made in the blast’s wake. Today, locals enjoy trips to Lappajärvi’s Kärnänsaari: an island of rock once melted by a collision from the Cretaceous Period. Canoeing there allows you to brush up against Finland’s landscape’s deep history. That is why the crater lake caught the attention of Safety Case natural analogue researchers. These experts used the power of analogy to make predictions about the Olkiluoto repository’s far future fate. They studied prehistoric features in places like Lappajärvi as stand-ins—practical tools for making long-term projections about repository parts, geological features, and environmental conditions. They selected these sites as analogues because they are thought to harbor features similar to those anticipated for Olkiluoto.

Safety Case experts explained to me how Lake Lappajärvi kept much of its distinct shape despite the erosion caused by the advances and retreats of past ice ages’ glacial ice sheets. Posiva’s reports told of “fairly stable conditions and slow surface processes” at Lappajärvi over millions of years. Taking the lake as an analogue, they argued that Olkiluoto could expect to see only limited movement and erosion of its land across multimillion-year futures. They reasoned that Posiva’s repository could hold up reasonably well in similar distant future conditions. Lappajärvi’s deep histories were, for Safety Case experts, windows onto the waxing and waning of far future ice ages. For me as an anthropologist, they were tools that could be repurposed to help us learn to refine our own deep time reckoning skills during the Anthropocene.

Safety Case experts also studied natural areas outside Finland. For example, they turned the prehistoric Littleham mudstone in Devon, England, into a place for grappling with deep time. There, copper, encased in sedimentary rock, was preserved for 170 million years without succumbing to major corrosion. Safety Case experts drew analogies between this copper and Posiva’s copper nuclear waste canisters. They noted how the Littleham mudstone is even more abrasive to copper than the bentonite clay, to surround Posiva’s canisters, would be. The latter, they reasoned, may see even rosier futures. Other Safety Case experts made trips to a large ice sheet near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, where they conducted analogue research on the permafrost, ice, and groundwater. The idea was that scientific scrutiny of the ice sheet could help nuclear waste repository projects in Finland, Sweden, and Canada more accurately project the characteristics of distant future ice sheets. This, they believed, could provide insights about repository safety.

Other Safety Case experts stayed closer to home, doing Safety Case fieldwork at Southern Finland’s own Palmottu uranium deposit. At Palmottu, they studied the underground pathways that groundwater flowed through, assessing how nearby radionuclides had traveled over the years. They searched for evidence of past chemical reactions. Their goal was to figure out how Posiva’s nuclear waste’s radionuclides may or may not move around in Olkiluoto’s underground in futures near and far. The idea was that studying present-day evidence of the past was the key to unlocking insights about far futures.

In every natural analogue study, future conditions are reckoned by drawing comparisons between physical formations across time (drawing inferences about long-term futures with reference to evidence from long-term pasts) and space (making comparisons between regions sometimes thousands of miles apart). Posiva’s archaeological analogue studies similarly stretched the intellect. Safety Case experts looked to a 2,100-year-old human cadaver in China, surrounded by clay and discovered alongside wood, vegetables, silk, and meat. The experts were interested in the clay’s capacities to preserve the body and the artifacts. Posiva reported that Xin Zhui’s cadaver was well preserved, with its abdominal organs intact and its skin completely there; some of its joints were still moveable, without it ever being mummified. The vegetables and meat were only partially decomposed because the clay had made an air-tight seal around them. In life, Xin Zhui never knew that he would, in death, become a means for reckoning far futures. Yet, for my informants, he helped demonstrate the power of the repository’s bentonite clay buffers to contain radioactive waste canisters for millennia.

Safety Case experts also cited Switzerland’s repository program’s analogue research on 2,000-year-old ancient Roman iron nails, dug up in present-day Scotland. The Swiss study pointed to how the nails saw limited corrosion across the millennia, despite facing conditions said to be more abrasive than those beneath Olkiluoto. From there, Safety Case experts made extrapolations about the endurance of the cast iron inserts that Posiva planned to use to hold nuclear waste in place inside their disposal canisters.

These Safety Case analogue studies can take us on learning-journeys across time. By taking cues from analogue researchers, we can stretch our minds toward the historical timescales of Scotland’s Roman nails, and toward the deep timescales of Lake Lappajärvi. This openness to learning from highly trained specialists is crucial in our struggle against the deflation of expertise. It can help us sync our everyday thinking patterns with the Anthropocene’s vast temporal breadth. To this end, this chapter follows a few experts’ analogue examples across time. It examines how analogue studies are rife with uncertainties, how their critics try to cut the analogical ties that sustain them, how these studies have been made among global networks of experts, and how they fit into the Safety Case’s broader arguments. The chapter then discusses nuclear waste experts’ analogue studies in relation to climate experts’ and space experts’ analogue studies. It closes with five reckonings, derived from the Safety Case experts’ work. Each reckoning carves out fresh ways of thinking, judging, and engaging with far futures. To better orient us in embarking on deep time reckoning efforts of our own, the reckonings suggest thought experiments that we can incorporate into our day-to-day lives. But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start by following an old cannon into pasts and futures.

CANNONS AND ICE

June 1, 1676: the Battle of Öland was raging. The Swedish Navy was grappling with a Danish-Dutch fleet for control of the southern rim of the Baltic Sea. Amid this bad weather, Kronan, Sweden’s naval flagship in the region, made a sudden left turn. It was one of the largest warships of its kind. The ship’s sails began to take on too much wind. Kronan tipped over as water gushed into its gun ports, and it soon lay horizontal on the water. Then an explosion rang out, tearing off a large chunk of the vessel’s front side. Kronan’s gunpowder storage room was ablaze. The ship, along with around eight hundred men, loads of military equipment, and piles of valuable coins, then sank to the bottom of the sea—eighty-five feet down. Sweden lost the battle. From 1679 to 1686, Swedish divers used diving bells to recover over sixty cannons from the wreck. After that, Kronan’s precise location was forgotten. The ship was left in its watery resting place for almost three centuries.

In 1980, a team located the old warship once again. Since then, over 30,000 artifacts have been retrieved from it, in what has been one of the most elaborate archaeological projects in Sweden’s history. Safety Case experts now see a bronze cannon from the Kronan as an analogue that can help them assess how and whether Posiva’s copper nuclear waste canisters will corrode over the long term. My informants explained that the artifact offers insights into (a) how the Baltic’s abrasive seawater affected the 96.3 percent copper that made up the cannon’s bronze and (b) whether areas of the cannon that had been encased in seafloor clay for centuries were shielded from corrosion. The latter inquiry, they hoped, would shed light on whether Finland’s and Sweden’s repositories’ bentonite buffers would effectively insulate the waste canisters from the underground environment.

The Kronan cannon can inspire long-term thinking, and help us to stretch our intellects and imaginations forward and backward across time. But we must always remember to never take analogue studies too seriously. They have many limitations. Anders, a Swedish expert with a PhD in science policy and a master’s degree in engineering and physics, repeatedly cautioned me about this.

Anders was openly critical of Sweden’s and Finland’s nuclear waste disposal efforts; that was, after all, his job. He worked for an NGO with a mission to provide Sweden’s repository licensing process with independent expert criticism. Anders’s NGO was, in fact, funded by the same industry-financed and state-run Nuclear Waste Fund that paid the salary of the Swedish nuclear waste repository experts he set out to criticize. Anders was talkative, opinionated, and articulate. He lauded Sweden’s nuclear regulator SSM’s commitment to Sweden’s constitution’s offentlighetsprincipen. This “Principle of Access to Official Information” fostered transparency in Swedish government organizations. But Anders critiqued how these rules did not apply to private companies. He was unsatisfied with the amount of documentation that Sweden’s nuclear waste management company SKB was making available to him. Anders worried that, when it came to nuclear waste decisions, many Finns were too quick to defer to paternalistic authorities and “men of action” without fully digesting the facts. He worried that they took a “Wild West” approach to nuclear waste decisions—acting first and asking questions later. Anders vented his frustration that elder nuclear industry insiders have been propagating “myths” to overzealous, impressionable, young industry recruits. These myths pertained to nuclear energy’s costs, new Generation IV reactor designs, and how nuclear plants fit into sustainable energy systems.

When I brought up analogue studies, Anders emphasized that Finland’s Posiva and Sweden’s SKB selectively cherry-picked natural and archaeological analogue examples to support their own agendas; they spent little to no time, he said, scouring the globe for counterexamples that could call the KBS-3 repository design into question. Anders’s aim was to reveal a devil in analogue research’s details. When encountering one, his tendency was to highlight gaps in similarity between the two objects being analogized. He aimed to sever connections between them by pointing to differences between them. For example, Anders saw real limits to what a bronze cannon submerged in the sea for centuries can really tell us about a copper nuclear waste canister buried in granite bedrock for millennia. As another example, he questioned whether a present-day ice sheet in Greenland could really be accepted as a valid analogue for an ice sheet during some future ice age in Finland. The latter, after all, will see eventually far colder temperatures than the former does today. A few months later, I broached Anders’s critiques with a Greenland Analogue Project expert from Finland named Aapo. He replied:

It is always this way with geology: you can look at two features just 100m apart from one another and see them as totally different areas geologically. It is a scale issue you can scale up bigger and bigger—but of course you just lose and lose detail when you go to a bigger scale. But look: you can actually get some real data from ice sheets in Greenland and that is the issue we have to look at. You need to go somewhere else with an ice sheet to really do this research and finding an analogue is the best available way of doing it because there are no glaciers in Olkiluoto. Of course, you have certain features in Greenland that you cannot match with the Swedish and Finnish site: for example, the rocks are not exactly the same, but they are very similar. They are in the same age range and they are crystalline granite. But any project in geology involves some measure of extrapolation or of application of your own preexisting expertise and knowledge about the basics of geology.

Aapo’s defense of the Safety Case experts’ analogies was subtle. First, he affirmed the accuracy of Anders’s epistemological critique—his criticism of what nuclear waste analogue researchers were accepting as knowledge. Yet he downplayed the importance of Anders’s conclusion. He did this by portraying Anders’s emphasis on the differences between far future Finland’s ice sheet and present-day Greenland’s ice sheet as taking advantage of an ordinary point of dispute already well known among geologists. Specifically, Aapo saw Anders as hyping up common but unremarkable gray areas about how to “scale” one’s interpretations of geological features. After that, Aapo simply brushed Anders’s critique aside by calling attention to the practical necessity of collecting hard data. He saw analogue experts’ efforts as crucial even if achieving perfect knowledge about Olkiluoto’s far future is ultimately impossible. Reversing Anders’s disanalogizing approach, Aapo then downplayed key differences between Greenland today and Finland tomorrow. He emphasized key similarities between them—namely, those concerning rock age and rock type.

So, Anders tried to unwind an analogical tie by offering an epistemological critique of the Safety Case experts’ knowledge. Aapo responded with trying to retighten the analogical tie by appealing to the pragmatic spirit of applied research. Toggling back and forth between seemingly incompatible deep time reckoning viewpoints like these can enrich how we approach long-termist knowledge ourselves.

Aapo’s and Anders’s disagreements can, for instance, teach us about intellectual optimism versus intellectual pessimism. According to philosopher of science Adrian Currie, this is largely a matter of personal attitude.1 Optimists, seeing the glass as half-full, tend to highlight the positive aspects of a situation; pessimists, seeing the glass as half-empty, tend to highlight the negative. Both, however, agree on the details: they agree that the glass contains 50 percent liquid. In other words, they do not have an empirical dispute. Anders may have (pessimistically) tried to shoot down Aapo’s (naïve) optimism by cutting his analogical ties. Aapo may have (optimistically) tried to shoot down Anders’s (paralyzing) pessimism by tying the analogies together again. Yet the two did not disagree on basic details about how glaciers work, the Kronan cannon’s composition, or how Posiva’s canisters would be manufactured. Rather, their disagreements lay in how comfortable they were making analogies between different objects. They disagreed about what conclusions they could draw from the analogies and how much weight they ought to be given. To use Currie’s terminology, Anders and Aapo disagreed about an epistemic situation: the challenges scientists face when forging knowledge in a given context. They also disagreed about analogues’ roles as “epistemic resources”: whether the analogies qualified as valid “knowledge, capacities, sources of evidence, and techniques” to solve scientific problems.2

That said, Aapo and Anders both underscored how trying to be honest with oneself and others about one’s limitations is the first step in becoming a more nuanced, careful, and modest deep time reckoner. Many Safety Case experts agreed. The biosphere report’s “Knowledge Quality Assessment,” for example, aimed to increase confidence in Posiva’s models by openly admitting to the “large uncertainties in the knowledge base.” It sought to detail its “assumptions and uncertainties” in a “systematic and comprehensive manner.”3 Still, Anders’s criticism was the one that most strongly called us to ask: at what point do the dissimilarities between the two objects in an analogue study become so pronounced that they weaken the analogy?

There will, of course, always be differences between the objects being compared. The Kronan cannon was, after all, only said to be an analogue of the canister, not a perfect copy of it. But when do these dissimilarities become significant enough to render them no longer able to shed meaningful light on one another? What degree of sameness, and what kinds of sameness, must be present to make or break an analogical connection? Even if an analogy is imperfect, can it not still add value if at least some useful information can be extracted from it? Chatting with Anders showed me how asking critical questions like these is key to moving forward with deep time learning—so long as we can hold onto the optimistic belief, held deeply by Aapo, that evidence-driven reason can ultimately help refine how we envision far futures.

These analogue studies also required imagination. They required a knack for creatively making connections between far-flung locales and far future Olkiluotos. But this was not the seemingly individualistic imagination of a solitary daydreamer, an artist at an easel painting solo, or a novelist staying up late writing alone. Rather, it arose from interactions between different kinds of experts, landscapes, published findings, future visions, institutions, scientific techniques, corporations, and technologies.

These networks were global in scope. The Natural Analogue Working Group (NAWG), originally founded under the auspices of the European Commission, has, since 1985, held fifteen international workshops exploring how analogue studies can support toxic waste disposal projects. Its members hail from India, Germany, Japan, the UK, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic, South Africa, the Slovak Republic, Israel, Poland, Australia, Romania, the United States, South Korea, Sweden, Canada, Croatia, and Taiwan. NAnet, another program also funded by the European Commission, brought experts together from ten repository initiatives to promote analogue studies. In both networks, analogical connections made between distant futures and pasts sprouted from professional connections made between experts across national borders.

As the deflation of expertise closes minds worldwide, this analogue research’s spirit of global exchange merits appreciation from publics, politicians, and social and news media. It must be elevated from its current obscurity and popularized; it must be broadcast widely, helping others resist Anthropocene shortsightedness. Analogue research must not be drowned out by today’s widespread deflations of optimism, trust, and confidence in international expert collaboration. To more fully embrace its long-termism, we must place a guarded faith in the promises of scientific knowledge interchange within and across national borders. This means celebrating the power of globalism to deliver humanity important analogical tools for reckoning futures both near and deep.

That said, analogical reasoning itself is nothing new. Its centrality to scientific argumentation is hardly unique to nuclear waste experts. Analogy is at the very heart of geology’s “uniformitarian” methods of extrapolating about past phenomena by making analogies with phenomena observable today. A geologist, for instance, might look at present-day places like the Bahamas to understand how limestone formed in New York State hundreds of millions of years ago. Climate scientists might look at past climate change processes to predict present and future global warming episodes. Medical researchers often study mice and other evolutionary cousins of Homo sapiens as analogical stand-ins for humans in experimental trials.

Then there are more specialized examples of the power of analogy. The Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)’s Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security has developed a climate analogues website. It was funded by the European Union, the United States, Thailand, and Switzerland, plus other governments and private donors. The online tool looks at rainfall and climate forecasts for future places across the Earth. Then it makes analogical connections between them and present-day regions already seeing those conditions. CGIAR’s idea is that if, for example, the climate of Durban, South Africa, in 2030 will resemble that of northern Argentina today, then the maize farmers in the latter region should be in contact with their counterparts in the former region. They could, perhaps, teach them how to adapt to coming climate changes. As another example, in recent years NAWG has also discussed the use of analogues for carbon sequestration proposals.

But analogue research is not just global but also interplanetary in scope. NASA scientists have studied deserts in Arizona as analogues for evaluating how robotic systems and vehicles will fare during future Mars missions. In 1969, they sent astronauts to Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho to work with lava fields and volcanic geology in preparation for the Apollo 14 Moon mission. NASA biologists have studied freshwater microbialites in British Columbia’s Pavilion Lake. Microbialites are tall underwater structures formed by the activity of microbes. They have served, for the biologists, as analogues for the earliest known remnants of life on Earth, and for other planets’ capacities to support life. Scientists have studied archaebacteria living in Earth’s deep-sea hydrothermal vents as analogues for microbes that could, speculatively, be found on Mars.4 For many experts, analogues are practical tools for teaching the mind how to stretch across time and space. But this does not mean analogues alone are enough to reckon far futures.

MULTIPLE LINES OF REASONING

The most powerful scientific views of the past and future are methodologically omnivorous: they combine many different epistemic resources together into complex models of very local phenomena.5 These resources can be anything from computer simulations, to artifacts left behind from the past, to analogue arguments. Analogues work best when scientists draw from multiple examples simultaneously. They work best when engaging their object of study at many “different levels of analysis,” with each analogue performing “different roles, compensating for each other’s failings.”6 It would be an exaggeration to claim that Safety Case experts achieved these ideals, but they did have a sense that analogues should be corroborated and bolstered by other forms of scientific evidence.7

Safety Case experts strategically approached distant futures through what they called “multiple lines of reasoning.” This meant intentionally having many different teams of experts, each with different disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual tendencies, working in parallel on the same long-sighted challenges. The rationale was simple. A team of, say, metallurgists and engineers may have weaknesses that can be compensated for by, say, a team of geologists and biologists’ strengths, and vice versa. Incompatible views were taken to be not only competing with one another, but also complementing one another. Together they painted more vivid portraits of future worlds by viewing them simultaneously from multiple angles. Locating analogue studies within these reasoning lines can help us understand their position in Posiva’s wider project.

The Safety Case portfolio’s main line of evidence was its engineering descriptions of the repository’s “barrier system.” This line described how Olkiluoto’s granite bedrock and the repository’s copper, clay, and iron components would contain Finland’s waste given Olkiluoto’s underground chemical, hydrological, and geological conditions. It also considered the barrier effects of the tricky-to-dissolve ceramic materials inside the pellets that made up Finland’s spent fuel bundles. Then there was the portfolio’s “Performance Assessment” section, which included number-crunching models. That was the Safety Case’s primary systematic analysis of how the repository’s mechanical parts, heat levels, nearby groundwaters, and so on may interact over hundreds of thousands of years. Alongside the Performance Assessment were less-likely scenarios modeling potential future repository problems, breakdowns, and “lines of evolution.” There were also hypothetical “release scenarios,” in which radionuclides enter ecosystems on or near the Earth’s surface. The Safety Case’s “Safety Assessment” section estimated annual radionuclide doses to human populations, as well as those absorbed by regional plants and animals. It assessed a variety of scenarios of varying plausibility. Posiva considered these estimations of radiological consequences in light of nuclear regulator STUK’s YVL regulatory rule guides. Posiva’s Safety Case report then determined, as nearly all stakeholders expected it would, that its own Olkiluoto repository would pass regulatory muster. It was, however, ultimately up to STUK’s technical reviewers to officially accept or dispute the Safety Case’s determinations. Then it was up to Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment to formally issue a repository construction license.

So, Safety Case experts entertained several different forms of scientific evidence. They did not, however, give them all equal weight. Alongside all these engineering, modeling, and quantitative lines of reasoning was a report called Complementary Considerations, a hodgepodge of public relations information and qualitative evidence made to persuade wider audiences of the repository’s strengths. This is where many of the Safety Case experts’ analogue studies were found. Complementary Considerations was presented as filling gaps in knowledge that computer modeling and engineering calculations alone could not fill. Most of my informants saw analogues as playing a “supporting” role in the Safety Case’s hierarchy of knowledges. To them, analogues were a less-highly regarded backup line of reasoning, there to step in only when more quantitative lines broke down. As an anthropologist, I often felt too much faith was placed in quantitative models and too little in empirical, qualitative analogue studies. Certain geologists agreed with me. The concreteness of the natural and archaeological analogues was, to them, more persuasive than Posiva’s quantitative models’ many labyrinthine layers of abstraction (which will be the focus of the next chapter).

Most informants, however, agreed with me on something broader: something like the Safety Case experts’ “multiple lines of reasoning” principle can provide a compass for navigating far futures. The Safety Case strove to take higher-resolution pictures of Olkiluoto’s far future by offering evidence, arguments, and calculations targeted at various audiences with varying degrees of faith in the various reasoning lines it presented. This multipronged approach can help a deep time reckoner appreciate the power of what one informant called “strategic redundancy.” This meant following an “Even if X, then Y” logic. Even if one does not have faith in Safety Case modelers’ simulations of future Finnish ecosystems and hydrogeology, then one can still turn to, say, the engineers’ defenses of the repository’s barrier system or reports on “mechanical strength” tests done on Posiva’s copper canisters. As another example, even if one does not trust those engineering reports, then one can still turn to the qualitative prose scenarios describing Finland’s very far future or to natural or archaeological analogues supporting the KBS-3 design. This reminds us that, when we reckon deep time, analogues must serve as but one method in a more holistic, multifaceted approach. All the better if this approach is methodologically omnivorous. All the better if it combines several different methods into something greater than the sum of their parts.

We have now learned to put analogue studies in their place. We have positioned them within the Safety Case’s broader layout of coexisting reasoning lines. Next, we can get more specific: we can learn how to more usefully integrate analogical reasoning into our own long-termist lines of reasoning. This will be useful to us during the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise: a tumultuous time, when all futurological knowledge, and all lines of reasoning, can potentially have value. Analogues can help us learn to learn more and more about our planet’s yesterdays and tomorrows.

TRIPS ACROSS TIME

Historian Gabrielle Hecht has approached nuclear waste natural analogues as what she calls interscalar vehicles, objects that can draw scholars and others to “move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space.” They can be a “means of connecting stories and scales usually kept apart.”8 This means first learning to follow an analogue across time and place, as I did with the Kronan cannon. Hecht’s example was the Oklo natural fission reactor in Mounana, Gabon, Africa. Oklo is a uranium deposit that, long ago, had its own self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions for a few hundred thousand years. Today, nuclear waste programs point to the radionuclides that the fossilized reactor left behind as analogues for how far future radionuclides at nuclear waste repositories may or may not disperse. They emphasize that the radionuclides did not disperse far from the Oklo site. Some critics, like Anders, saw the Oklo analogue as dubious.

When Hecht followed the Mounana interscalar vehicle across time, she found herself engaging with the theories of an eccentric scientist named Paul Kuroda on our solar system’s origins, with the Oklo deposit’s fission reactions’ origins 1.7 billion years ago, with France’s concerning history of twentieth-century uranium extraction in postcolonial Africa, with France’s post–World War II nuclear weapons and energy programs, and with the ways Mounana locals are negatively affected by uranium mine tailings today. Taking this learning-journey across timescales, for Hecht, brought “industrial time into dialogue with deep time, bodily temporality into dialogue with planetary temporality.”9 This, to me, underscores that we do not have to be physical or natural scientists for analogues to nudge us toward reflecting more imaginatively on possible similarities and differences between distant past, far-future, and present-day worlds.

One does not need a PhD—or to be an anthropologist like me, a historian like Hecht, or a nuclear waste scientist like Risto—for analogues to widen the time horizons of one’s thought. Journalist Jonathan Jones has, for one, looked at NASA’s Curiosity Rover’s pictures of barren lifeless Martian landscapes to speculate about what Earth’s far future landscapes might look like if environmental degradation destroys life here. To prepare for World War II fighting in Northern Italy, US Army personnel first trained in the crags of West Virginia’s Seneca Rocks. They saw the crags as analogues for those found in the Dolomites mountain range overseas. Learning to integrate flights of analogy like these into our day-to-day ponderings can stretch our intellects across time and space too. This is a crucial task during the Anthropocene—a time when the “boundary between the ancient and the contemporary” can appear “mucked up.”10 It means trying to be more like a Finn who reads about Lake Lappajärvi in this book, on the website Atlas Obscura, or on Posiva’s online Databank and then decides to go paddle-boating. On the water, he or she starts pondering distant past asteroid impacts, multiple ice ages’ erosion processes, and far future nuclear waste repositories.

To resist the deflation of expertise, we can all study up on the publicly available findings of analogue experts who work on projects of nuclear waste disposal, space exploration, climate change, and carbon sequestration. Doing so, one may ultimately become only an amateur analogizer: a dilettante who never quite attains the skill of a highly trained expert who conducts analogue research professionally. That is fine. What matters is that we all work to improve our long-termist skillsets, even in incremental ways, while extending the societal impact of today’s most long-sighted experts. Our efforts to acquire scientific knowledge must, however, be supplemented with imagination. When looking at, say, an ancient artifact in a history museum, we could try to start thinking analogically. Why not imagine how analogous appliances found in homes today might be presented in a history museum thousands of years from now? This exercise turns a present-day exhibit into an analogue for a far future one. Or, when watching a documentary on excavations of ancient Mesopotamian settlements, why not try to imagine what present-day Seoul, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, or Mumbai might look like to archaeologists excavating them millennia from now?

Combining expert-driven learning with futurological exercises like these can become a kind of long-termist intellectual calisthenics. A person in Bangladesh, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka, or Shanghai could, for instance, try to imagine their area submerged by, or fighting off, future rises in sea level. When taking a bus on Maryland’s Interstate 68, one could look at the shaded rock layers often found where rural highways are carved into hills. One could reflect on how the strata indicate ways that the local landscape has changed over hundreds of millions of years.11 Then one could ask: What might this area have looked like in each of the past time periods that each rock layer represents? If I were a stratigrapher living in the far future, would I see “technofossils” of twentieth-century human activity—the distinct human-altered strata layers that mark the proposed Anthropocene epoch?12

Long-termist expertise can sharpen our abilities to answer these questions. Analogue studies can provide resources for more accurately visualizing the present-day world in radically different states across time and space. Scientific knowledge can add sophistication to these futurological thought experiments, which can be attempted by anyone anywhere. The key is to (a) make a connection between our immediate surroundings and a dramatically long-term future or past and then (b) try to envision it as accurately as possible by drawing, analogically, from information and imageries we already have in our heads of concrete, real-world locales out there today. Doing this can outfit us with an evidence-driven toolkit more tangible than navel-gazing speculation. If entire populations were to commit to developing these skills en masse, a much grander transformation could take place. Contemporary societies could inch closer to liberation from their dangerously shallow time horizons.

As the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise take hold, learning to better reckon deep time becomes a practical necessity. This is as true for us as it is for analogue studies experts. To this end, I close with five reckonings that walk through how anyone can do analogical thought experiments to cultivate their long-termism. Each has been inspired by the learning-journey that analogue studies just took us on. This analogical trek took pit stops in far future Finlands, the Roman Empire, ancient China, a future Earth that looks like Mars, Africa during our planet’s earliest history, other planets, regions of South Africa in 2030, West Virginia during World War II, and elsewhere. But now it is time for reckoning. If you, the reader, are able to extract more reckonings from all of this, please write them down. These insights will serve as groundwork for building our capacities to reckon deep time as this book progresses.

RECKONINGS

REIMAGINING LANDSCAPES

To better integrate deep time learning into our everyday awareness, we can begin doing analogical thought experiments in which we routinely try to reimagine how outdoor landscapes change across time. This could mean making analogies between how the landscapes may have looked in distant pasts, and how they may look in far futures. As an example, I currently live in Arlington, Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. Sometimes I head west to hike in Appalachia. A quick Google search can reveal how, hundreds of millions of years ago, the region was home to much taller mountains. Some say their elevations rivaled those found in today’s Rockies, Alps, or even Himalayas. The challenge, for me, becomes how to reimagine my surroundings as I trek through the hills. So, I draw, analogically, on the images I already have in my head of what taller mountain ranges look like today. These analogies help me stretch the momentary “now” of my hike by enchanting it with a much deeper history and future. They introduce a pragmatic approximation of deep time into my awareness of my surroundings.

This exercise can be done in any outdoor place. Each plot of land has its own distinct past that, with a little background research, can often be uncovered and transformed into exercises in deep time contemplation. Occasionally, we may find that this research has already been done for us, like at the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. This hiking route in Wisconsin is over a thousand miles long. It brands itself as harboring the “finest features of the glacial landscape.” The drumlins, eskers, kames, erratics, and kettles found there can “expand your knowledge of Earth’s icy past.”13 They can also become resources for imagining what the area may have looked like during and after the previous Ice Age.

So, the next time we find ourselves outside, we should pause for a moment and imagine the nearby landscapes as they could have been in a distant past, or could be in a distant future. We don’t need to live near pristine forests, idyllic meadows, or sublime mountain vistas to do this. If you have the time, you could enhance your thought experiment’s accuracy by doing a few minutes (or hours) of preliminary research before embarking. Why not expand your repertoire of epistemic resources—learning about your area’s landscape history, plus other analogue landscapes found elsewhere today? Developing a hunger for learning about long-term landscape evolution can stop the deflation of expertise from sapping our curiosity. This hunger can be satisfied through personal efforts to read up on scientific findings about nearby ecosystems and faraway analogues. Fortunately, thanks to the internet, more information of this kind is publicly available than ever before.

This knowledge can help us defamiliarize our perceptions of this moment some call the Anthropocene. It can get us to take a step back from what is normalized, think critically about our surroundings, and use the power of analogy to reenvision them at different moments in Earth’s history. Such outside-the-box thinking can be rewarding. Corporate coaches have recommended taking breaks from familiar thinking patterns to experience the world in new ways that foster creativity and overcome mental blocks.14 Cognitive scientists have shown that inspiration can be sparked by perceiving “something one has not seen before (but that was probably always there).”15 Could learning to better emulate analogue studies experts’ thinking patterns help lay publics navigate today’s dual crises of expertise and ecology? Could it help societies cultivate their intellectual nimbleness across time—enhancing public awareness of local landscape change across decades, centuries, and millennia?

REIMAGINING URBAN AREAS

City-dwellers can also train their minds to envision their surroundings in different time periods. I found an example just blocks from my current workplace: George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, DC’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. A quick peek at the website Atlas Obscura reveals that, in 1922, excavation crews clearing ground for building the nearby Mayflower Hotel found fossilized bald cypress trees twenty feet below the city’s surface. These trees, which lived to be 1,700 years old, grew 100,000 or so years ago. Back then, America’s capital city was a literal swamp. Today, four bald cypresses, planted in the mid-1800s, grow in Lafayette Square right near the White House. When I walk by them, the living trees become interscalar vehicles and analogical resources for thinking across time. They provide me with tree imageries I can draw upon when reimagining the nation’s capital as a prehistoric swamp.

Analogical materials of a similar sort can be found in Chicago’s Garfield Conservatory’s Fern Room too. The room gives visitors a “glimpse of what Illinois might have looked like millions of years ago.” As the conservatory’s website explains, it features an indoor lagoon along with plants from species groups from dinosaur times, 300 million years ago. When in these cities, our minds can repurpose the cypress trees and ferns as analogues for inserting deep time learning into our daily routines. Anyone with an internet connection can discover more examples. If this includes you, maybe a quick Google search will reveal that the city you call home once had a dense rainforest ecosystem at some point in its geological history. If so, you can do analogical exercises when walking, driving, or taking a bus around your area. Ask yourself: what analogical resources do I already have in my mind—imageries of, say, the Amazon—that I can tap into to reenvision my neighborhood as if it were a rainforest?

We can also reimagine local cityscapes by turning human-made objects and local buildings into interscalar vehicles. When walking by a landfill, we can bask in the dreary uneasiness one can feel knowing that the plastic wastes there may not fully disappear for many human generations. When coming across a coal power plant, we can contemplate how its carbon emissions contribute to the enormity of climate change’s long-term impact. When driving by a car factory, we can feel taken aback by the production process’ intricacies. We can consider the sheer number of historical events, technological breakthroughs, labor exploitations, and economic trends that had to unfold first before the factory could be built. Our goal is to discover interscalar vehicles locally and then imaginatively ride them across time. This means contemplating the complex chains of events that brought them into existence, plus those that will, in the future, be caused by their existence.

As another example, I recently found myself looking at a Japanese white pine bonsai at the US National Arboretum in Washington, DC. The tree had been alive since the seventeenth century—the beginning of Japan’s Edo period. This was a relatively stable time of peace, isolationism, and rigid social codes. It preceded Japan’s 1868 Meiji Restoration. Several generations of bonsai masters had already cared for and trained the small pine tree. It had even survived the Hiroshima atomic blast. In 1976, its bonsai master Masaru Yamaki gifted it to the United States to honor the country’s two hundredth anniversary. Standing there, I wondered what wisdom the tree would share if it could think and talk. I tried to envision, step by step, the many centuries of history that had unfolded, and that would continue to unfold, around this arboreal interscalar vehicle, from its sprouting to its eventual decomposition.

The bonsai pine, the landfill, the ancient ferns, the coal plant, the cypress trees, the car factory, and the online Amazonian forest images each evoke past and future complexities. These complexities can inspire fascination, curiosity, or even awe, which can have powerful effects on the psyche. A Stanford University study has shown how awe can expand a person’s sense of time.16 States of awe can be “mind- and heart-expanding” too.17 So, when we defamiliarize our surroundings by making long-termist analogies or following objects across time, we not only lengthen our thinking’s time horizons during the Anthropocene; we also broaden our intellectual horizons by finding inspiration in analogue experts’ research during the deflation of expertise. The question is: How can we commit to taking this outlook of deep time awe with us, wherever our lives may lead? How can we muster the self-discipline to undertake independent long-termist learning—expanding our repertoires of analogues and interscalar vehicles?

SELF-CRITIQUE THAT DOES NOT PARALYZE ACTION

When doing long-sighted analogical and interscalar exercises, we must be critically self-aware of our limitations. This holds for scientists conducting analogue research, as well. Resisting the deflation of expertise does not mean blindly deferring to experts, closing our minds to nonexperts, or pretending that experts never make errors. We must admit from the outset, just as the biosphere experts’ “Knowledge Quality Assessment” did, that far futures are marked by incredible uncertainties. Attaining total knowledge of them is impossible. We must accept that experts and laypeople alike have little choice but to make pragmatic simplifications of the future. They must reduce and distill uncertain tomorrows into something more workable, lest their legs buckle before deep time’s many unknowns.

Looking far futures and pasts in the eye will evoke what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called infinition: a complexity “overflowing the thought that thinks it,” or the “overflowing of the idea by its ideatum.”18 Reaching out to grasp deep time’s ungraspable complexity will, in anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s terms, leave “remainders” in analysis. These remainders can elicit more analysis, which leave more remainders, which can elicit even more analysis, ad nauseam.19 In other words, there is always more of deep time to know. It can never be fully lassoed into place. Yet the payoff of chasing its ever-receding horizons, trudging onward like Risto’s Sisyphean ants, is real. To get there, we must first believe, as the Safety Case experts did, that embarking on this path will be more enlightening than not embarking. We must trust that seeking out interscalar vehicles and analogues—despite their very real limitations, as highlighted by Anders—can offer at least some viable, evidence-driven paths forward.

When doing analogical thought exercises, we should ask ourselves: How can I sustain the optimism of intellect, the disciplined attention to evidence, and the faith in reason-driven self-improvement I need to face down deep time’s complexities? How can I adopt a constructively self-critical approach to reckoning distant futures without succumbing to indecision, information overload, or analysis-paralysis? When I make predictions, can I use Donald Rumsfeld’s famous formula to help me gauge my progress? This means asking: How can I account for the known knowns (what I know I know), the known unknowns (what I know I don’t know), and the unknown unknowns (what I don’t know I don’t know) that accompany any forecast? Have I accepted that my predictions may someday be revealed as rife with unknown knowns (what I once thought I knew but, over time, realized I did not ever know)?20

SHARPENING OUR TOOLS

We must commit to growing into more well-informed analogizers of our futures. This book offers only a preliminary step. Future learning-journeys are necessary. The more analogical resources we gather through personal online research, the more sophisticated our deep time reckoning skills become. The more we learn about climate, space, and nuclear waste analogues already identified by scientists, the more interscalar vehicles we have at our fingertips for learning to glide across time. The more time we spend on Posiva Oy’s website’s public Databank information archive, the more lines of long-termist reasoning we discover. We can reinforce these information gathering efforts by reading long-sighted books like Alan Weisman’s 2007 The World without Us or Andrew Shrylock and Daniel Lord Smail’s 2011 Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present.

In this spirit, try logging onto NAWG’s homepage (www.natural-analogues.com) and learning from some of the long-termist analogue work databased in its Library archive. A good place to begin is the website’s “NA Overviews” section, which contains reviews and summaries of recent years’ state of the art analogue research. After getting a lay of the land, check out the more specialized subsections. These explore the futures of clays, glass, glaciers, cements, archaeological artifacts, and more. Once armed with this arsenal of analogues, one could switch intellectual gears by picking up literary scholar David Farrier’s 2019 book Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction, or his 2020 book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. Then one can begin combining all these ideas, asking: how could Farrier’s view of deep time help me think more imaginatively about, say, the clay deposit futures NAWG scientists have studied in Cyprus and the Philippines?

When we add a new analogue to our inventory, we not only get better at making good analogies; we also get better at breaking bad ones. From there, we can begin posing questions like: What are the limits to what native copper in mudrock in Devon can really tell us about manufactured copper canisters in clay in Olkiluoto? To what extent can an analogue help us envision what our home regions might look like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years from now? If my hometown will look like a desert, to what extent can I, analogically, draw on mental imageries I already have of Arizona’s deserts or of Mars to help me reimagine it devoid of life? Could I draw on science fiction books or movies? If my area will look like Ice Age Finland, could I draw on what I now know of Greenland’s Kangerlussuaq ice sheet or of Wisconsin’s postglacial terrain? To what extent? Could using CGIAR’s online climate analogues tool help me compare my home region’s near-future climate to other regions’ present-day climates?

MULTIPLE LINES OF REASONING

Doing analogical thought experiments can help us distance ourselves from our time-bound worlds, defamiliarize them, and imagine them afresh. They can help us reposition our everyday lives in broader horizons of time, training our intuitions to adopt the long-termism necessary to think more clearly about climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability during the Anthropocene. But we must remember to perform these personal fact-finding quests and intellectual workouts with a self-questioning attitude. That can help us adopt the cautious, self-reflective, modest optimism about expert inquiry that Safety Case experts had as a foundation for their long-sightedness. If the public, media outlets, and political organizations opened their minds to analogue experts’ findings, the cynical deflation of expertise could begin to reverse. Yet we must acknowledge that no one analogy, or even the power of analogy itself, could ever be enough. Analogical reasoning must be just one among—to use the Safety Case experts’ buzzword—multiple lines of reasoning.

For the Safety Case experts, the most robust forecasting projects were those in which a variety of groups, using a variety of vocabularies and techniques, all engaged with far future phenomena at once. As a philosophy professor might put it, analogues were necessary, but not sufficient, for reckoning deep time. In this spirit, we must see our analogues as corroborating, competing with, and/or complementing other approaches—as they did in Posiva’s Complementary Considerations report. Analogues must be positioned in a lively ecosystem of coexisting reasoning lines. This means that when dueling viewpoints—like those of Aapo and Anders—appear irreconcilable, we must not respond by dismissing the entire endeavor as bogus. Instead, in a spirit of adventurous learning, we must ask: How can I see this disagreement as a teaching moment? Can the debate it sparks generate fruitful questions about deep time analogies and disanalogies? Can these questions sharpen my own sophistication when I venture to make or break long-sighted analogies myself?

NOTES

  1. 1.  Adrian Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 13.

  2. 2.  Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin, 15.

  3. 3.  T. Hjerpe, A. T. K. Ikonen, and R. Broed, “Biosphere Assessment Report 2009,” Posiva Oy Databank (2009), 27, 141, http://www.posiva.fi/en/databank/biosphere_assessment_report_2009.1867.xhtml#.VcPF6Ra8_dk.

  4. 4.  Stefan Helmreich, “Extraterrestrial Relativism,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2012): 1125–1139.

  5. 5.  Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin, 191.

  6. 6.  Currie, Rock, Bone, and Ruin, 216.

  7. 7.  At times, however, data derived from analogue sites got input into the Safety Case’s models—which I explore in chapter 2.

  8. 8.  Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 115, 134.

  9. 9.  Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles,” 131.

  10. 10.  Stefan Helmreich, “Waves: An Anthropology of Scientific Things,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 3 (2014): 265–284.

  11. 11.  Patricia Coates, “A Drive-Through Geology Lesson,” Washington Post, November 18, 2005).

  12. 12.  J. Zalasiewicz, C. N. Waters, M. Williams, A. D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-twentieth-century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (2015): 204–207.

  13. 13.  The Conservation Fund, “Ice Age National Scenic Trail,” Our Projects, https://www.conservationfund.org/projects/ice-age-national-scenic-trail (accessed December 31, 2019).

  14. 14.  Preston Ni, “How to Unleash Your Creativity and Find Inspiration Today,” Psychology Today, February 2, 2014.

  15. 15.  Scott Kaufman, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 103.

  16. 16.  Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time and Enhances Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2012): 1130–1136.

  17. 17.  Barbara King, “Atheists Feel Awe, Too,” National Public Radio—Cosmos & Culture Blog, August 28, 2014.

  18. 18.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 41.

  19. 19.  Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).

  20. 20.  Errol Morris, dir., The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld (film, Radius-TWC, 2013).