#plutopia

All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man (C. M. Kösemen) "The story begins in the near future, as burgeoning population pressures force humanity to terraform and colonize Mars. After a brief but violent civil war between the two planets, the genetically engineered survivors begin a new wave of colonization, spreading across the galaxy. Everything is looking up for the human race… until the colonies encounter the Qu, technologically advanced aliens on a religious mission to remake the universe. Although humans fight valiantly, the Qu easily overpowered humanity; as punishment, these aliens decide to genetically modify the survivors, turning most of them into mindless, animalistic creatures before departing. Evolution kicks in, with these terraformed post-humans continuing to breed and evolve, some regaining sapience in the process, some do not, and many others simply going extinct.

The book covers roughly a billion years of humanity's future descendants evolving into various new species and going through mass extinction after extinction, before finally revealing that the author is an alien paleontologist writing on humanity's fossil remains, with no idea what finally drove the clade to complete extinction."

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Kate Brown) "The book is a comparative history of the cities of Richland, in the northwest United States adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site plutonium production area, and Ozersk, in Russia's southern Ural mountain region. These two cities were home to the world's first plutonium production sites, and in Plutopia Brown charts the environmental and social impacts of those sites on the residents of and the environment surrounding the two cities. Brown argues that the demands of plutonium production – both the danger of the physical process and the secrecy required in the Cold War context – led both US and Soviet officials to create "Plutopias," ideal communities to placate resident families in exchange for their cooperation and control over their bodies. This entailed creating significant state-run welfare programs along with high levels of consumerism in both places. However, each city witnessed what Brown terms "slow-motion disasters" via the slow, and usually controlled, release of high levels of radiation into their surrounding environments."

⚛ Flat-top House / AMSE, Oak Ridge

This B-1 flat-top house was just one of the original structures laid at Oak Ridge to house its booming population. Originally, Oak Ridge was known as Clinton Engineering Works, and was designed to house around 13,000 people. By the war’s end, over 70,000 individuals lived in Oak Ridge. This specific house was donated to the American Museum of Science and Energy by Isabelle Smith. While it is not the only cemesto house still present in Oak Ridge, it is prominent in that visitors to the AMSE may walk through and experience what it would have been like to live there. It is being maintained by the museum as a way to demonstrate how ridiculously cramped these little houses were.

The Road (Cormac McCarthy) "The premise of the book is a father and son journeying through a post-apocalyptic world. The book is incredibly bleak, perfect for The Extinction, and depicts a great deal of death."

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Kate Brown) "The book is a comparative history of the cities of Richland, in the northwest United States adjacent to the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Site plutonium production area, and Ozersk, in Russia's southern Ural mountain region. These two cities were home to the world's first plutonium production sites, and in Plutopia Brown charts the environmental and social impacts of those sites on the residents of and the environment surrounding the two cities. Brown argues that the demands of plutonium production – both the danger of the physical process and the secrecy required in the Cold War context – led both US and Soviet officials to create "Plutopias," ideal communities to placate resident families in exchange for their cooperation and control over their bodies. This entailed creating significant state-run welfare programs along with high levels of consumerism in both places. However, each city witnessed what Brown terms "slow-motion disasters" via the slow, and usually controlled, release of high levels of radiation into their surrounding environments."

Taken as a complex, the militarized landscape also helped produce heath epidemics.  In the United States from 1950 to 2001, the overall age-adjusted incidents of cancer increased by 85 percent.  Childhood cancer, once a medical rarity, has become the most common disease killer of American children.  Cancer rates are just the end of a continuum of American health problems that include diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and obesity.  These social-cultural-economic problems written on the body are also etched across American communities, one-quarter of which are within four miles of a Superfund site filled with plastics, chemical solvents, pesticides, nuclear waste, and all the other unwanted detritus of consuming societies.  This too is the house plutonium built.

Russia scores no better.  From 1960 to 1985, cancer rates in the Soviet Union grew from 115 to 150 per 100,000 people.  By the mid-1990s, Russia's death rate had reached it's highest peacetime level in the twentieth century.  Only a third of Russian infants are healthy.  Russia annually falls at the bottom among nations in a host of categories, including life expectancy, fertility, and infant mortality.  As Soviet leaders race to keep up with American weapons manufactures, they created landscapes with the promises of the Communist utopia were shifted to citizens living in well-supplied cities requiring registrations passes, while villagers legally immobilized in the hinterland languished in poverty and poor health.

The history of Richland and Ozersk begs telling because the problem of plutopia are not going away.  The 2011 meltdown of three reactors in Fukushima follow the patterns established in the plutonium zones: military designs scant on safety, accidents followed by denial and minimization, delayed evacuations to zones also contaminated, and the deployment of short-term, minimally paid 'jumpers' to do the dirtiest work.  In the United states, Russia, and Japan, were private corporations reap profits from nuclear production, federal governments have indemnified nuclear enterprises against nuclear accidents, in this way socializing the financial risk of nuclear adventure.

Plutopia is an all species arcade situated in a two-story retail unit of Celestial Tower. The first floor contains your classic arcade games. The second floor is a laser tag arena. Be careful though, staring at all those screens for too long can alter your perceptions and beliefs. No magic involved, just some very subtle propaganda and subliminal messaging.

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