The human race needs help? Are there any aliens out there who can help us?

What a situation we find ourselves in!

It is pretty obvious that the humans need help from a higher intelligence before we destroy the only environment that we believe exists!

Last December I visited the Olkiluoto site and took a ride on a " back to the future" elevator that took me to a depth of 450 m to the surreal world of long term, high grade , nuclear watt storage.

The nice, well intentioned ,lady from the Finnish power company TVO explained how robots would manoeuvre big copper cylinders, full of the vilest materials that we as humans have ever excreted, into there final resting place in a granite cemetery.

Only one problem.....the three metre high copper cylinders, about a metre wide, have a copper cap on either end that as the lady said " will have to be properly welded so as to avoid any leakages"........ Are you confident enough to believe the weld will last forever and a day. I am not....

Help us save ourselves from ourselves.....yours Reg

Into Eternity - review
This jaw-dropping documentary tackles a subject almost beyond comprehension, says Peter Bradshaw


Share
79

Comments (8)

Peter Bradshaw
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 November 2010 22.00 GMT
Article history

Barely even conceivable … Onkalo in the film Into Eternity
In many ways, this unassuming, modestly proportioned documentary from Finnish film-maker Michael Madsen (no relation to the Hollywood bad guy) is one of the most extraordinary factual films to be shown this year: my only quarrel is that it is perhaps too short, and could have done with more wide-ranging interviews to tackle its implications. Madsen's film is about Onkalo, a colossal underground tomb being built in Finland, 500 metres below the earth – supposedly impervious to any event on the surface and far away from any possible earthquake danger: its purpose is to house thousands of tonnes of radioactive nuclear waste. Onkalo is the first storage site of its kind, and Madsen interviews the various technicians, scientists, legislators and commentators involved in this awe-inspiring project.

Into Eternity
Production year: 2010
Countries: Denmark, Finland, Italy, Rest of the world, Sweden
Runtime: 75 mins
Directors: Michael Madsen
More on this film
The point is that, to be safe, this gigantic bunker has to last 100,000 years. Are we humans capable of even conceiving this, let alone actually guaranteeing it? Our own history spans a few paltry millennia. We have, of course, created nothing that has lasted anything like this length of time. And yet Onkalo has to do it – there is no question about this. Finland is building something that must outlast every institution humans have ever conceived.

Madsen's film does not merely ask tough questions about the implications of nuclear energy – now enjoying a fashionable renaissance as the burning of fossil-fuels becomes increasingly unacceptable – but about how we, as a race, conceive our own future. My jaw descended at Madsen's interviews with the Finnish guardians of this place, and at what they had to consider. Should they put markers or warnings on the site warning away any future people who, tens of thousands of years from now, stumble upon it? Languages might be pointless. How about runic symbols or signs? Quite seriously, the site's designers were considering using Munch's The Scream as a way of getting the message across.

But Onkalo's designers had to consider the possibility that it might be safer to leave it unmarked. An array of symbols might simply whet the curiosity of any future visitors: they might become insanely excited at the thought of a Tutankhamun-style vault.

Onkalo might seem an unimaginably mysterious shrine to the gods. And is that, in fact, precisely what we are building here? My blood ran cold as one engineer involved in this project said that the project had to be "independent of human nature".

This is nothing less than post-human architecture we are talking about. Why isn't every government, every philosopher, every theologian, everywhere in the world discussing Onkalo and its implications? I don't know, but they should see this film.