Society for Creative Apocalyptology Looks at Deep Science Research Facility in Homestake Mine

Image SourceAlmost a mile deep, under the Black Hills of South Dakota, the US government is building the world's deepest underground scientific hidey-hole. The groundbreaking for the facility was attended by politicians, connected individuals, and scientists who may eventually work in one of the labs to be built deep underground.

The new labs will be built in and around the old Homestake Gold Mine, which extends as deeply as 8,000 feet underground. The gold mine was shut down in 2001 and allowed to flood when pumps were shut down. Refurbishing of the mine will involve restoring the pumps, refurbishing and stabilising tunnels, and building new underground infrastructure for scientific and other purposes.

The ostensible purpose of the deep new facility is to study dark matter in a location that is deep enough to be shielded from cosmic rays. But can you think of any other reasons for building such a deep, remote, high technology facility? And how many politicians are more interested in dark matter than in confiscating as much wealth from taxpayers and anyone else, as they can?

The new scientific lab complex is expected to span a wide array of experimental sciences, as the refurbishers develop new methods of deep underground architecture.

Analysts at the Society for Creative Apocalyptology © have looked at the plans for the new underground lab, and concluded that it would make an ideal university / scientific complex to survive the next apocalypse -- whatever the cause.

When the axe falls on civilisation, human societies in the western world will fragment by religion, ethnicity, language, and the luck of the draw. If you find yourself living in a bad neighborhood when the doom comes down, you had better have some very good extraction plans already set in place, and well-rehearsed.

The electrical grid will go down fairly quickly, since it is unlikely that many utility managers will have had to foresight to disconnect their sections of the grid to prevent cascading failures. Manpower shortages at all high technology installations would grow acute quite quickly. Universities, high tech labs and research centers, and other high tech facilities would quickly fall to the momentum of collapse, and be looted and stripped beyond repair.

That is why a facility such as the one in South Dakota is so important in the re-start of civilisation -- after the fall. A location where top scientists and technologists across a wide range of human scientific and technological skills can continue to advance their studies while the rest of the world is falling down around them. Then, when the momentum of collapse dies down and the pressure from the doom inciting event(s) has subsided, advance teams of scouts can move out of the enclave to survey the damages and the potential for re-emergence.

A schedule for the re-introduction of technology can be devised and implemented by advance teams of skilled workers, as likely surviving population centers are located. As surviving, rejuvenated population centers are re-connected, a new larger society can be regrown.

But you will not read about these plans in conventional journals, papers, or blogs. And the SCA agrees that popular knowledge of such generative / regenerative knowledge centers would be counter-productive. Of course, what the government is attempting in South Dakota (and what the UK is attempting in Scotland etc.) is nothing more than a tax-supported version of what the SCA has been working on all along, using private funding.


H/T ImpactLab