The hot debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates is whether “design” is a detectable property of a system. The ID hypothesis votes yes, its opponents vote no.
So the other day I was random-link-cruising and happened upon some articles and discussions about Yucca Mountain, and particularly about the “warning label” problem: how do we mark the Yucca Mountain facility in such a way that all comers will recognize it as “dangerous” even if those comers are not English-speakers (10’s of years), familiar with Post-enlightenment Western culture (100’s of years), users of “language” as we understand it (1,000’s of years), or even recognizably “human” (10,000’s or 100,000’s of years).
It struck me that this is simply another face of the “design” question: the DOE wants to make it unambiguously clear to an observer with whom they have nothing (practically speaking) in common and to whom they will communicate nothing except a single physical artifice that (1) the artifice was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent, and (2) the intent of the designer was to warn the curious away from the site. So success rests upon the existence of some empirical means of detecting not only design, but intent. If the site can be misunderstood as a potentially natural phenomenon (e.g., genetically-modified blue cacti) or its purpose is misunderstood by a civilization with a different cultural lexicon (as, e.g., a “place of honor”), the project will have failed.
Then I had an almost comical daydream about Richard Dawkins’ great60 grandson (60-some-odd generations from now) standing before an apparently sealed-up wall, Geraldo Rivera style, lambasting his critics’ quaint but preposterous notions that the triple-triangular megaliths surrounding him are anything except aethetically fortuitous freaks of geology which our psychological evolution happens to have predisposed us to be both fascinated and horrified by, and that he intends to prove first-hand that there is nothing interesting about the site. Bring in the robot-piloted hyper-backhoes and start digging!
