New Book: Deep Disposal

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Cover image of the book, Deep Disposal. Portrays a hole in the ground.

A Documentary Account of Burying Nuclear Waste in Canada

by William Leiss

Published by McGill-Queen’s University Press eBook and Print Edition (Paperback): available now

Deep Disposal | McGill-Queen’s University Press (mqup.ca)

What should be done with Canada’s 3.2 million nuclear fuel waste bundles, currently stored on-site at nuclear plants?

Canada is one of many countries around the world that use nuclear reactors to generate electrical power, in part as of now to reduce our carbon footprint. Yet this energy produces hazardous, long-lived waste that emits dangerous radioactivity for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclear waste, stored temporarily for decades, must be safely disposed so it will not pose a serious threat to human health and the environment. This means being placed in locations deep underground in granite, sedimentary rock, or clay. Canada’s ideal location is somewhere on the Canadian Shield, the 2.5-billion-year-old crystalline rock that undergirds much of the country. Beginning in 2010 some twenty-two  communities, most in Ontario, volunteered to host the repository. In Deep Disposal William Leiss explains the challenges that have arisen in the evaluation of potential sites over the last decade.

High-level nuclear waste is the most hazardous byproduct of an energy source that is incredibly useful and increasingly in demand. Finding a suitable place to store it permanently is an urgent policy issue facing our country. Deep Disposal reveals the nature of this issue and how we might resolve it.

Additional material:

Item No. 1: Petition to the House of Commons

Petition e-4852 – Petitions (ourcommons.ca) [Now including a response from the Minister of Natural resources and energy]

Item No. 2: NWMO Errors in Deep Disposal

NWMO Errors in Deep DisposalDownload

Item No. 3: NWMO Failures in Risk Communication

NWMO Failures in Risk CommunicationDownload

Item No. 4: NWMO Deep Disposal Fact Check

NWMO Deep Disposal Fact CheckDownload

Our Nature: The Earth as Home

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Climate change debates: a new way of looking at the issue

Download PDF:

Our Nature V10 Feb 2020Download

Contents

INTRODUCTION
ONE: GEOCENTRIC HOME
TWO: HELIOCENTRIC HOME
THREE: COSMIC / GEOLOGICAL HOME
FOUR: EVOLUTIONARY HOME
FIVE: CHEMICAL HOME
SIX: RADIOACTIVE & QUANTUM HOME
SEVEN: A MODELLED HOME
EIGHT: THE EARTH WE NOW INHABIT
NINE: HOTHOUSE EARTH
TEN: A DAMAGED EARTH
GUIDE TO FURTHER STUDY

Preface

Eons of past time and ceaseless change, embedded in earth’s geology and in the evolutionary biology of species, are the twin factors which provide the best guide to the major risks facing humanity in the present day. The current state of the planetary surface on which we all reside, as well as the many steps in the emergence of homo sapiensfrom its ancestral origins in the hominin tribe, are the results of specific stages during prior times and of new developments.  The history of our planet is a 4.5 billion year record of violent upheaval, driven by forces deep below its surface, such as volcanic eruptions and marked most dramatically by the push and pull of gigantic continental masses against each other. Its atmosphere too, as well as climatic conditions, have likewise been repeatedly altered, a function of the interaction between the earth’s crust and external factors such as solar radiation, strikes of massive asteroids, the planet’s orbit, the tilt of its axis, and others. Geologists have named the stages in this record: The current one is known as the Quaternary, which has featured the growth and decay of continental ice sheets in 100,000-year cycles. The most recent episode, beginning roughly about 12,000 years ago, is called the Holocene.

            The human counterpart to the first phase of the Quaternary, known as the Pleistocene, was the migration of our hominin ancestors (such as homo erectus) out of their African homeland, which is thought to have begun as much as 1.8 million years ago. We ourselves have been baptized with the term “anatomically modern humans;” we originated in Africa between 300,000 and 250,000 years ago and began to disperse about 70,000 years ago. Because these later treks occurred in the most recent cold glacial cycle, climatic conditions were not conducive to rapid human population growth – until the arrival of the Holocene, the warm interglacial, when temperatures were about 6°C (11°F) warmer than they had been just 7,000 years earlier. And then, in the geologically-brief period of less than 10,000 years, the population of modern humans literally exploded, by which time wandering hunter-gatherers had become settled farmers and herders, and the first civilizations had been born.

            The recent evolutionary success of homo sapiens, therefore, resulted wholly from the fortuitous confluence between the modern geological history of the planet’s land surface, on the one hand, and the formation of a relatively new hominin species, equipped with a large brain and upright gait, prepared to exploit its new environmental opportunities, on the other.

            And exploit them we did: Around 3000 BCE there were an estimated 45 million of us worldwide, and the number reached 1 billion for the first time around 1800 CE. But at that point most people were still living on primitive agricultural holdings, beset by backbreaking manual labor, impoverishment, and the endemic threat of famine and infectious disease.  Then the Industrial Revolution marked another decisive turn, at least as dramatic as the one from hunter-gatherers to farmer-herders more than ten millennia earlier. Arguably, humans were thereby propelled into a new epoch, called the Anthropocene, where we have become so dominant on the planet that we are now influencing the future stages of global climate. And if this is the case, we humans collectively have become responsibile, for the first time in the evolution of our species, for the next stages in our climate history. 

            The scientific argument that human-caused factors are forcing the global climate along a new pathway – one that could bring great harms to human settlements around the turn of the next century – is contested by some who attack the theory and the evidence marshalled in order to support it. But that argument is also resisted by many others who point to the lack of full certainty in the scientists’ predictions, or who refuse to accept the idea that humans could exert much influence on the climate, or who profess to believe that climate scientists are perpetrating a hoax on the public, or who aver that God will decide the outcome. Since 100% certainty is impossible to achieve in predictions of this kind, we are left with a throw of the dice: Does one accept the contentions of climate scientists or not? If it is expected to be costly to say yes, as it probably will be, then why not just wait and see what happens?

            In the pages that follow I have tried to frame the debate over the credibility of climate science in a new way, by putting the issue in the double-perspective of the earth’s geological history and the evolution of species, culminating in the fortunate nexus of the Holocene and modern humanity. 

Who Speaks for the People of Ontario?

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Who Speaks for the People of Ontario 2  [PDF]

William Leiss

Published in part in The Hamilton Spectator, 13 September 2018

Recently, speaking of the judicial ruling that found his government’s actions in reducing the size of Toronto’s city council to be unconstitutional, Premier Ford said: “I believe the judge’s decision is deeply concerning and the result is unacceptable to the people of Ontario.” He went on to point out that he was elected while the judge was appointed.

Let us leave aside, for the time being, the premier’s questioning of the authority wielded by a Superior Court justice in interpreting the Charter of Rights in the Constitution of Canada. Instead, let us focus on the matter of who speaks for the people of Ontario. At least one commentator on yesterday’s events suggested that, in making the claim that it is he who does, Premier Ford was acting according to a “populist” political stance. “Populism” is often said to refer to those who believe they represent so-called “ordinary people” as opposed to the members of “elite” groups, whoever they may be.

So let us ask: Who are these ordinary people? On whose behalf does the current premier of Ontario have a legitimate right to speak?

First, as an elected politician, he has an undoubted right to speak on behalf of the constituents in his riding who voted for him. Second, as premier of a government holding a majority of seats in the provincial legislature, he has a right to speak on behalf of that government as a whole. By extension, he may speak on behalf of all the voters in Ontario who elected all of the MPPs in that government party.

But those electors make up, in point of fact, a rather small proportion of all of “the people of Ontario.” How small? The calculation runs as follows. First, exclude all those who cannot vote, by reason of age, lack of Canadian citizenship, illness, or anything else. The voting age population in Canada is about 79% of the total population. Then, exclude from the 79% all those eligible to vote who did not do so in the last Ontario election, that is, 42%, leaving us with 58% of 79%, or 46%. Then exclude all those who did not vote for the Conservative Party in that same election, that is, 59.4%, which yields the final figure of 19%. To sum up, the Premier and his party actually have a legitimate right to claim to represent, and thus to speak on behalf of, 19% of the people of Ontario. I invite others to check these calculations and to improve them.

With respect to any specific question of law or policy, such as the law reducing the size of Toronto’s city council, it is reasonable to suppose that at least some of the electors who voted for the Conservative Party in the 2018 election might not support that particular law, making it likely that, on this issue, Premier Ford is entitled to speak on behalf of something less than 19% of the people of Ontario.

This strikes me as being a very peculiar form of “populism,” if that is indeed what it is, in today’s Ontario. Nevertheless, it has become common to refer to an entire group of current political leaders around the world, particularly certain of those in the United States and Europe, as being “populists.” It is time for us to have a wider debate in Canada about how well the term populism describes the reality of political formations, and how the term might relate to other characterizations, especially demagoguery.

For example, those who used the term populism approvingly often claim that it reflects the alleged distinction between “ordinary people” as opposed to “élites.” The most charitable comment one can make on this word usage is that it is woefully imprecise. The word élite, its proper spelling indicating its French origins, means a part of a larger group that is superior to the rest; the word ordinary, from the Latin and French, and meaning “orderly,” carries the following connotations or synonyms: unremarkable, unexceptional, undistinguished, nondescript, colorless, commonplace, humdrum, mundane, and unmemorable. One wonders why the ideological champions of populism would think that this way of characterizing the great majority of people in any society would be regarded as being flattering? How does denigrating the many admirable qualities of people qualify as an indicator of one’s support for their alleged political interests? And what is supposed to be derisory about being above-average in terms of quite specific categories such as talent or abilities? It seems that occasional recourse to a dictionary might have been helpful here.

Challenges in managing the risks of chronic wasting disease

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William Leiss*, Margit Westphal, Michael G. Tyshenko and Maxine C. Croteau

McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa,
600 Peter Morand, Ottawa, ON, K1G 3Z7, Canada

Tamer Oraby

Department of Mathematics, University of Texas – Pan American, 1201 W University Dr.,
Edinburg, TX 78539, USA

Wiktor Adamowicz and Ellen Goddard

Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, University of Alberta,
Canada
Email: ellen.goddard@ualberta.ca

Neil R. Cashman

Department of Neurology, Faculty of Medicine, Vancouver Coastal Health, University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract: This article summarises efforts at disease surveillance and risk management of chronic wasting disease (CWD). CWD is a fatal neurodegenerative disease of cervids and is considered to be one of the most contagious of the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Evidence has demonstrated a strong species barrier to CWD for both human and farm animals other than cervids. CWD is now endemic in many US states and two Canadian provinces. Past management strategies of selective culling, herd reduction, and hunter surveillance have shown limited effectiveness. The initial strategy of disease eradication has been abandoned in favour of disease control. CWD continues to spread geographically in North American and risk management is complicated by the presence of the disease in both wild (free-ranging) and captive (farmed) cervid populations. The article concludes that further evaluation by risk managers is required for optimal, cost-effective strategies for aggressive disease control.

A Modest Proposal on Immigration and Denaturalization

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A Modest Proposal on

Immigration and Denaturalization

by

William Leiss

30 July 2018

It is perhaps understandable that many citizens have become very concerned with the continued arrival of new immigrants to the United States. There is, they fear, a real chance that in their midst there may lurk murderers, rapists, and drug dealers, among other criminals. More broadly, however, they are uneasy about the prospect that millions of people who may be, as they report, simply fleeing poverty, gang war, everyday violence, and injustice will become an intolerable burden on established citizens who are already hard-pressed to provide for their families.

In this regard it was inevitable, surely, that the debate about dealing with new immigrants would shift to the process of denaturalization of recent immigrants. There are some 20 million naturalized citizens now residing in the United States. A number of federal government agencies, we are told, are charged with ferreting out cases of fraud among those arrivals who have already been granted full citizenship. Cases of fraud involves concealing, on the application for citizenship, everything from war crimes and terrorism to minor criminal offences, phony marriages and false identities. When fraud of this type is proved, citizenship is revoked and the offender is deported.

However, it is easy to imagine that this case-by-case, retrospective review of suspected fraud must represent an administrative nightmare. Each charge must be proved before a judge, and this involves digging up obscure paperwork in foreign countries that itself may be of dubious providence. Yet the suspicions remain: How many naturalized citizens in the recent past might have lied or dissembled in a desperate attempt to stay permanently in this country? But perhaps our fears about being overwhelmed by dangerous elements among the prospective new immigrants have made us blind to a greater threat: What if we are already surrounded by such elements, in vast numbers of those now permanently resident here? What if it is already too late to protect ourselves against this danger?

There is a simple solution available to address these fears. It is based on the recognition that the case-by-case, elaborate administrative review of suspected fraud among the newest naturalized citizens will never be adequate to the task. The solution to this dilemma is both straightforward and elegant: Since all citizens of this country are descendants of people who were once naturalized citizens, then all must be subjected to the process of being examined for denaturalization and deportation to country of origin.

For who among us can prove, to the satisfaction of a judge, that the statements made by our ancestors, upon landing at Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island, were “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”? What crimes great and small, false identities, and phony marriages did they fail to mention? What enormous pile of immigration fraud lies forever concealed among the desperate tales of the “wretched refuse” that has been cast upon these shores since time immemorial? Those facing denaturalization proceedings today must say to the rest: “You were, every one, all immigrants at one time or another. All of you should be sent back to your ultimate country of origin, until all of the paperwork can be sorted out.”

The logic and reasonableness of this position undoubtedly will appear to many to be inescapable. There will surely arise a swelling tide of citizens who will choose to self-deport themselves back to their ancestors’ countries of origin. Only the present descendants of aboriginal peoples will be exempt. But wait! They too were immigrants, starting about 14,000 years ago. Given the age of the universe, what difference does a few thousand years make? They too must choose to go. And every one of the self-deportees will have to take with them their household pets and farm animals, most of which are non-native species. 

On a personal note, all four of my grandparents emigrated from Germany to New York, through the port of Hamburg, around the end of the nineteenth century. We should, by all rights, return to the Fatherland until all this is sorted out. There will be a few awkward cases among the tens of millions of returnees. The grandfather of the current president of the United States sought to do the right and proper thing, by returning to his country of origin after making a small fortune in some interesting enterprises in the Pacific Northwest; however, German officials refused to allow him to take up his German citizenship again. This was obviously a simple bureaucratic error that could be rectified with a bit of good will on all sides, and indeed it was.

Once the United States is emptied out, for which the resident wildlife will be grateful, Canada and the whole of Central and South America must follow suit. But when Europe is filled to bursting with these inhabitants of temporary detention centers, will not those detainees cry out: “What right do the rest of you have to your comfortable squatting on occupied land? Whence came the Angles and the Saxons, whence the Goths and Visigoths, the Vandals and the Huns? Not to mention the Han Chinese.” 

Out of Africa, and back again.

William Leiss was born in Long Island, New York; he is professor emeritus, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada, and a Fellow and Past-President of The Royal Society of Canada: Go to www.leiss.ca.

Ten Rules of Good Risk Communication

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Ten Rules

  1. Do not use invidious comparisons between your views and anyone else’s.
  2. Avoid either explicit or implicit fights with those holding opposing views.
  3. Maintain a tone of sweet reasonableness throughout any document.
  4. Admit that there is some risk (where scientifically appropriate).
  5. Use some technical terminology to make your explanations understandable, but always give brief explanations in nontechnical language (exposure, dose, likelihood, etc.).
  6. Be bold in asserting that the only reasonable basis for understanding risks is the accumulated weight of scientific evidence, not single published studies, older studies that have been superseded by newer ones, or outlier studies. Say something like: We strongly recommend that people do not rely on the other types of studies mentioned [i.e., single published studies, etc.]
  7. Be bold in recommending to the public that they exercise caution when making up their minds as to what to believe about any risk, including asking themselves what is the source of any piece of information which they have read or heard about from a friend, and whether that source is likely to have the expertise needed to make a reliable judgment on the risk in question.
  8. Don’t hesitate to advise your audience that, if it is possible for them to do so, it is fine to seek to minimize personal risks (usually by limiting exposure) when it is relatively easy to do so and does not otherwise inadvertently create or increase another risk.
  9. It is perfectly acceptable to advise people who are preoccupied with certain risks that alternatives they might choose almost always carry their own risks, sometimes higher ones.
  10. Brevity is the soul of communicative effectiveness when it comes to key messages.

The Need for Utopia And What Utopia Needs

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The Need for Utopia [PDF]

(First Draft December 2017)

A Contribution to the Future of Critical Theory

Dedicated to Herbert Marcuse

by
William Leiss
©William Leiss 2017. All Rights Reserved. (wleiss@uottawa.ca / www.leiss.ca )

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………. 1 THEUTOPIANVISIONINTHEMODERNWEST……………. 3

SOCIALISM, ANARCHISM, COMMUNISM……………………. 7

THE END OF UTOPIA?………………………………………… 10 TRANSITION……………………………………………………… 12 EMPOWERMENTOFWOMEN………………………………… 18

WHAT IS EMPOWERMENT? 19

RELEVANT SOCIAL INDICATORS 20

MARY BEARD’S MANIFESTO 21

WHAT DIFFERENCE MAY IT MAKE?…………………………….. 22

MALE VIOLENCE 24
REPRODUCTION 26

TWO SCENARIOS………………………………………………….. 29 ROUTES…………………………………………………………… 32 CONCLUSIONS……………………………………………………. 33

Herasage Book 3 – Chapter 6 (free online version)

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I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 6.

“Superintelligence” refers to the idea that an advanced form of machine (computer-based) intelligence, programmed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, will in the future greatly exceed the intellectual capacities of human beings. According to some experts, this gives rise to the threat that such a machine would seek to dominate or displace humans. This threat has given rise to a great deal of academic and industry interest in the area now known as “AI safety.”

Herasaga 3 Chapter 6

Herasage Book 3 – Chapter 4 (free online version)

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I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 4.

In a truly remarkable historical development, seven men and women, all born in small Jewish communities in a narrow band of territory running through Western and Central Europe in the nineteenth century, made extraordinary contributions to the “Second Enlightenment” in the modern West. They were Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Gustav Mahler, Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, and Franz Kafka. But a mere fifty years after the youngest among them was born (Kafka, in 1883), all of the communities from which they came, and so many other similar ones, were wiped out entirely in Nazi Germany’s Holocaust.

Herasaga 3 Chapter 4

Herasage Book 3 – Chapter 3 (free online version)

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I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 3.

A key feature of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment was its war against religion, which it called “superstition,” and its advocacy of the “new science” – that is, experimental science, as defined first by Francis Bacon and Galileo in the preceding century and practiced by the first modern chemists. But in his great book on “the progress of the human mind,” Condorcet added an important corollary: that the evidence-based method of science should also spread throughout social practices, leading to a more humane society. But contemporary science can no longer fulfill this role, since its concepts and methods stray far from the common-sense understanding of the world.

Herasaga 3 Chapter 3

Herasaga Book 3 – Chapter 2 (free online version)

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I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 2.

The introduction of large-scale machinery into factories in the nineteenth-century, and (with railroads) into the public sphere, was a great shock to the artistic imagination. In such imaginative works as the short stories by Herman Melville, “The Bell-Tower (1855), and E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops (1909), this development was portrayed as presenting deep challenges to humanity’s sense of self, leading to the possibility that humankind could wind up as the passive and uncomprehending victims of the triumph of the machine.

Herasaga 3 Chapter 2

Herasaga Book 3 – Chapter 1 (free online version)

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I am posting selections from Book 3 of the Herasaga, along with a short introduction for each chapter. I will post one each week for the next month or so. Here is the intro to Chapter 1.

What is “modernity”? In what essential, unique way does modern Western civilization differ from all of its predecessors, stretching back to the ancient Greeks, and all other major world civilizations (Chinese, Islamic, Japanese, Russian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and African Kingdoms)? I argue that the unique element is both modern science itself and its historical characteristics – its close bond with technology, and its influence on the social sphere. To be sure, this results in a highly problematic situation, since this science confers great operational power on humans, and thus it demands that this power be used prudently, a demand that has not yet been met.

Herasaga 3 Chapter 1

Black Holes of Risk Vol II: Nuclear Waste Storage – updated and on Amazon

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Black Holes of Risk

By William Leiss

Collected Papers on Risk Management, 1995-2017

Volume II:  Nuclear Waste Storage

287 Pages

November 2017

Preface by Ortwin Renn

Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Holes-Risk-Collected-Management-ebook/dp/B0773Y9PY4/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509722523&sr=1-2&keywords=leiss+black+holes+of+risk

(Also available at Amazon.ca and other Amazon markets)

Table of contents

Part Four:  Long-Term Storage of Nuclear Waste

Chapter 19:  Introductory Note to Part Four

Chapter 20: The Interface of Science and Policy

Chapter 21:  Community Engagement (Update 2017)

Chapter 22:  Stigma and the Stigmatization of Place

Chapter 23: Qualitative Risk Comparisons (1)

Chapter 24: Risk Perception Background Study

Chapter 25: Risk Perceptions of Nuclear Waste Storage

Chapter 26: Qualitative Risk Comparisons (2)

Chapter 19

Introductory Note to Part Four

Chapter 20 in Part Four is from an academic journal, but all the remaining chapters originally were produced as consulting reports. Chapter 21 was commissioned by the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (www.nwmo.ca), an agency authorized by the Government of Canada to recommend to the Minister of Natural Resources an acceptable plan for the long-term storage and disposal of high-level nuclear waste. (High-Level Nuclear Waste is extremely hazardous and long-lasting radioactive material extracted from Canada’s civilian Candu nuclear reactors, which generate electricity.) Chapter 22 was commissioned by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), a federal agency charged with responsibility for regulating the use of radioactive materials in Canada. Both of these reports were also solo efforts.

The final four documents were prepared by, or on behalf of, an ad hoc four-member body, called the Independent Expert Group [IEG], made up of the following persons:  William Leiss, Chair; Maurice Dusseault; Tom Isaacs; and Greg Paoli. (For Chapters 24 and 25, we had the expert assistance of Dr. Anne Wiles.) The IEG’s work was commissioned by the Joint Review Panel (JRP), a three-member group appointed by two agencies of the Government of Canada, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. These agencies jointly directed the IEG to answer specific questions posed to it by the JRP. The JRP itself was charged with making recommendations to two federal ministers on the acceptability of a proposal by Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to build a permanent repository for low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste on the site of the Bruce Nuclear Station near the town of Kincardine, Ontario. (Low- and Intermediate-Level Nuclear Waste is made up of materials and supplies used in the operation of the Candu reactors; it is much less hazardous than the high-level waste, but is still radioactive over long periods of time, and by law it too must be sequestered securely.)

The IEG’s work was fully independent, but it worked closely with senior scientific personnel from OPG, which was the proponent for the project. All of our reports were placed by the JRP in the public domain, thus being made available to all interested parties. The IEG prepared three separate reports, which form the four Chapters 23 to 26 in this volume (one of the three reports has been split into two separate chapters). In addition, the IEG members were required to attend public meetings organized by the JRP, and to respond there to questions from the Panel and from the intervener groups and individuals who had official standing for those hearings. The verbatim written transcripts, as well as video records, of those sessions are likewise in the public domain.

Book Two of the Herasaga available online

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Product Description

https://www.amazon.ca/Priesthood-Science-Utopian-Fiction-Herasaga-ebook/dp/B075MNKB64/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505672894&sr=1-1&keywords=leiss+the+priesthood+of+science

The Priesthood of Science, Second Edition (2017)

(Book Two of The Herasaga)

Pages xxxii, 350

Pictures and Illustrations

Publisher: Magnus & Associates Ltd.

The second edition features a new concluding chapter, entitled “Such Clever Microbes!” which deals with the implications of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique.

The work originally published in 2008 had two components that were central to its purpose as a work belonging to a specific genre, namely, science-based utopian fiction: First, a collection of essays, grounded in scientific literature, on the history of science, social impacts of science and technology, and mammalian reproductive biology. Second, a series of dialogues, involving different combinations of characters, that are philosophical in nature, largely concerned with exploring the social and ethical implications of the technologies associated with modern science. Works of utopian fiction in modern times have always been “novels of ideas,” and the present work seeks to remain faithful to that tradition. This edition has had minor changes to the text throughout, as well as the addition of an entirely new chapter on genome editing at the end, Chapter 17: “Such Clever Microbes!” focusing on the CRISPR-Cas9 technique.

I read in the paper recently that you are supposed to have said: “If I were to be born a second time, I would become not a physicist, but an artisan.” These words were a great comfort to me, for similar thoughts are going through my mind as well, in view of the evil which our once so beautiful science has brought upon the world.

Max Born, Letter to Albert Einstein (1954)

Plotline:

Hera and her sisters are now sealed off from the rest of the world in their private enclave at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. She is still tormented by the decision of her parents, two neuroscientists, to make genetic modifications in the brains of their twelve daughters—and by her own agreement to allow a similar procedure to be used later on a much larger group of human embryos.

Her doubts now spill over into a series of debates with a molecular biologist, Abdullah al-Dini, about whether scientists have the right to hand over the vast new powers they have discovered to a world still riddled with religious fanaticism, ethnic hatred, and a longing to see the prophecy of the “end of days” be fulfilled.  These debates refer back to what happened during the Second World War, when physicists were unveiling the secrets of nuclear power, and the possibility of the atom bomb, just as the time when Nazi Germany and its allies were launching their terrifying bid for world domination.

Meanwhile, that group of engineered embryos has become one thousand young people, just turning eighteen, and the gender politics among them is threatening to bring down in ruins her own little experiment in redesigning human society.

The first (2008) edition is available from the University of Ottawa Press in three formats:

  • Paperback (a beautiful book!)
  • ePub & ePDF

https://press.uottawa.ca/the-priesthood-of-science.html

New 2017 edition of Hera, or Empathy (Book One of The Herasaga) available now

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Hera, or Empathy (Book One of The Herasaga):

Now Available in a Revised Edition 2017 as an Ebook at:

https://www.amazon.ca/Hera-Empathy-Utopian-Fiction-Herasaga-ebook/dp/B0753K64K1/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504200927&sr=1-1&keywords=hera+or+empathy

Pages xv, 550

This work, originally published in 2006, had two components that were central to its purpose as a book belonging to a specific genre, namely, science-based utopian fiction: First, a collection of essays, grounded in scientific literature, on neuroscience, genetics, and reproductive biology. Second, a series of dialogues, involving different combinations of characters, that are philosophical in nature, largely concerned with exploring the social and ethical implications of the technologies used to create a tribe of genetically-modified individuals. Works of utopian fiction in modern times have always been “novels of ideas,” and the present work seeks to remain faithful to that tradition. The revisions undertaken for this edition were the elimination of two later chapters and some other material, beginning in Chapter 15, but none of the material related to the two key components has been deleted. Finally, this new edition contains pictures and illustrations not found in the original 2006 book, as well as an updated timeline for the events (advanced by a decade from the original timeline).

Hera the Buddha (Book 3 of The Herasaga) now available!

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Full PDF now available:

Hera-the-Buddha-2017Download

Hera the Buddha (Book 3 of The Herasaga)

Product Details:

Author: William Leiss (www.leiss.ca)
Length: Pages Xix, 195
Publisher: Magnus & Associates Ltd.
Language: English
ISBN 978-0-9738283-2-0

Table of Contents

Prologue and Retrospective
Part One: The Mind Unhinged: Modernity and its Discontents
Chapter 1: The Rupture in Historical Time in the Modern West
Chapter 2: Sublime Machine
Chapter 3: Modern Science and its Spacetime
Chapter 4: Seven Figures and the Agony of Modernity
Part Two: Pathways to Utopia
Chapter 5: A Utopia for our Times
Chapter 6: The Threat of Superintelligence
Chapter 7: Good Robot
Chapter 8: Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief Life-Systems:
Introduction: Silicon and Carbon
The First Dialogue: The Guardians
The Second Dialogue: At Home in the Universe
The Third Dialogue: What is Time?
The Fourth Dialogue: Two Forms of Intelligence
The Fifth Dialogue: On Superintelligence and the Ethical Will
The Sixth Dialogue: What is Life?
The Seventh Dialogue: Interdependence between Humanity and Machine Intelligence
Conclusion: Mastery over the Mastery of Nature
Chapter 9: Utopia in Practice, with A Discourse on Voluntary Ignorance
Chapter 10: A Moral Machine: Rebooting Hal
Appendix: Hal (Outline for a Screenplay)
Sources and References / Acknowledgements / About The Herasaga

Synopsis
Prologue and retrospective:
A summary of the main themes in the first two volumes of The Herasaga: Hera, or Empathy (2006) and The Priesthood of Science (2008).

Chapter 1:
Recounts the radical rupture in modern history caused by the emergence of the new natural sciences. Argues that the new science is an unambiguous good for humanity, but that its close connection with technology and industry is highly problematic, leading to out-of-control advances which, in the era of nuclear weapons, lead to the threat – still around us today – of the utter destruction of the entirety of civilization.

Chapter 2:
Tells the story of the nineteenth-century reaction to the coming of industrial technology, called the Age of Machinery, regarded as greatly problematic by many important writers, notably Herman Melville, and leading to a powerful countervailing current in the early twentieth century, in E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story, The Machine Stops, and in the first dystopian novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924).

Chapter 3:
The French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century saw the new science as spreading rationalism against superstition and religion through all of society – but it underestimated badly the strength of traditional institutions which opposed this. Then, in the twentieth century, the new subatomic physics revealed the underlying natural world to be a scene of incomprehensibly weird forces, and modern science lost its ability to shape thinking in the social world.

Chapter 4:
The second phase of Enlightenment is known as ‘modernity.’ Across virtually all aspects of high culture during the twentieth century, modernity posed a radical challenge to traditional ways of thought and behavior. But it evoked an equally radical and violent reaction, represented best in Nazi ideology, which had a shockingly destructive outcome. At the core of this contest were the European Jewish communities, which suffered its horrendous consequences.

Chapter 5:
The wreckage left by the violent contest over modernity prompts us to take another look at the tradition of utopian thought, with its vision of a better model for human society. Four different “platforms” are described and contrasted, with a special focus on their approach to the challenge implicit in the impact of steady technological advance on social life.

Chapter 6:
The most recent challenge of technological advance is the idea of ‘superintelligence,’ which imagines a future in which computer capabilities far exceed those of humans, in terms of thinking and decision-making. Scenarios have described the possibility that such a machine might turn out to be opposed to human interests and might have the capacity to deceive its human masters about what its own goals are. This has raised the prospect of a strongly-bifurcated future state for humanity: on the one hand, an end to all of the old problems of poverty and inequality; on the other hand, the possibility of the destruction of the planet and the human race itself.

Chapter 7:
A whimsical short story, set sometime in the future, about robots and humans.

Chapter 8:
The longest chapter in the book, an imaginary scene set 50 years in the future, this is a series of dialogues between a fictional human character and a superintelligent computer which calls itself “Hal.” The most intense discussion involves the difference between biological and machine forms of intelligence, and the dialogue revisits the potential threat of superintelligence covered in Chapter 6. After many pages of back-and-forth conversations about complex ideas, as well as some friendly banter, there is a surprise ending.

Chapter 9:
This chapter returns to the utopian themes in Chapter 5 in the light of the subsequent issues raised in Chapters 6 and 8, and, in this context, reviews once again the difficult problems raised by the challenge that relentless technological advance poses for human society.

Chapter 10:
Hal is rebooted in a scenario in which ‘his’ human programmers are resolved to try to turn him into a “moral machine.”

Appendix:
This is an outline for a movie screenplay about a superintelligent computer which is not at all malevolent but which simply wishes to control its own existence.

Three Courses by Herbert Marcuse from the 1960s ©William Leiss 2017, All Rights Reserved

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William Leiss took these notes in handwritten form in courses offered by Herbert Marcuse, in 1960-61 and 1963 at Brandeis University, and in 1966-67 at the University of California, San Diego.

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