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Consequences of Perspective

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The piece was included in the 02024 edition of Pace Layers, Long Now's Annual Journal of the best of long-term thinking.

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As part of the larger strategy to keep our decaying nuclear waste undisturbed in long-term storage facilities, linguists, artists, and scientists alike have proposed building monuments over and around the areas where the waste is concealed to discourage future generations from entering these toxic sites for at least 10,000 years. Linguists speculate that the English language will decay by 89 percent over the next ten millennia.

Only 11 percent of our warnings will reach them.

The following is an erasure of a paper published inThe Medical Implications of Nuclear War. The text was sourced from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

Only 11 percent of the original document remains.


The purpose of this systematic war:

offer care

complications progressed

It became all

impact has been , and continues to be

Subject of

consequences.

uncovered to be confined entirely

The application of our knowledge has been done on subjects

Response to warning:

Administer economy without nations.

There is, shortage of change,

We

Pretend, We do not question, speculate, entertain possibilities.

Mutually assured

vulnerability

Casualties thought to be effective

under conditions for civil system.

Blast-resistant citizens of an impending time.

This so-called crisis of realism a product of orchestrated flight targeted escalation

We citizens under catastrophe have to be appropriate, even without safe

Persons responsible evacuate.

The completeness devastation brings,

Suffering the subject of studies. We begin with a scenario then Megatons

(detonation would be skeletal, contents blown into streets)

Leave no signs.

This is the circuitry of the classified.

blacked out economy interruption to the data

In the event of sabotage, fail. The nature of a glitch is to predict total collapse.

How long can a body carry on?

Maintenance of

the absence

the presence

of insect of radiation described by complications

of time disruptions of static

The consumer nature of commodities is a pattern of victims assessing material

well-being from productivity.

A collapse of behavior, efficient, but impersonal An individual creates

an image which masks the whole.

intimate in industrialized

objectification essential to nation

of emergency

Human: a disaster-induced suspension of highly-concentrated time

and again biologicals deteriorate to the raw units. Deplete the embodied.

Form the machines.

Forecast estimates

medium of exchange rendered useless

Metallurgical growth

from

the totality within reasonable speed.

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The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.

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