The Movie "Into Eternity"

Today, I saw the movie "Into Eternity" by Michael Madsen, 2009, that was a documentary film about nuclear waste underground repository storage solution.

I had already known nuclear waste underground repository storage and it needs long-term keeping system. But this time, seeing the movie, I rethinked some points. It is very difficult to solve nuclear waste problem perfectly now. So next way of solution is using future "time". This nuclear waste repository storage "Onkalo" is built so that it keeps 100,000 years. 

What interests me is not noly nuclear problems, but also more philosophical problems. There are two problems. First, the problem of our finitude. We must have a responsibility for our many actions, but this kind of storage system betrays our responsibility for unresponsibility. Unresponsibility means not inability to respond, but impossibility to respond. We have to be, but are not able to respond all of our descendants. In the first place, essence of our existence as human beings is unresponsible. It is ultimate time consciousness over death and limit of our half-and-half technology that testify this factical and finite essence of our existence. It is called "intergenerational ethics", but the problem itself is much deeper. We are finite beings that have to be responsible for our unresponsibility. 


Second problem is hermeneutical, how to inform of danger people 100,000 years or more into the future. A way of information or communication itself may have changed beyond recognition. Actually, languages, knowledge and symbols are all changing even now.There is almost few way that would be durable enough for the warning message to survive. What is universal and unchangable communication?  





Universal and unchangable communication is almost impossible. It is more suitable for our human beings to take hermeneutical thinking. Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory, and can be either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. It is well known for Bible-hermeneutics. Philosophically speaking, hermeneutics is a way of our existence as human beings, according to M. Heidegger and H.-G. Gadamer. Hermeneutics is the way for finite human beings, regardless of telling us evangel or disaster. But hermeneutics is a kind of art or techne of thinking, too. We are beings that have both possibilities and impossibilites to live, right from the start. And we are beings that have to need teche or technology in order to live, too.