Homo sapiens, All Too Homo sapiens: Wise Man, All Too Human

Outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, a mere three hundred miles from the University of New Mexico where I teach, is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). This deep, geologic storehouse will entomb nuclear weapons waste for the next 10,000 years. The transuranic elements--elements with an atomic number of 92, uranium, or higher--are unstable and radioactive, and they decay at a half-life rate that makes them dangerous environmental contaminants. During the planning phase of the WIPP's construction, the Department of Energy hired archaeologists, historians, linguists, materials scientists, and science fiction writers to address questions such as the one paraphrased here: How should we communicate radioactive danger to Earth-dwellers after five hundred generations of linguistic variation? (Piller). How can we communicate that this repository is not a monument filled with treasure to the Cyborg Indiana Jones who may come a thousand years hence? They drew plans for a field of twenty-five-foot tall granite pillars surrounding a roofless granite room positioned above the waste site. At the heart of this ominous landscape, a wanderer would find warnings and more information A section of it reads: "We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This is not a place of honor.... Nothing valued is here The danger is still present in your time, as it was in ours ... This place is best shunned and uninhabited" (Trauth, Hera, and Guzowsti, 139). I mention the WIPP because, essentially, this government team was collaboratively writing a speculative fiction; to do so, they had to perform research, create elaborate scenarios of events that may or may not happen, and then develop strategies to cope with them. They brought together a team of experts from different fields to consider human curiosity and cross-cultural and -temporal communication. This team might sound a lot like the students in your honors seminar, and the project requires the kind of creative, interdisciplinary thinking that is present in a humanities-based honors education. This kind of education is what students need to begin solving the many serious problems we face today, including climate change, Ebola, and of course, the half-life of transuranic waste. The emphasis on STEM education should not be interpreted as an omen of the death of humanities; art, literature, history, and philosophy can inform and enlighten STEM studies if the walls of academic silos are broken down and taught in combination As the famous essayist and humanist Michel de Montaigne said: A tutor must demand an account not just of the words of his lesson, but of their meaning and substance, and must judge of its benefit to his pupil by the evidence not of the lad's memory but of his life. He must make him consider what he has just learnt from a hundred points of view and apply it to as many different subjects ... (55) Where the physical universe collides with the fanciful and flawed human experience of life, there is creative energy, be it in scientific research or creative writing. Both are meant to birth new knowledge, rouse questions, explore our relationship with the world, employ the senses, test ideas, and better our understanding of life and the human experience. The humanities can easily combine with other disciplines through applied speculation. A strategy to combine might be, for instance, to adapt the writing core to an interdisciplinary, experiential course that uses science as the lens through which students analyze and apply literary devices. Many fine examples of creative writing use science as a way to access the personal, bizarre, and blemished experience of living. For instance, Lydia Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys is a collection of short stories that investigate the connection between the human and animal worlds, often through famous researchers and their encounters with laboratory animals. Emulating these works, students communicate information, conflict, and awe of scientific endeavors. …