He reasoned that though current languages could be dead in this future, any people who had survived that long would have advanced astronomy, math and physics in their arsenal of survival tactics. He used the clock to mark major historical events of the last several thousand years including the birth of Christ and the building of the pyramids, events which he thought were equal to the engineering feat of men bringing water to a desert in the 1930s. Hansen wanted any future humans who came across the dam to be able to know exactly when it was built. Hansen included this information in an amazingly accurate astronomical clock, or celestial map, embedded in the terrazzo floor of the dam’s dedication monument. At the end of the current Platonic Year it will be Vega, in the constellation Lyra. Now Earth’s true-north pole star is Polaris, in Ursa Minor, as it was at the completion of Hoover Dam. The duration of the last is the Platonic Year, where Earth is incrementally turning on a tilt pointing to its true north as the Sun’s gravity pulls on us, leaving our planet spinning like a very slow top along its orbit around the sun. Earth rotates in three ways: 365 days around the sun, on its 24 hours axis and on its precessional axis. It’s also known as the precession of the equinoxes, first written into the historical record in the second century BC by the Greek mathematician, Hipparchus, though there is evidence that earlier people also solved this complex equation. Hansen’s vision will be realized: future humans will find the dam 14,000 years from now, at the end of the current Platonic Year.Ī Platonic Year lasts for roughly 26,000 years. Otherwise erosion will take much longer to claim the structure, and possibly Oskar J.W.
That is if the Colorado continues to flow.
The mollusks which grow in the dam’s grates will no longer be scraped away, and will multiply eventually to such density that the built up stress of the river will burst the dam’s wall. Hoover Dam is theorized in some structural stress projections to stand for tens of thousands of years from now, and what could be its eventual undoing is mussels. Nevada is the uncanny locus of disparate monuments all concerned with charting deep time, leaving messages for future generations of human beings to puzzle over the meaning of: a star map, a nuclear waste repository and a clock able to keep time for 10,000 years-all of them within a few hours drive of Las Vegas through the harsh desert. Inside the dam’s walls that concrete is still curing, and will be for another 60 years.Įrik, photojournalist, and I have come here to try and get the measure of this place. It required 6.6 million metric tons of concrete, all made from the desert enough, famously, to pave a two lane road coast to coast across the US. The dam brought water to 8 million people and created more than 5000 jobs. Diverting the Colorado destroyed the ecology of the region, threatening fragile native plant life and driving several species of fish nearly to extinction. It claimed the lives of 96 workers, and the beloved site dog, Little Niggy, who is entombed by the walkway in the shade of the canyon wall. This was the work of the Human Interference Task Force.īuilding the Hoover Dam rerouted the most powerful river in North America. So, how would we post warnings at Yucca Mountain about the entombed dangers to generations living 10,000 years and more from now? Those behind the Yucca Mountain project considered a number of fantastic (in its original sense) programs to carry dire warnings into the distant future including hostile architecture, radioactive cats and a pseudo-religious order.
Keep in mind that some products of nuclear reactors, such as various isotopes of uranium, plutonium, technetium and neptunium, remain highly radioactive for tens of thousands to millions of years.
Now shuttered, Yucca Mountain was designed to be a repository for nuclear byproducts and waste from military and civilian programs. Yet these monuments to our impermanence raise a important issue beyond their construction - how are we to communicate their intent to humans living in a distant future, humans who will no longer be using any of our existing languages? Directions and warnings in English or contextual signs and images will not suffice. Structures like the Hoover Dam, which regulates the mighty Colorado River, and the ill-fated Yucca Mountain project, once designed to store the nation’s nuclear waste, were conceived to last many centuries. Or, perhaps it’s our monumental human structures that aim to encode our present for the distant future. Perhaps it’s the vastness of the eerie landscape that puts fleeting human moments into the context of deep geologic time. Time seems to unfold over different - lengthier - scales in the desert southwest of the United States.
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