Adventurous learning A thoughtful intellectual approach of actively seeking out scientifically informed knowledge while embracing an anthropologically informed openness to careful, skeptical, critical listening to all sorts of diverse perspectives.
Anthropocene A name proposed for a troubled epoch in Earth’s geological history ushered in by human transformations of our planet’s climate, erosion patterns, extinctions, atmosphere, rock record, and more. Many of the proposed epoch’s advocates argue that humans have become telluric forces of nature: agents not just of ecological but also geological change.
Archaeological Analogues Present-day artifacts, ruins, or remnants of past human activities that nuclear waste researchers study in order to make extrapolations, inferences, or projections about future nuclear waste repositories’ engineered components or natural surroundings.
Asiat riitelevät, eivät ihmiset A Finnish phrase meaning “the issues fight, not the people,” which can serve as a model for thoughtful, civil, respectful debate in times of social, political, and ecological tumult.
Attunement Legal scholar Frank Pasquale’s term for a principled embrace of receptivity, sensitivity, and appreciation of one’s wider world. To embrace attunement is to resist yearning for mastery, escapism, or mechanistic thinking.
Big History An interdisciplinary academic field that studies history in the widest of timescales—far beyond social or historical time horizons—from the Big Bang to the present.
Biosphere Assessment A subsection of Posiva’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case portfolio, which examines the paths of radionuclides that could, in worst-case scenarios, escape from the Olkiluoto repository and be released into Western Finland’s landscapes. Biosphere models extrapolate about how radionuclides might travel around in distant future lakes, rivers, forests, fields, and bogs. The biosphere report explores questions like: At what pace will Finland’s shoreline continue expanding outward into the Baltic Sea? What happens if forest fires, soil erosion, or floods occur? How and where will lakes, rivers and forests sprout up, shrink and grow? What role will climate change play in all this?
CGIAR Climate Analogues Project CGIAR’s Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security’s online tool for exploring rainfall and climate forecasts in various future locales across the world. This tool makes analogies comparing these future regions’ conditions with various present-day regions, which are already seeing similar conditions.
Complementary Considerations A subsection of Posiva’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case portfolio, which contains a hodgepodge of public relations information and qualitative evidence designed to persuade wider audiences of the repository’s strengths. The report contains most of the Safety Case experts’ analogue research findings and is seen as filling knowledge gaps that computer modeling and engineering calculations alone cannot fill.
Deflation of expertise A term proposed for our current historical moment, in which political power is commonly gained through populist mockery of expert authority, when experts’ voices are drowned out by the noisy clamors of knee-jerk tweets and self-published blogs, and when experts’ inquisitive spirits are dulled by new corporate-managerial reforms and constrained by bureaucratic protocols. In this context, it is increasingly difficult to put forth bold, evidence-driven, intellectually ambitious visions of the Earth’s future. This situation is exacerbated by widespread skepticisms of technocratic knowledge, liberal arts education, scientific research on the environment, and even the very possibility of there being verifiable facts, truth, or a single shared reality.
Existential risk A severe future risk that could destroy global human flourishing, cripple civilizational progress, trigger human extinction, or end life on Earth. Examples include pandemic disease, a supervolcano eruption, a total nuclear war, a large asteroid impact, or a hostile insurrection of artificially intelligent machines.
Geoengineering A term for proposals to technologically manipulate our planetary environment in order to strategically reduce the effects of climate change. Examples include proposals to pour fertilizers into the Earth’s oceans to raise their carbon dioxide uptake, or to pump reflective particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to deflect sunlight.
Global Deep Time Reckoning Association A proposed international organization that aims to unite long-sighted experts of many kinds—astrophysicists, geologists, historians, cosmologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, archivists, paleontologists, nuclear waste scientists, climatologists, philosophers, archaeologists, and other long-term thinkers—into self-identifying as a pragmatic interdisciplinary community that today’s societies must rely on to avert planetary collapse.
Global Deep Time Reckoning Information Repository A proposed international archive in which prolific deep time reckoning experts’ findings, forecasts, scenarios, ideas, models, interview recordings, meetings transcripts, and notebooks could be archived, conserved for posterity, and disseminated more widely across populations, educational institutions, and media outlets.
Hiljainen tieto The Finnish word for Michael Polanyi’s concept of experience-based, “tacit knowledge” that, in being deeply inscribed in one’s intuitions or muscle memory, cannot be fully recorded in technical manuals or backed up in databases. This form of knowledge is often contrasted with explicit, formal, or codified knowledges, which can be more easily transmitted via text, how-to guides, or digital media.
Hiljaisuus A Finnish word for “quietude” or “silence,” often associated with being omissa oloissaan (“to oneself”) in inward contemplation. When in Finland, one can embrace hiljaisuus in Helsinki’s Kamppi Chapel, also known as the “Chapel of Silence”: an ecumenical space where visitors from any religious tradition or life philosophy can meditate quietly in a serene wooden structure in one of Finland’s busiest areas. Embracing contemplative self-reflection can help us cultivate the thoughtfulness necessary for transcending today’s intellectual and environmental crises.
Infinition Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s term for a complexity “overflowing the thought that thinks it,” leading to the “overflowing of the idea by its ideatum.” Gazing into distant futures or pasts can have this effect. Since there is always more of deep time to know, its complexities can never be fully lassoed into place.
Interscalar vehicles Historian Gabrielle Hecht’s term for objects that can draw scholars and others to “move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space.” Studying them can provide “means of connecting stories and scales usually kept apart.”
Iteration Finland’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case experts’ stepwise approach of developing progressively new and improved versions, or “iterations,” of their deep time reckoning models before each successive repository license application submission deadline. Between the publication of each new version of the Safety Case, lessons learned from the previous iteration can be factored in to improve future iterations. Updated iterations are to be released until the Olkiluoto repository’s planned decommissioning around 2120.
KBS-3 A spent nuclear fuel repository design concept used in Sweden and Finland. Posiva’s KBS-3 repository plan involves sliding spent nuclear fuel bundles into tube-shaped cast iron insert containers. They then plan to slide the inserts inside large copper canisters at an encapsulation plant in Olkiluoto, now under construction. Once emplaced underground in one of the repository’s deposition holes 400–450 meters underground, the canisters are to be surrounded by an absorbent bentonite clay. The clay is to serve as a “buffer” between the canisters and the bedrock. Posiva’s KBS-3 design has mostly been derived from the Swedish nuclear waste company SKB’s research and development work.
Knowledge Quality Assessment A self-critical section in Posiva’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository Safety Case’s biosphere modeling report, which aimed to increase confidence in the experts’ far future forecasts. Its approach was to openly admit to—and then systematically detail—various uncertainties and reductive assumptions found in the biosphere modelers’ own knowledge base.
Lake Lappajärvi A crater lake in Southern Ostrobothnia, Finland, that formed over 73 million years ago after a meteor crashed into the Earth. Among Finland’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case experts, the crater became an analogue for how the country’s landscape may or may not change over the next several ice ages.
Long Now Foundation Established in San Francisco in 1996, the Long Now Foundation aims to “provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture,” to “help make long-term thinking more common,” and to “foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” This organization is known for its plans to build a clock, hundreds of feet tall, which will tick continuously for ten millennia. Built as a monument to long-term thinking, the Clock of the Long Now is sited deep in a West Texas mountain.
Multiple lines of reasoning Finland’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case experts’ strategy of intentionally having multiple teams of experts—each with different disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual tendencies—working in parallel on the same long-sighted challenges. To this end, some experts developed quantitative models, others developed natural analogue studies, others conducted mechanical tests on KBS-3 repository components, and so on. In Posiva’s Safety Case portfolio, these arguments for repository performance were presented in parallel—offering a more robust and holistic set of arguments for repository safety.
Multiscalar perspective A holistic form of analysis that intentionally tacks back and forth between several different scales of generality and particularity—approaching a topic from multiple angles, levels, and perspectives. Such analyses gesture to how any given event, entity, or vision of the future can be viewed in several different ways, depending on the perspective from which one approaches it.
Multitemporal perspective A holistic form of analysis that intentionally approaches a topic from the perspective of a variety of different timespans. What emerges is a more dynamic and multidimensional understanding of a given event, entity, or vision of the future’s causes and effects across futures and pasts. Multitemporal sensibilities can be cultivated in contemporary organizations by (a) instituting chapter 3’s proposed workplace multitimescale awareness training workshops, retreats, or training sessions or (b) establishing chapter 3’s proposed timescale-specific days divisions, decades divisions, centuries divisions, and multimillennial divisions.
Natural analogues Examples of present-day ecological or geophysical features, processes, or locales that nuclear waste experts study to make extrapolations, inferences, or projections about repositories’ engineered components or natural surroundings in the future. Natural analogues research is compiled globally by the international Natural Analogue Working Group (NAWG) organization.
Offentlighetsprincipen Sweden’s constitution’s “Principle of Access to Official Information,” which is aimed at fostering transparency among government organizations.
Oklo A uranium deposit in Gabon, Africa, that experienced self-sustaining, natural fission chain reactions roughly 1.7 billion years ago. Today, nuclear waste programs point to the radionuclides the fossilized reactor left behind as analogues for understanding how radionuclides released from today’s nuclear waste repositories may or may not disperse in far futures.
Paskaporukka A playful nickname, translated from Finnish as “Shit Gang,” for Finland’s founding group of geologic disposal experts from the 1970s and 1980s.
Performance Assessment A section of Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository Safety Case, which consists of multiple quantitative models. The Performance Assessment was Posiva’s primary systematic analysis of how the repository’s mechanical parts, heat levels, nearby groundwaters, and so on may interact over the coming hundreds of thousands of years.
Pessimisti ei pety A Finnish phrase, translated as “a pessimist is not disappointed,” which evokes a guarded approach to future events.
Pilkunnussijat A pejorative term, translated from Finnish as “comma-fuckers,” used as an epithet for people who are too detail-obsessed for their own good.
Posiva Finland’s nuclear waste management company, which is jointly owned by Finnish power companies Teollisuuden Voima Oyj and Fortum Power & Heat. Posiva is developing what will, in the 2020s, likely become the world’s first operating underground disposal repository for high-level nuclear waste. This facility is currently being built in Western Finland’s granite bedrock, deep below the island of Olkiluoto in the Gulf of Bothnia.
Predecessor preservation An ethic of motivating younger generations to work toward carefully absorbing, tending to, and disseminating insights from prolific deep time reckoners so that their contributions to humanity’s long-termism do not die off upon their biological deaths.
Radionuclide Transport A subsection of Posiva’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case portfolio, which models the possible future routes of radionuclides that could, in unlucky conditions, escape from Finland’s Olkiluoto repository and travel through groundwater channels toward Western Finland’s surface.
Reckonings A name I’ve given to this book’s open-ended guidance for embracing long-term thinking. These reckonings, found at the conclusions of each chapter, are not meant as hard instructions telling anyone how to think or act. They are suggested starting points for orienting others in embarking on long-termist learning-journeys of their own.
Ressentiment A French word for the psychological state of being weighed down by repressed emotions of envy or anger at the past, which the sufferer can no longer act on. This often results in self-deprecation or self-abasement. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw ressentiment as a defining feature of Judeo-Christian “slave morality.”
Safety Case A safety assessment report that provides evidence-based arguments for a given technology’s or facility’s future health or environmental acceptability. Often mandated for submission to government regulatory agencies, safety cases are developed for new aviation technologies, medical devices, or railway infrastructures. Nuclear waste repository licensing safety cases, like the one Posiva developed for submission to Finland’s nuclear regulator STUK, often make predictions about geological, hydrological, and ecological conditions tens or hundreds of millennia in the future.
Säteilyturvakeskus (STUK) Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority is the country’s nuclear regulator and radiation monitoring agency. In 2015, STUK, in conjunction with Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, approved Posiva’s Safety Case’s projections of conditions the Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository may face over the coming tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.
Shallow time discipline The powerful cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that interact to fix our attentions on the radical short-term. Examples include twenty-four-hour news cycles, the boom-bust-or-buyout tempos of startup companies, throwaway consumerism, lightning-fast financial transactions, short-lived political electoral terms, digital marketplace tempos, contingent employment policies, fickle popular culture trends, corporate fixations on quarterly earnings, and more.
Slow violence A concept, popularized by English professor Rob Nixon, referring to the gradually occurring, slow-moving destruction caused by deforestation, climate change, toxic chemicals spreading in ecosystems, and other more gradually unfolding crises. Instances of slow violence often unfortunately fail to win hearts and minds or incite political action in today’s spectacle-driven media landscape.
Successor stewardship A proposed code of ethics for deep time reckoning experts, which focuses on sustaining and refining long-term thinking patterns across the generations. This means that each new generation must see themselves as both (a) mouthpieces for transmitting predecessors’ long-term thinking patterns and (b) reformers working to end the transmission of impediments to long-termism. Successor stewardship involves responsibly selecting which aspects of a predecessor should be mimicked and replicated versus which should be discouraged and discarded by new generations.
Suuret nälkävuodet The “great hunger years” famine that killed almost 9 percent of Finland’s population in just three years, from 1855 to 1868.
Svalbard Global Seed Vault A program to back up plant seeds in an underground Arctic repository to ensure against genetic diversity loss during future global crises. This gene-bank vault is located on Spitsbergen Island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.
Timefulness A concept popularized by geologist Marcia Bjornerud, which reminds us to be “mindful that this world contains so many earlier ones, all still with us in some way—in the rocks beneath our feet, in the air we breathe, in every cell of our body.” Timefulness is one route to greater time-literacy.
Time reckoning A social scientific concept for how different individuals or communities understand, represent, measure, or grapple with various spans of time, and their past and future horizons. Studying how people approach time’s intervals, scales, horizons, and durations can reveal how they see themselves and their worlds.
Timescapes A sociological concept, developed by Barbara Adam, that attends to how different paces, scales, durations, sequences, and modalities of past, present and future converge to form context-specific “scapes” of time. For example, tempos of democratic electoral schedules, tempos of capitalist commodity production, and tempos of communication and transportation speeds may converge, in unique ways, to stoke environmental problems.
Tyhjän puhuminen A Finnish word for “empty talk,” which has negative connotations. Many (but not all) Finns are seen as disliking unnecessary small-talk, long-winded tangents, and unconcise speech—embracing straightforward, less verbose modes of self-expression.
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) The United States’ transuranic defense nuclear waste repository, located deep in a salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the US Department of Energy assembled interdisciplinary teams to help brainstorm ideas for warning monuments to deter far future tomb-raiding treasure hunters, archaeologists, local communities, and miners from digging near the repository.
Yucca Mountain License Application A US Department of Energy facility performance assessment document developed to seek US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for the country’s now-defunct high-level nuclear waste repository program in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The License Application includes Total System Performance Assessment models that gaze one million years into the future.