http://longnow.org/I recently was reading an article about the Long Now foundation; a group of people dedicated to increasing our modern civilization’s attention span by hosting discussions and engaging in projects that extend over a wider range of time. Their Clock of the Long Now project, for example, is a huge mechanical clock being built in the Western Desert of the United states, it is designed to remain accurate for 10,000 years using a complex system of gearing akin to a mechanical computer. The device has been built to be robust against damage, and has multiple methods of being passively mechanically and electrically powered in a manner that would allow it to remain operational for millennia. The systems have also been built with abject simplicity and inherent understandability in the design of their components and operation. So even if someone with no modern mechanical knowledge came upon it, they could reason how to keep it working or repair it.
This made me think about other long-term gambles we have made, as a society, with possible disasters that require regular maintenance of technologically advanced systems to maintain. Some examples include:
Nuclear containment and spent fuel.
Capped undersea oil and gas wells.
Waste chemical holding pools at large factories.
Large scale regional defense against non-native species.
Large rural dams
Landfills and chemical dumps
Acid mine drainage and deep mine pumping
And many others.
Without regular and advanced knowledge of the engineering and handling of these systems, within 100-500 years all of them have the opportunity to fail, creating huge, planetary environmental problems.
If Federal governments become unwilling or unable to continue the maintenance of these places due to socio-politico-economic collapse we could see the following long term, slow occurring disasters that would multiply in effects over the next thousand years.
Nuclear fall-out and discharge at first gradual, then reaching disastrous levels within several centuries
Corroded concrete caps and seals failing at undersea drill sites, creating multiple massive, BP-esque hydrocarbon releases worldwide over several centuries.
Breached chemical containment rendering entire watersheds contaminated and sterile.
Overwhelming incursions by invasive species causing irreparable local ecological collapses worldwide.
Large dam breaches flooding and destroying huge regions of cropland and urban land.
Mine pump failures lead to them filling with highly acidic water laden with heavy metals and dissolved chemicals spilling over into regional water table, polluting entire aquifer systems.
None of these disasters could reach their full potentials within our lifetimes, but if allowed to languish unthought-of about in a low energy world, will we even be capable of stopping them?
Would it not be prudent to build in robust systems designed to operate on the scale of millennia as failsafes? Is that even possible?