[POSTPONED] Technosemiotics: the Atomic Priesthood project

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the session is cancelled and will be held at a later date. The next Technosemiotics sessions will continue as planned, from Sept 11 to Dec 4.

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In our August 21 regular session, we discuss the idea of Atomic Priesthood, proposed by Thomas A. Sebeok in his report to the Human Interference Task Force, a project initiated by the US government in 1980 to find ways to communicate scientific information over deep time.

Human Interference Task Force and the problem of communicating 10 000 years into the future

In the 1980ies, the government of the United States, recognising the long-term environmental danger posed by nuclear waste repositories, created Human Interference Task Force (HITF) to figure out ways to ensure that the information and awareness about the radiation danger is extended to the future.

HITF commissioned various people to imagine action plans for ensuring knowledge transfer into the far future. Among others, the group included science fiction author Stanisław Lem, semioticians Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri, as well as Vilmos Voigt and Thomas A. Sebeok. Considering that the half-life of some nuclear isotopes (and their radioactive danger to human life and health; possibly 24 000 years) exceeds the length of the known human (written) history (5000 years), there wasn’t an available model to imagine scientific communication over such a time period. The tentative period for the invited thought experiments was estimated at 10 000 years, so the researchers needed to propose solutions to communicate the danger of the sites to future inhabitants (people, societies) over this time period.

Bastide and Fabbri proposed an idea of “radiation cats”, and Thomas A. Sebeok came up with a complex system that included the creation of a scientific cult — “Atomic Priesthood”, modelled on the way the Catholic Church has preserved its message for 2000 years.

Many of the —considerably strange— ideas and details were left out of the final report titled “Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-level Waste Repositories,” including Sebeok’s Atomic Priesthood concept. However, his technical report, separately available as “Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia,” remains an interesting historical document that, among other ideas, outlines the introduction to semiotics and basic communication theory in less than 30 pages.

In this seminar, we re-read and discuss Sebeok’s report and its contemporary reflections.

Readings

Sebeok, T.A. 1984. “Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia.” BMI/ONWI-532, prepared by Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Indiana University, for Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, OH. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/16/010/16010244.pdf.

“Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities That Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories.” 1984. BMI/ONWI-537. Battelle Memorial Inst., Columbus, OH (United States). Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. https://doi.org/10.2172/6799619.

Fabbri, Paolo. n.d. “Human Interference Task Force – Paolo Fabbri.” Accessed August 17, 2023. https://www.paolofabbri.it/recensioni-e-commenti/human_interference_task_force/.

Musch, Sebastian. 2016. “The Atomic Priesthood and Nuclear Waste Management: Religion, Sci-Fi Literature, and the End of Our Civilization.” Zygon® 51 (3): 626–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12268.

Musch, Sebastian. 2021. “Hans Jonas, Günther Anders, and the Atomic Priesthood: An Exploration into Ethics, Religion and Technology in the Nuclear Age.” Religions 12 (9): 741. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090741.

Felton, James. 2021. “Scientists Once Proposed An Atomic Priesthood To Deliberately Spread Rituals And Legends.” IFLScience. January 20, 2021. https://www.iflscience.com/scientists-once-proposed-an-atomic-priesthood-to-deliberately-spread-rituals-and-legends-58427.