Containment - Film Screening & Discussion
with Director Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University.
Can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? Left over from the Cold War are a hundred million gallons of radioactive sludge, covering vast radioactive lands. Governments around the world, desperate to protect future generations, have begun imagining society 10,000 years from now in order to create monuments that will speak across time. Part observational essay and part graphic novel, Containment weaves between an uneasy present and an imaginative, troubled far future, exploring the idea that over millennia, nothing stays put.
In 1989, the Department of Energy hired futurologists, astronomers, writers, and experts on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, to create "scenarios" in which our descendants break into the waste burial sites. Historian Peter Galison and and filmmaker Robb Moss have filmed the scenarios' authors and have interwoven a graphic narrative that explores these weird, funny, and unnerving images of these tenthousand year futures.
Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He was awarded: a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1997; a Pfizer Award for the best book in the History of Science in 1998; and the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize in 1999.
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Film Screening at 6:00 PM
Discussion with Peter Galison at 7:30 PM
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information and to register, visit http://www.chstm.org/
Sponsored by Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University