1 minute read

Radioactive Isotopes

Robert Hilles

The imagination is binary and contains slippage. Is more of an ascent than descent. Radioactive Isotopes in a garden. It is safe to say that radiation is outside human control. It can’t be contained and once it all goes wrong the amount of time to dissipate it is beyond any livable scale. The universe is so vast it appears to be standing still but it is not. Our years are spent inside closed heads where time ticks in seconds.

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Radioactive Isotopes prove there is no God nor is all that is produced pluggable into a moral matrix. There is no such weighting. Before the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl there was always going to be that disaster because isotopes are not bound by hope or wishes or even by the laws of thermal dynamics. That is but a mathematical wish waiting to be corrected or at best deciphered and once deciphered it is no longer a wish but the way through the wrong door. It can be spread out then and drifts far out into the future.

You enter an airplane and fly over the abandoned city of Pripyat and you see a stopped Ferris wheel and rows of apartment buildings and the swallowing green. In another few decades the city and Chernobyl will be mostly hidden by a vibrant forest and from above like now it will look as though no one ever lived there. Only the remaining stacks will contradict that notion. If you look closely enough you will see the downward slope of history. And in a hundred years who will tell the story? And in a thousand who?