Two of the most disastrous man made forces are nuclear technology and climate change. The 1960’s were huge for nuclear power, but it was actually the end of an era. The Atomic Era started in 1945, when the first nuke was tested or when the first nuke was dropped three months later. This was a very socially charged time period, just out of WW2 and just into the civil rights movement in the US, then leading into the Vietnam War. The US government had its hold solidified and was looking everywhere for it’s newest breakthrough.
1959: Project Iceworm
At this time a research and development sector of the US Army was breaking ground in Greenland. What they were doing was creating a secret nuclear powered missile bay in the Greenland ice sheet. But, they only ever made it a secret nuclear powered polar research camp, because they realized that the tunnels in the ice would shift and not work well for launching missiles.
The project was short lived and the camp was operable and livable for only 7 years. The last the camp was seen was in 1969. Everything that was left of it was crushed and covered by snow. If you were to go there today you wouldn’t see a thing, just snow. But, beneath there is the remnants of this previous, toxic lifestyle.
Though the reactor and most of the plant was removed, there is still radioactive waste water frozen under the ice. Nobody lives in Greenland, so why is this a problem? It’s very easy to forget this stuff and, you probably will never go to Greenland. Except, this sinister part of Greenland is coming to you.
Metaphors and Climate Change
When natural law stops favoring life and global homeostasis is lost, doom is inevitable, like when the food chain is big animals that eat other big animals that eat up all the plants, or, when you have billions of medium sized animals that eat similarly sized animals, and ride around in big metal animals that digest the long dead megafauna that have been under the ground for millions of years which turned into natural oils and gases.
We are turning the failure of dinosaurs into our own failure, just less biologically diverse. Our failure will melt your ice and kill your crops. Dinos and Man both operate under the concept of “big and smart”. We have big capable bodies and intelligence. We also share the ability to diversify. This diversification makes us feel complete as a whole. But, this is all a sort of illusion. If you think about all the dinosaurs ever as a complete system and all the people ever as a complete system, it has many similarities. We both consume resources as they become increasingly scarce while the big get bigger and the little get littler. We both take oxygen making lifeforms that we rely on and turn them into meat, be it our own meat or of others meat used for consumption.
We often think demise, doom, and apocalypse are sudden, jarring, and horrific. But, what’s more horrific is that our existence is really a slow and very painful death. We won’t feel the pain with our nerves at first. But, we will feel it in our minds and in our societies.
Our demise is Greenland melting. Our demise is war. Our demise is cheap hamburgers. Our demise is in making ourselves feel big like a T-Rex.
A lot of people serve no purpose to anything except a few other people; not humanity itself, but to liars and resource controllers who seek to live in the metaphorical boxes that govern us. If you are reading this, I hope you know that you have the capacity to not be that person. We all have bodies. Are we going to let them waste energy by eating and doing nothing? Are we taking the energy away from future generations by burying it away with you when you die? Or will we use our energy to understand and create a the future for our future generations to come?
What is buried under the melting ice in Greenland is as much of a pollutant as it is an image of the cause of its melting. We live toxic lifestyles and have been coasting off of the resources nature has accumulated over billions of years. While we consume, we are also causing the end of nature as we know it. Breaking the laws of nature and exploiting excessive resources only feels like winning until we lose our ability to feel.
P.S: So if you were wondering what that rant and that government project have to do with the Ray Cat Solution; the Ray Cat Solution is a project to essentially make geiger counter software to work on living hardware. But, it’s also about considering the future, and how we build and protect that future. As a combination of art, science and culture, the Ray Cat Solution creates awareness tells us the importance of imagination in long term progress and success.