A.

Interpretation – presence refers to the totality of US military power in a country

Blechman et al, 97 – President of DFI International, and has held positions in the Department of Defense,
the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Office of Management and Budget (Barry, Strategic
Review, Spring, “Military Presence Abroad in a New Era: The Role of Airpower,” p. 14)

The highly complex nature of military presence operations, with manifestations both psychological and
physical, makes their effects difficult to identify and assess. Nonetheless, presence missions (whether
employing forces stationed abroad or afloat, temporarily deployed or permanently based overseas, or based in
the United States) are integral parts of U.S. defense strategy. Through routine presence operations, the United
States seeks to reinforce alliances and friendships, make credible security commitments to crucial regions, and
nurture cooperative political relations. More episodically, forces engaged in presence operations can dissuade
aggressors from hostile demands, help prevent or contain regional crises, and, when conflict erupts
nonetheless, provide an infrastructure for the transition to war. Given its multifaceted nature, neither
practitioners nor scholars have yet settled on a single definition of presence. Technically, the term refers to
both a military posture and a military objective. This study uses the term “presence” to refer to a continuum of
military activities, from a variety of interactions during peacetime to crisis response involving both forces on
the scene and those based in the United States. Our definition follows that articulated by the U.S. Joint Chiefs
of Staff: “Presence is the totality of U.S. instruments of power deployed overseas (both permanently and
temporarily) along with the requisite infrastructure and sustainment capabilities.”2

A substantial reduction in presence requires at least a 50% decrease

Comprehensive Base Closure Reform and Recovery Act, 92 (1992 H.R. 4421 ; 102 H.R. 4421, text of
the Comprehensive Base Closure Reform and Recovery Act of 1992, introduced by Olympia Snowe, lexis)

TITLE I-ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION AT MILITARY INSTALLATIONS TO BE CLOSED

SEC. 101. CLEANUP SCHEDULE FOR CERTAIN BASES ON SUPERFUND NATIONAL
PRIORITIES LIST.
(a) CLEANUP SCHEDULE FOR CERTAIN BASES ON NATIONAL PRIORITIES LIST.-(1)
With respect to each military installation described in subsection (b)-
(A) before the installation is closed or substantial reductions in its operations have occurred, at least 75
percent of the remedial action required on the installation pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental
Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (42 U.S.C. 9601 et seq.) shall be completed; and
(B) not later than two years after the installation is closed or substantial reductions in its operations have
occurred, all of the remedial action required on the installation pursuant to such Act shall be completed.
(2) For purposes of paragraph (1), substantial reductions in the operations of a military installation shall be
considered to have occurred if more than 50 percent of the personnel assigned to the installation, including
employees and members of the Armed Forces, have been reassigned and moved to another installation.

B. Violation – the affirmative removes a single B61 bomb; their plantext is explicitly referring to a
non-plural form of “B61 bomb”

C. Voting issue –

1. limits – allowing minor reductions allows countless variations of small affs likes reducing a
single type of intelligence gathering or a covert op in Afghanistan or arms sales to Japan; it
makes adequate research impossible
2. xt: has huge external impacts which are virtually unrelated to the resolution

kills fairness because it forces us to research literally every type of advocacy and assume that it has impacts on
the global order, explodes research burden. infinitely regressive
2. negative ground – topic disads won’t link to minor modifications, and generic ground is vitally
important to protect since there are 6 different countries with diverse literature bases
The affirmative eschews techno-fix solutions, they're not going to manipulate international relations to secure
ourselves against terrorism or foreign states. Instead they would wipe the slate clean, opening a space for new
life. What this really means is that they refuse to take the work of averting nuclear war, instead they invite it, as
apocalypse. After all, apocalypse means salvation, unveiling. Nuclear war will wipe away the sinful, the cities,
the modernist dregs, leaving only the purified survivors, purified by the deaths of most of the world population.

Martha A Bartter (Northeast Missouri State University). “Nuclear Holocaust as urban Renewal.” Science Fiction Studies, 13:2. July 1986.

Mrs. O'Leary's cow did Chicago a big favor. The earthquake of 1906 did the same for San Francisco. Once such a disaster is
distanced by time, we can see how these major cities benefited by having to rebuild. Similarly, we may marvel at the modernity, functionality,
and beauty of some European cities-those most devastated by World War II. Cities get old, worn-out, dirty,
dysfunctional. No technological" fix" seems to satisfy us as we struggle with deteriorating neighborhoods,
narrow streets, and ineffective sewers. We long for the opportunity to clean house from top to bottom, to "make
it new." Typically, we alternate between the kind of urban renewal that blasts all old structures to make room for
high-rise low-income housing and the kind that salvages the shell of old buildings while "modernizing" the
interior. While we would deny actually wanting our major cities destroyed, and with them our landmarks and our history, we note
the popularity of movies like Godzilla, which show the fragility of our urban culture.
Since Sodom and Gomorrah, cities have been identified with sin. Now we spend much of our time and energy
trying to make our cities "habitable," while seeing them as a prime target for atomic bombs; they sin by their
very existence. For us, the underground "shelters" that simultaneously protect and confine the fictional survivors of nuclear "war" metaphorically represent he
most-feared features of the city: crowded, dark, technologically dependent, complicated prisons, they are necessary only because the city itself exists. The city is both
womb and tomb.
fictional descriptions of atomic weapons used in war
Our attitude towards nuclear holocaust appears similarly ambivalent. Early, serious
predicted their horrifying destructive properties, mostly aimed at civilian populations in urban centers; yet these
fictions usually found ways to explain the survival of a select group. This group, purified through the sacrifice of a
large percentage of its members (and perhaps by a return to primitive conditions), might eventually be able to build a new, infinitely
better world. Thus, atomic war has traditionally been presented both as obvious disaster and as secret salvation. This
covert message is usually overlooked in fiction, even by authors, but it powerfully influences our cultural subconscious.
In fiction we explore who we "are" (or "were"). Through the medium of a story, we expose our assumptions about
ourselves and our world, although very often we don't see what we have said. "Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely
enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. … [T]he real job is not to understand foreign
culture but to understand our own"( Hall:3 8). Comparing our culture to another is invaluable; we can "see" ourselves, perhaps for the first time. We
obtain much the same result by observing our fiction, which is produced from our own cultural matrix, responds to it, and subtly
but definitively influences it, while being "made new" by passing through the eye of an artist. Looking back at our fictions, we can see some of
our own cultural "blind spots," some of which seem not to have changed very much over the years, even though SF is a "literature of change" (Gunn:1).
In fiction, we still expect to "renew" society by surviving the "inevitable" atomic war, rather than by changing
the conditions that lead to it. While we give lip service to the concept of "renewal," what we truly believe, as
Mircea Eliade notes (see G. Wolfe: 3-4), is that any remnant of the old structure will get in the way of the new: "life cannot
be repaired, it can only be re-created by a return to sources."
In fact, the US has been preparing for a nuclear war. Not with Star Wars or treaties or stockpiled food, but by
ensuring that the right population will be attacked – by concentrating the poor and racial minorities in cities and
eliminating social programs. The disadvantaged members of society are being prepped for nuclear annihilation,
and the aff plan is just another step towards this economic, religious, and ethnic cleansing.

DeanMacCannell (Professor of sociology at UC Davis). “Baltimore in the Morning … After: On the Forms of Post-Nuclear Leadership.” Diacritics, 14:2.
Summer, 1984.

strategists who
This line of reasoning had already received technical reinforcement from Yale political scientist Bernard Brodie and other early post-war civilian
made models of nuclear exchanges and determined that "cities of over 100,000 population" are the only targets of
sufficient economic value to justify the use of atomic weapons. They reasoned that atomic bombs are just too
expensive to use on military targets which typically would be worth no more than the bomb and the cost of its delivery [F.
Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 30].
Thirty-five years later a military analyst reflected on the origin of the idea of deterrence by threat of massive retaliation in the following way:
[B]efore the ashes of Japan were cold, the earliest thinkers about nuclear war hit on the idea that, if there was not effective defense against nuclear attack ...
you had only to rely on the threat of retaliation in kind; they all thought in terms of what came to be called 'city busting.' [L. Martin, The Two-Edged Sword:
Armed Force in the Modern World (London: Weidendeld and Nicolsen, 1982), 18]
Basic Assumptions of the Doctrine of Deterrence and Their Effect on Domestic Structure
1. Survivability: Nuclear strategists must assume limited "survivability." (I cannot concern myself here with the evidence for and against the validity of this
assumption. I am personally among those who do not believe that an all out nuclear attack can be survived. But this does not change the fact that our nuclear strategists
must believe in survivability, or fundamentally alter the total design of our current nuclear posture.) According to this idea, the cities will be blown away, but sufficient
numbers of people will survive to rebuild American society. According to one official United States Government Civil Defense Manual I read, this will take
approximately four days. An assumption that is never stated but is always implicit in survivability scenarios is that the survivors will be people who are closely in touch
with the unique spirit of America, and the values of the system of "free enterprise." No government planner has envisaged a post-attack rebuilding by people who never
much benefited from American society, or quite understood what America was all about, that is, by people who lived at a disadvantage on the margins of society.
cities are not merely targets, but American cities
2. The City as a Nuclear "Defense Weapon"' A second assumption of deterrence is that
can be transformed into effective defense weapons to the degree that they are vulnerable to atomic attack. In other
words, the defense role of the city is not just to receive the hit, it is to absorb the hit so that damage minimally spills over to
surrounding "survival areas." After 1960, defense planners were univocal on this one point: any effort to defend the
American city by protecting its residents from attack is extremely dangerous to the national security. All analysts
agree that such efforts ("hardening" the city) will be interpreted by the Soviet Union as an offensive move on our part, that is, as a sign that we are preparing for a "firsts
trike." Even more important, we are told by our own planners, any preparedness for attack on our part will only cause an intensification
of the attack [Eyring iv, 19, 27, 28], needlessly endangering the small communities and rural areas that might otherwise
survive. For example, Wolfgang Panofsky stated: "a large civil defense program would only raise the level of armament on both sides of the iron curtain to a higher
level without an increase, and possibly a decrease in our security" [Civil Defense 19]. Owen Chamberlain of the University of California agrees: "Meaningful
attempts by the United States to protect its population from nuclear attack will be met by Soviet attempts to
increase the effectiveness of their armaments" [Civil Defense 291]. Barry Commoner, whose thoughts on the probable effects of nuclear war are
more detailed and sophisticated than other analysts, also agrees. He argues that any United States effort to duplicate the Soviet policy of putting people and equipment
in hardened facilities underground would cause our adversaries to reprogram their weapons to detonate at ground level instead of in the lower atmosphere. In a 1966
statement, Commoner sums up this position: "the very existence of such defenses would impel an enemy to massive attacks with ground bursts. This would create a
huge global dust pall that might trigger a new ice age" [AAAS 101]. What is especially noteworthy about these and similar statements is that they are made by scientists
and other leaders who know that Soviet domestic policy involves developing "hardened" facilities, and the United States has not chosen to read that fact as an
extraordinary provocation. This particular excuse for official opposition to the defense of our own cities is another slip of the nuclear unconscious.
The official plan of the United States is to move people, or suggest that they move
3. The Strategic Role of the Rural Areas:
themselves, away from the target cities just before a nuclear attack. Interestingly, this policy "figures in little" a large-scale shift in the
macrostructural arrangement that Robert Redfield dubbed the "folk-urban continuum." The first perturbation was the creation in the 1950's of
middle class suburbs, entirely new communities, on the edge of the cities. Next, in near perfect synchronization with
accelerating nuclear arms build-up and delivery capacity, came withdrawal of the upper-middle class and
intelligentsia still further from the city, into small towns beyond the suburban fringe. Beginning in the 1970's and continuing to the
present, rural areas of the United States, for the first time in history, are growing at a more rapid rate than urban areas. All of this is done in the framework of a hastily
assembled rhetoric of rediscovery of positive rural values. Independent of any actual cause, its strategic import cannot be discounted because it now figures in our
nuclear planning.

[Continues]
The Desire: The will to sacrifice our cities and urban peoples is a matter of national foreign policy, but the bomb itself and the will to use it is only a bit of the ankle
showing. The hidden demographic-psychoanalytic desire can be discovered only by bringing a consideration for some of the most basic problems of the "system of Free
What is to be done with the mass of disadvantaged people which is such a
Enterprise" into the post-nuclear structural arrangement.
common feature and embarrassment to the system of "Free Enterprise?" Are we to follow the course of
Eurosocialism and agree upon certain minimal standards of income, health care, and housing below which no one should
fall? Or do we renew an earlier United States program of quality democratic institutions, courts, schools, the free press, all of
which hold out the prospect of great economic reward for anyone tough enough to go for it? In the last decades, the
United States has turned away from either of these approaches and begun to warehouse its ethnic, impoverished,
stigmatized, and mentally marginal populations in large cities characterized by measurably inferior education,
health standards and facilities, and housing. During this same period on the rural side, there has been a movement of
white wealth out of the large cities and a sudden and very large drop in the numbers of rural black farm owners.
After the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act, thousands of addicts and the certified insane were released into the streets of our cities.

THE LEGAL FRAMING OF THE PLAN IS DISASTROUS. ITS DETACHED EPISTEMOLOGY

DISEMPOWERS RECIPIENTS INTO OBJECTS OF CONTROL AND REPRODUCES WHITENESS.
SWIGONSKI, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, 1994 [MARY E., THE LOGIC OF
FEMINIST
OF
STANDPOINT THEORY FOR SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH. SOCIAL WORK. V. 39 ISSUE 4. EBSCO]

Logical positivism asserts the possibility of value-free theory and science based on the use of the senses and reason. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is believed to
be both desirable and
possible. But in the 1960s, critics of science discovered that those in charge of the neutral sciences were over-whelmingly white, male, and privileged occupants of
positions in advanced
industrialized society (Rose, 1983). The sciences are inextricably part of the social order that supports them. Hubbard (1988) called our attention to the political,
value-laden nature of scientific
that "the pretense that science is apolitical and value neutral is profoundly political because it
activity in her assertion
obscures the political role that science and technology play in underwriting the existing distribution of
power in
society.... Science and technology always operate in somebody's interest" (p. 13). In societies where power is
organized hierarchically (by class, culture, or gender), there is no possibility of an impartial, disinterested,
value-neutral perspective. Social work's commitment to value-directed actions stands in contrast to positivist
commitments to value-free endeavors. A profession that prides itself on a humanitarian value base cannot rely on a research
grounded in the assertion that its methods can and should strip values from its work and findings. From its inception, social
work research has been an applied research. The profession's commitment to practical ends requires that social work researchers
possess an acute awareness of the value-laden potentials of the
process and products of our science. Social work practitioners more readily become involved with
research activities that honor the profession's commitment to client empowerment and social
transformation. In both the planning and implementation of research activities, researchers need to attend to the policy implications of their inquiries
(Cook & Fonow, 1990). Logical positivism builds on the epistemological assumption of the possibility of separation of the
observer from the observed, the knower from the known (Lincoln & Guba, cited in Wood, 1990). This thinking requires that the
subject and object of research activities be treated as separate, noninteracting entities. The scientist is viewed as an independent
observer who minimizes any relationship between the self and the subject of study. The actions of the researcher are constructed so that they do not infect or alter
objective truth. However, it
that both the observer and the observed occupy the same causal plane. Both are influenced by the same

now appears
sociocultural factors. The objects of our research are, in fact, gazing back at us (Harding, 1991). The
requirement of
subject-object separation stands as a significant barrier to social work practitioner involvement in the
research
process. This separation casts the practitioner in the role of an observer and reporter of reality, rather
than as its
cocreator and interpreter with the client (Witkin, 1991). A scientific approach that recognizes the social
bond and the
reciprocal nature of interactions between people in social contexts would be more consistent with the
assumptions of social work practice. Logical positivism builds on the ontological assumption of a single,
tangible reality "out there" (Lincoln & Guba, cited in Wood, 1990). Positivist approaches to science assume that there is an objective world of facts and universal
laws,

independent of scientists and their community, waiting to be known. The assumption that the social world is knowable through observation and recording of
objective reality by an independent

researcher leads to the assertion that all people using the proper scientific method will come to the same conclusion. In this approach to scientific activity, bias is
identified and eliminated from

This approach to objectivity views facts as independent of, and

research activities through techniques such as randomization and control groups.
unaffected by, the cultural assumptions of the scientists who discover them. This approach to objectivity and the
related search for universal laws that apply across cultures and times also strips the context from the products of
science. A profession whose hallmark is a commitment to enhancing clients' dignity and worth must question approaches
to
research in which activities reduce clients to mere objects of observation or manipulation. The profession's dual
focus on
the individual in a social context and the inclusion of diversity as integral to understanding human behavior stand in contrast to narrow definitions of objectivity
that "decontextualize" research
the methods of the scientific approach as applied are incapable of
activities. Harding (1991) deemed this objective approach inadequate because
identifying or extracting sociocultural values and interests shared by the community of scientists. The scientific
methods based on the assumptions of positivism allow for the detection of bias in individual scientists, but those methods do not detect commonly held
assumptions or biases. Biases shared by the community of scientists are embedded in sociocultural values that
are entrenched in the statement of the problem and in the choice of concepts included in the hypotheses to be
tested. Language, values, and perceptions are all shaped by culture. Scientists cannot simply suspend the
influences of their culture. Our best beliefs, as well as our least defensible ones, have social causes (Harding, 1991).

Harding challenged scientists to a stronger objective approach that examines social and cultural influences. Social work practitioners and researchers are
human observers with particular
personal and social backgrounds who need to recognize the role investigations play in creating rather than merely discovering social phenomena (Witkin &
Gottschalk, 1988). Social work's
commitment to working with individuals as they
interact in society requires an emphasis on contexts, perhaps more than any other profession (Wood, 1990).
research cannot engage in context stripping and the resulting diminished relevance for the sake of operational
rigor. Such research needs to embrace the strongest possible definition of objectivity, one that requires systematic identification of
both individual and cultural assumptions as they shape
research efforts and simultaneously preserve the contextual richness and meaning of scientific findings.
 1NC MCLAREN AND TORRES

Whiteness structures how we view reality, and what kinds of politics are viable so as to
naturalize domination and close off emancipatory realities.
Peter Mclaren, prof of education at U of California and sunglasses-wielding bad ass, and Rudolfo Torres,
Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science. 1999. P. 49-50.
“Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking ‘Race’ and ‘Whiteness’. “Critical Multiculturalism”. Edited
by Stephen May.
To this end, rather than stressing the importance of diversity and inclusion, as do
most multiculturalists, we think that significantly more emphasis should be
placed on the social and political construction of white supremacy and the
dispensation of white hegemony. The reality-distortion field known as
‘whiteness’ needs to be identified as a cultural disposition and ideology linked to
specific political, social, and historical arrangements. As Matt Wray and Annalee
Newitz, editors of White Trash: Race and Class in America, put it:
It has been the invisibility (for Whites) of whiteness that has enabled white Americans
to stand as unmarked, normative bodies and social selves, thestandard against which all
others are judged (and found wanting). As such, the invisibility of whiteness is an
enabling condition for both white supremacy/privilege and race-based prejudice. Making
whiteness visible toWhites—exposing the discourses, the social and cultural practices,
and the material conditions that cloak whiteness and hide its dominating effects— is a
necessary part of any antiracist project. (1997, pp. 3–4)
The concept of whiteness became lodged in the discursive crucible of colonial identity by the early 1860s. Whiteness at that time had become a marker for
measuring inferior and superior ‘races’. Interestingly, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and Confucius were at this time considered as ‘white’. Blackness was evaluated
positively in European iconography from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, but after the seventeenth century and the rise of European colonialism, blackness
became conveniently linked to inferiority (Cashmore, 1996). For instance, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, blood purity (limpieza de sangre)
became raised to a metaphysical—perhaps even sacerdotal—status, as it became a principle used to peripheralize Indians, Moors, and Jews. Blackness was not
immediately associated with slavery. In the United States, the humanistic image of Africans created by the abolitionist movement was soon countered by new types
of racial signification in which white skin was identified with racial superiority. Poor Europeans were sometimes indentured and were in some sense de facto slaves.
They occupied the same economic categories as
African slaves and were held in equal contempt by the lords of the plantation and legislatures. So poor Europeans were invited to align themselves with the
plantocracy as ‘white’ in order to avoid the most severe forms of bondage. This strategy helped plantation owners form a stronger social control apparatus as
hegemony was achieved by offering ‘race privileges’ to poor Whites as acknowledgment of their loyalty to the colonial land (Cashmore, 1996).
By the early twentieth century, European maritime empires controlled over half of the land (72 million square kilometres) and a third of the world’s population (560

Africans died during the centuries- long transatlantic slave trade

million people). Seventy-five million

(West, 1993). The logics of empire are still with us, bound to the cultural fabric of our
daily being-in-the-world; woven into our posture towards others; structured into the
language of our perceptions. We cannot will our racist logics away. We need to work
hard to eradicate them. We need to struggle with a formidable resolve in order to
overcome that which we are afraid to confirm exists, let alone confront, in the
battleground of our souls.
George Lipsitz argues that understanding the destructive quality of white identity requires what Walter Benjamin termed ‘presence of mind’ or ‘an
abstract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment more decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events’ (1995, p. 370). Noting that
‘race’ is not merely a ‘cultural construct’ but a construct that has ‘sinister structural causes and consequences’, Lipsitz argues that from colonial times to the present

there have existed systematic efforts ‘to create a possessive

investment in whiteness for European Americans’. Identifying what he calls a
new form of racism embedded in ‘the putatively race-neutral liberal social
democratic reforms of the past five decades’ (1995, p. 371), Lipsitz asserts that
the possessive investment in whiteness can be seen in legacies of socialization
bequeathed to United States’ citizens by federal, state, and local policies toward
African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans,
and other groups designated by Whites as ‘racially other’.In her article, ‘Whiteness as
property’, Cheryl Harris (1993) makes the
compelling case that within the legal system and within popular reasoning, there
exists an assumption that whiteness is a property interest entitled to legal
protection. Whiteness as property is essentially the reification in law of expectations of white privilege. Not only has this assumption been supported by
systematic white supremacy through the laws of slavery and ‘Jim Crow’ but also by recent decisions and rationales of the US Supreme Court concerning affirmative

white ‘racial’ identity provides the

action. Harris is correct in arguing that whiteness serves as the basis of racialized privilege in which

basis for allocating societal benefits in both public and private spheres. Whiteness as a property of
status continues to assist in the reproduction of the existing system of racial classification and stratification in the US that protects the socially entrenched white
power elite. For example, rejecting race-conscious remedial
measures as unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is, according to Harris, ‘based on the [US Supreme] Court’s chronic
refusal to dismantle the institutional protection of benefits for Whites that have been based on white supremacy and maintained at the expense of Blacks’ (1993, p.
1767).

Current legal definitions of ‘race’ embrace the norm of colourblindness and

thus disconnect ‘race’ from social identity. Within the discourse of
colourblindness, blackness and whiteness are seen as neutral and apolitical
descriptions reflecting skin colour, and unrelated to social conditions of
domination and subordination and to social attributes such as class, culture,
language, and education. In other words, colourblindness is a concept that
symmetrizes relations of power and privilege and flattens them out so that they
appear equivalent. But blackness and whiteness exist symmetrically only as
idealized oppositions; in the real world they exist as a dependent hierarchy, with
whiteness constraining the social power of blackness. According to Harris:
To define race reductively as simply colour, and therefore meaningless is as
subordinating as defining race to be scientifically determinative of
inherent deficiency. The old definition creates a false linkage between race and
inferiority; the new definition denies the real linkage between race and
oppression under systematic white supremacy. Distorting and denying
reality, both definitions support race subordination. As Neil Gotanda has
argued, colourblindness is a form of race subordination in that it denies the
historical context of white domination and black subordination. (1993, p. 1768)
Likewise, Alcoff writes: ‘For Whites and others who benefit in the present from
a history of oppression, the appeal of universal racelessness may also he in its
ability to deface their/our race-based connections with that unpleasant past: in
other words, it may entitle Whites to believe they/we don’t need to acknowledge
the salience of white identity and thus to avoid the moral discomfort that that
identity cannot help but present’ (1996, p. 10). Affirmation action (positive
discrimination) thus needs to be understood not through privatizing social inequality through claims of bipolar corrective justice between black and white
competitors but rather as an issue of distributive social justice and rights that focuses not on guilt or innocence but on entitlement and fairness.
Because racism and ‘race’ hierarchies are virtually ignored in discussions of multiculturalism in the US, the educational left has largely failed to address the issue
of whiteness and the insecurities that young Whites harbour regarding their future during times of diminishing economic expectations. With their ‘racially coded and
divisive rhetoric’, neo-conservatives may be able to enjoy tremendous success in helping insecure young white populations develop white identity along racist lines
while at the same time appealing to a universal racelessness.
Consider the comments by David Stowe who writes: The only people nowadays who profess any kind of loyalty to whiteness
qua whiteness (as
opposed to whiteness as an incidental feature of some more specific identity) are Christian Identity types and Aryan Nation
diehards. Anecdotal surveys reveal that few white Americans mention whiteness as a quality that they think much about or particularly value. In
their day-to-day cultural preferences—food, music, clothing, sports, hairstyles—the great majority of American Whites display no particular attachment to white
things. There does seem to be a kind of emptiness at the core of whiteness. (1996, p. 74)
People don’t discriminate against groups because they are different but rather the act of discrimination constructs categories of difference that hierarchically
locates people as ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ and then universalizes and naturalizes such differences. When we refer to whiteness or to the cultural logics of whiteness,

cultural practices considered to be white

we need to qualify what we mean. Here we adopt Ruth Frankenberg’s injunction that

need to be seen as contingent, historically produced, and transformable. White culture is

not monolithic and its borders must be understood as malleable and porous. It is the
historically specific confluence of economic, geopolitical, and ethnocultural processes.
According to Alastair Bonnett, whiteness is neither a discrete entity nor a fixed, asocial
category. Rather, it is an ‘immutable social construction’ (1996, p. 98). White identity is
an ensemble of discourses, contrapuntal and contradictory. Whiteness —and the
meanings attributed to it—are always in a state of flux and fibrillation.Bonnett notes that ‘even if one
ignores the transgressive youth or ethnic borderlands of western identities, and focuses on the “centre” or “heartlands” of “whiteness”, one will discover racialized
subjectivities, that, far from being settled and confident, exhibit a constantly reformulated panic over the meaning of “whiteness” and the defining presence of
“non-whiteness” within it’ (1996, p.

white culture is a material and discursive space

106). According to Frankenberg,

that:is inflected by nationhood, such that whiteness and Americanness, though

 by no means coterminous, are profoundly shaped by one another.... Similarly,
whiteness, masculinity, and femininity are co-producers of on another, in ways that are,
in their turn, crosscut by class and by the histories of racism and colonialism. (1993, p.
233)Whiteness needs to be seen as cultural, as processual, and not ontologicallydifferent from processes that are non-white. It works, as
Frankenberg notes, as‘an unmarked marker of others’ differentness—whiteness not so
much void or formlessness as norm’ (1993, p. 198). Whiteness functions through social
practices of assimilation and cultural homogenization; whiteness is linked to the expansion of capitalism in the sense
that ‘whiteness signifies the production and consumption of commodities under capitalism’ (1993, p. 203). Yet capitalism in the United States needs to be
understood as contingently white, since white people participate in maintaining the hegemony of institutions and practices of
racial dominance in different ways and to greater or lesser degrees. Ruth Frankenberg identifies the key discursive repertoires of whiteness as follows:
[first] modes of naming culture and difference associated with westEuropean colonial expansion; second, elements of ‘essentialist’ racism...
linked to European colonialism but also critical as rationale for Anglo Settler colonialism and segregationism in what is now the USA; third,
‘assimilationist’ or later ‘colour- and power-evasive’ strategies for thinking through ‘race’ first articulated in the early decades of this century; and,
fourth, ...‘race-cognizant’ repertoires that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century and were linked both to US liberation movements and to
global struggles for decolonization. (1993, p. 239)While an entire range of discursive repertoires may come into play, jostling against, superseding, and working in

white identity is constructed in relation to an individual’s personal

conjunction with each other,

history, geopolitical situatedness, contextually specific practices, and his or her location
in the materiality of the so called ‘racial order’. In other words, many factors determine
which discursive configurations are at work and the operational modalities present.
Whiteness has no formal content. It works rhetorically by articulating itself out of the
semiotic detritus of myths of European superiority. These are myths that are
ontologically empty, epistemologically misleading, and morally pernicious in the way that
they privilege descendants of Europeans as the truly civilized in contrast to the quaint,
exotic or barbaric character of non-European cultures.
Whiteness is a sociohistorical form of consciousness, given birth at the nexus
of capitalism, colonial rule, and the emergent relationships among dominant and
subordinate groups. Whiteness operates by means of its condition as a
universalizing authority by which the hegemonic white bourgeois subject
appropriates the right to speak on behalf of everyone who is non-white, while
denying voice and agency to these ‘others’ in the name of civilized humankind.
Whiteness constitutes and demarcates ideas, feelings, knowledges, social
practices, cultural formations, and systems of intelligibility that are identified with or attributed to white people and which are invested in by white people as

Whiteness is also a refusal to acknowledge how white people are implicated in

‘white’.

certain social relations of privilege and relations of domination and subordination.

Whiteness, then, can be considered as a form of social amnesia associated with certain
modes of subjectivity within particular social sites considered to be normative. As a lived
domain of meaning, whiteness represents particular social and historical formations that
are reproduced through specific discursive and material processes and circuits of desire
and power. Whiteness can be considered to be a conflictual sociocultural, sociopolitical,
andgeopolitical process that animates commonsensical practical action in relationship to
dominant social practices and normative ideological productions.Whiteness constitutes the selective tradition
of dominant discourses about ‘race’, class, gender and sexuality hegemonically reproduced. Whiteness has become the substance and limit of our commonsense
articulated as cultural consensus. As an ideological formation transformed into a principle of life, into an ensemble of social relations and practices, whiteness
needs to be understood as conjunctural, as a composite social hieroglyph that shifts in denotative and connotative emphasis, depending upon how its elements
are combined and upon the contexts in which it operates. Whiteness is not a pre-given unified ideological formation but is a multifaceted collective phenomenon
resulting from the relationship between the self and the ideological discourses which are constructed out of the surrounding local and global cultural terrain.
Whiteness is fundamentally Euro-or western- centric in its episteme, as it is articulated in complicity with the pervasively imperializing logic of empire.

Whiteness in the United States can be understood largely through the social
consequences it provides for those who are considered to be non-white. Such
consequences can be seen in the criminal justice system, in prisons, in schools, and in
the board rooms of multinational corporations. It can be defined in relation to
immigration practices and social policies and practices of sexism, racism, and
nationalism. It can be seen historically in widespread acts of imperialism and genocide
and linked to an erotic economy of ‘excess’. Eric Lott
writes: In rationalized western societies, becoming ‘white’ and male seems to depend upon the remanding of enjoyment, the body, and aptitude for
pleasure. It is the other who is always putatively ‘excessive’ in this respect, whether through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or
unremitting sexual appetite. Whites in fact organize their own enjoyment through the other, Slavoj Zizek has written, and access pleasure precisely by fantasizing
about the other’s ‘special’ pleasure.
Hatred of the other arises from the necessary hatred of one’s own excess; ascribing this excess to the ‘degraded’ other and indulging it—by imaging, incorporating,
or impersonating the other—one conveniently and surreptitiously takes and disavows pleasure at one and the same time. This
is the mixed erotic economy, what Homi Bhabha terms the ‘ambivalence’ of American whiteness. (1993, p. 482)Whiteness is a type of articulatory practice that
can be located in the convergence of colonialism, capitalism, and subject formation. It both fixes and sustains discursive regimes that represent self and ‘other’;
that is, whiteness represents a regime of differences that produces and racializes an abject other. In other words, whiteness is a discursive regime that enables real
effects to take place. Whiteness displaces blackness and brownness—specific forms of non- whiteness—into signifiers of deviance and criminality within social,
cultural, cognitive, and political contexts. White subjects discursively construct identity through producing, naming, ‘bounding’, and marginalizing a range of others
(Frankenberg, 1993).

Whiteness constitutes unmarked (white American male) practices that have

negative effects on and consequences for those who do not participate in them.
Inflected by nationhood, whiteness can be considered an ensemble of discursive
practices constantly in the process of being constructed, negotiated, and changed.Yet it
functions to instantiate a structured exclusion of certain groups from social arenas of
normativity. Coco Fusco remarks:To raise the spectre of racism in the here and now, to
suggest that despite their political beliefs and sexual preferences, white people operate
within, and benefit from, white supremacist social structures is still tantamount to
a declaration of war. (1995, p. 76)

We present the following counterplan Text : Mah homiez at da murda capital betta get dem g-
bombz out of the turkes shit.

Holla and we’ll spell out what we mean.

 1NC ALTERNATIVE
Our alternative is the rhetorical suicide of whiteness. Whiteness maintains itself through its
invisible replication in elite discourses of policy making. Multicultural integration is a failure-
our alternative is instead to embrace African American Language as an act of rupturing the
apolitical nature of whiteness. We realize there is humor in the disjunction between the way
we normally talk and the way we will articulate our alternative, and that that is part of the
point- this disjunction functions to make our subject position visible, short-circuiting the
epistemological basis of whiteness.
George Yancy, Duquesne University. “Geneva Smitherman: The Social Ontology of African-American
Language, the Power of Nommo, and the Dynamics of Resistance and Identity Through Language .”
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18:4. 2004.
Hence, from the very giddayup, that is, befo I bees gittin into some really dope cultural, historical, philosophical, and linguistic analyses, let’s engage in a lil
bit of naming and claiming. Word! The power of Nommo. Geneva Smitherman (a.k.a. Docta G) is an educational activist, a word
warrior, a language rights fighter, a linguist-activist, and a linguistic democratizer. Can I get a witness?
Yeah, that’s right. She is the legitimizer of African American Language (AAL) (Smitherman 2001, 347).
The shonuff sista from the hood who is cognizant of what it means to be a New World African, to be linked
to that shonuff Black space of talkin and testifyin, stylin and profilin. AAL is the language of her nurture
(343). She was, after all, baptized “in the linguistic fire of Black Folk” (Smitherman 1997, 242). Believe
me, for if I’m lyin, I’m flyin, she knows the source of those deleted copulas (“The coffee cold”), those
post-vocalic –r sounds (“My feet be tied,” not “tired”), redundant past tense markings (“I likeded her,” not
“liked”), few consonant pairs (“Those tesses was hard,” not “tests”), stylizations, and rhetorical devices.
Docta G operates within that unique African American space of performative “languaging,” a space
of agency, contestation, self-definition, poiesis, and hermeneutic combat. She is all up in the cultural
sphere of ashy knees, nappy hair, and how we be actin so saddity. Ah, yes, and she knows about the hot
comb as a cultural artifact of self-hatred, a form of hatred instilled through the power of colonial white
aesthetics. She member where she come from. She got no desire to front. Docta G’s medium is the
message. She avoids what linguist-philosopher John L. Austin refers to as the “descriptive fallacy,” which
involves the assumption that the main function of language is to describe things.
Through the incorporation of AAL flava in her written works (and no doubt in her lectures), Docta G is
doing something with those words and phrases. Her writings, in short, are demonstrative enactments of
the historical, stylistic, political, communicative, cognitive, and social ontological power of African
American Language. Docta G is the lion who has learned how to write, how to narrate a counterhistorical
narrative, and how to recognize and theorize a counterlanguage. A metalinguist, she is a cultural, ethical,
and political theorist.
If push comes to shove, she’ll “choose goodness over grammar” (349). She knows that the politics of
language policy is a larger question of the politics of reality construction, historical structuring of society,
race, class, and Anglo-linguistic imperialism. As such, she moves between both the sociolinguists (who stress social and ethnic language)
and the Cartesian or Chomskyan linguists (who stress “ideally competent” language). She knows that the right to speak AAL is a question of
linguistic freedom, agency, and justice. A womanist, moving within that bold, self-assertive, and we-affirming space of sistas like Angela Davis,
Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, Docta G is responsible, in charge, and serious. She’s no prisoner of the
academy; rather, she is existentially and politically committed to the Black community, its survival, and
the continual actualization of its cultural generative force. Smitherman maintains that a womanist denotes
an “African-American woman who is rooted in the Black community and committed to the development of
herself and the entire community” (Smitherman 1996, 104). African American women, empowered by
their womanist consciousness, were well-aware that white feminists had failed to critique, self-reflexively,
the normativity of their own whiteness. Epistemologically, Black womanists occupied their own subject
positions, positions that did not square with the theorizations of white middle- class women. You dig
(Wolof: dega) what I’m sayin? Can I get an Amen?
Squo seeks to silence narratives that challenge American culture-don’t believe victims
—bear witness key Refusing to hear the voice of racism in the lives of others is inherently racist. It
creates a false reality whereby the only voice of reason is the white privileged version of reality
excluding all other perspectives in an attempt to remain in a stance of power, telling the subject of
racism what is and is not acceptable as a complaint.
WISE 2K5 [Tim. American anti-racist activist and writer. He has lectured since 1995 at over 500 college campuses across the US.
He has trained teachers, corporate employees, non-profit organizations and law enforcement officers in methods for addressing and
dismantling racism in their institutions. White Like Me. Pages at end of evidence]

THE FIRST THING a white person must do in order to effectively fight racism is to learn to listen,
and more than that, to believe what people of color say about their lives. This may seem
obvious, even trite, but I assure you it is more important than it may appear. One of the biggest
problems with white America is its collective unwillingness to believe that racism is still a real
problem for nonwhite peoples, despite their repeated protestations that it is. Survey after survey
for decades has demonstrated the same pattern: whites saying that racial discrimination is
pretty much a thing of the past, and people of color saying that it continues regularly and that
they have personally experienced it, often several times a month. That whites refuse to believe
what people of color say about racism in their own lives—and have refused to believe it in every
generation, by the way—is itself a form of racism: it amounts to saying, “I know your reality
better than you know your reality” In other words, you are not, as a per son of color, smart
enough, or rational enough, or objective enough to intuit your own experiences, so let me tell
you what your life is like, rather than having you trust your own lying eyes. But why do whites regularly
refuse to give credit to the lived experience of black and brown peoples? Why do we refuse to believe what people of color say they
regularly experience, in employment, housing, schools and the justice system? Is it because we are inherently racist and unfeeling
about black and brown suffering? Is it because we’re just too hardheaded to accept reality? I would venture to guess it’s neither of
these. Rather,
to be white in America is to be so removed from the experiences of people of color,
that it should come as no surprise to find whites unwilling to accept the versions of reality
offered by those who are black and brown. Even well meaning whites rarely see racism up close
and personal, because so few of us live around, recreate with, or socialize with people of color;
as such, we don’t have the opportunity to witness what people of color go through. And in
keeping with the old “out of sight, out of mind” maxim, even whites who harbor little if any racist
ideology could easily dismiss claims of persistent discrimination, never or rarely having seen it
with our own eyes. This isolation from people of color is itself the result of years of housing
segregation and other racist forces that have kept us apart, so that still today, the vast majority
of whites live in neighborhoods with few if any people of color. Though this fact isn’t necessarily the fault of
any individual white person reading this book—much of the separation has been socially constructed and reinforced against our wills
—it is the responsibility of whites to recognize this process and to address the way in which it can
skew our understanding of racism by making things seem far more copacetic than they really
are. And we must recognize how our unwillingness to take people of color at their word when
they say they experience racism actually contributes to and furthers racism: after all, it’s tough
to fight something when you aren’t willing to see how serious a problem it really is. [67-68]

THE AFFIRMATIVE’S REPRESENTATION OF A FUTURE NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE MASKS THE ONGOING EXTERMINATION OF THE
PERIPHERY, EMBODIED IN THE NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE’S TARGETTING OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. THIS FANTASY OF NUCLEAR
EXTINCTION CREATES A DISCURSIVE HIERARCHY OF RECOGNIZABLE VIOLENCE, A FANTASY ALL TOO OFTEN PERPETUATED BY
NUCLEAR CRITICS THEMSELVES.

KATO, DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, 1993 [MASAHIDE, “NUCLEAR GLOBALISM:
TRAVERSING ROCKETS, SATELLITES, AND NUCLEAR WAR VIA THE STRATEGIC GAZE,” ALTERNATIVES 18 (1993), 339-360]
Nuclear War Imagined and Nuclear War as Real
The vigorous invasion of the logic of capitalist accumulation into the last vestige of
relatively autonomous space in the periphery under late capitalism is propelled not only
by the desire for incorporating every fabric of the society into the division of labor but
also by the desire for "pure" destruction/extermination of the periphery." The penetration of
capital into the social fabric and the destruction of nature and preexisting social organizations by capital are not separable. However,
what we have " witnessed in the phase of late capitalism is a rapid intensification of the
destruction and extermination of the periphery. In this context, capital is no longer interested in incorporating
some parts of the periphery into the international division of labor. The emergence of such "pure" destruction/ extermination of
the periphery can be explained, at least partially, by another problematic of late capitalism formulated by Ernest Mandel: the mass
the latest phase of capitalism distinguishes itself from
production of the means of destruction.' Particularly,

the earlier phases in its production of the "ultimate means of destruction/extermination,

i.e., nuclear weapons
Let us recall our earlier discussion about the critical historical conjuncture where the notion of "strategy" changed its nature and
became deregulated/dispersed beyond the boundaries set by the interimperial rivalry. Herein, the perception of the ultimate means of
The only instances of real nuclear catastrophe perceived
destruction can be historically contextualized.

and thus given due recognition by the First World community are the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which occurred at this conjuncture. Beyond this historical
threshold, whose meaning is relevant .only to the interimperial rivalry, the nuclear
catastrophe is confined to the realm of fantasy, for instance, apocalyptic imagery. And yet
how can one deny the crude fact that nuclear war has been taking place on this earth in the name of

"nuclear testing" since the first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo in 1945? As of 1991, 1,924
nuclear explosions have occurred on earth. The major perpetrators of nuclear warfare
are the United States (936 times), the former Soviet Union (715 times), France (192
times), the United Kingdom (44 times), and China (36 times). The primary targets of
warfare ("test site" to use Nuke Speak terminology) have been invariably the sovereign nations of
Fourth World and Indigenous Peoples. Thus history has already witnessed the nuclear wars
against the Marshall Islands (66. times), French Polynesia (175 times), Australian
Aborigines (9 times), Newe Sogobia (the Western Shoshone Nation) (814 times), the
Christmas Islands (24 times), Hawaii (Kalama Island, also known as Johnston Island) (12
times), the Republic of Kazakhstan (467 times), and Uighur (Xinjian Province, China) (36
times). Moreover although I focus primarily on "nuclear tests" in this article, if we are to expand the notion of
nuclear warfare to include any kind of violence accrued from the nuclear fuel cycle
(particularly uranium mining and disposition of nuclear wastes), we must enlist Japan
and the European nations as perpetrators and add the Navaho, Havasupai and other
Indigenous Nations to the list of targets. Viewed as a whole, nuclear war, albeit
undeclared, has been waged against the Fourth World, and 'Indigenous Nations. The dismal
consequences of "intensive exploitation," "low intensity intervention,." or the "nullification of the sovereignty" in the Third World
produced by the First World have taken a form of nuclear extermination in the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. Thus, from the
the nuclear catastrophe has never been the
perspectives- of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations,

"unthinkable" single catastrophe but the real catastrophe of repetitive and ongoing
nuclear explosions and exposure to radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have
been, subordinated to the imaginary grand catastrophe.by rendering them as mere
preludes to the apocalypse. As a consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear
explosions as war have been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the
First World community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the "real" of nuclear
warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be observed even in Stewart
Firth's Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of "nuclear testing" in
the Pacific:
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere ... were global in effect The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas
of the fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning
our planet and going into battle against nature itself.

Extinction is inevitable - several risks - - (this evidence is from

scientists with PhDs who study the risk of extinction, btw).
Sandberg, Matheny, & Ćirković, 08
Anders Sandberg, James Martin Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University - PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University and is
a postdoctoral research assistant for the EU Enhance project. Jason G. Matheny, and Milan M. Ćirković, senior research associate at the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade.
He is also an assistant professor of physics at the University of Novi Sad in Serbia and Montenegro. | 9 September 2008. "How can we reduce the risk of human extinction?"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/how-can-we-reduce-the-risk-of-human-extinction

Humanity could be extinguished as early as this century by succumbing to natural hazards, such as an extinction-level
asteroid or comet impact, supervolcanic eruption, global methane-hydrate release, or nearby supernova or gamma-
ray burst. (Perhaps the most probable of these hazards, supervolcanism, was discovered only in the last 25 years,
suggesting that other natural hazards may remain unrecognized.) Fortunately the probability of any one of these events killing off our species
is very low—less than one in 100 million per year, given what we know about their past frequency. But as improbable as these events are, measures to reduce their probability can
still be worthwhile. For instance, investments in asteroid detection and deflection technologies cost less, per life saved, than most investments in medicine. While an extinction-
level asteroid impact is very unlikely, its improbability is outweighed by its potential death toll. The risks from anthropogenic hazards appear at present larger than those from
natural ones. Although great progress has been made in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world, humanity is still threatened by the possibility of a global
thermonuclear war and a resulting nuclear winter. We may face even greater risks from emerging technologies. Advances in synthetic biology might make it possible to engineer
pathogens capable of extinction-level pandemics. The knowledge, equipment, and materials needed to engineer pathogens are more accessible than those needed to build nuclear
weapons. And unlike other weapons, pathogens are self-replicating, allowing a small arsenal to become exponentially destructive. Pathogens have been implicated in the
extinctions of many wild species. Although most pandemics “fade out” by reducing the density of susceptible populations, pathogens with wide host ranges in multiple species can
reach even isolated individuals. The intentional or unintentionalrelease of engineered pathogens with high transmissibility, latency, and
lethality might be capable of causing human extinction. While such an event seems unlikely today, the likelihood may increase as biotechnologies
continue to improve at a rate rivaling Moore’s Law. Farther out in time are technologies that remain theoretical but might be developed this century. Molecular
nanotechnology could allow the creation of self-replicating machines capable of destroying the ecosystem. And
advances in neuroscience and computation might enable improvements in cognition that accelerate the
invention of new weapons. A survey at the Oxford conference found that concerns about human extinction were dominated by fears that new technologies would
be misused. These emerging threats are especially challenging as they could become dangerous more quickly than past technologies, outpacing society’s ability to control them. As
H.G. Wells noted, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

AND, we'll win probability - - human extinction is a 100% certainty at some point or
another - - there's no way to "solve" or avert the risks/causes of extinction.

Matheny, 07 (Jason G. Matheny,Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University "Reducing the Risk
of Human Extinction" Risk Analysis, Volume 27, Issue 5, Date: October 2007, Pages: 1335-1344. accessed @ Wiley InterScience database)

humanity
We have some influence over how long we can delay human extinction. Cosmology dictates the upper limit but leaves a large field of play. At its lower limit,
could be extinguished as soon as this century by succumbing to near-term extinction risks: nuclear
detonations, asteroid or comet impacts, or volcanic eruptions could generate enough atmospheric debris to
terminate food production; a nearby supernova or gamma ray burst could sterilize Earth with deadly radiation;
greenhouse gas emissions could trigger a positive feedback loop, causing a radical change in climate; a
genetically engineered microbe could be unleashed, causing a global plague; or a highenergy physics
experiment could go awry, creating a “true vacuum” or strangelets that destroy the planet (Bostrom, 2002; Bostrom &
Cirkovic, 2007; Leslie, 1996; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2003). Farther out in time are risks from technologies that remain theoretical but
might be developed in the next century or centuries. For instance, self-replicating nanotechnologies could destroy the ecosystem;
 self-improving computers could exceed normal human ingenuity to create uniquely
and cognitive enhancements or recursively
powerful weapons (Bostrom, 2002; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2007; Ikle, 2006; Joy, 2000; Leslie, 1996; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2003). Farthest out in time are
astronomical risks. In one billion years, the sun will begin its red giant stage, increasing terrestrial temperatures
above 1,000 degrees, boiling off our atmosphere, and eventually forming a planetary nebula, making Earth inhospitable to
life (Sackmann, Boothroyd, & Kraemer, 1993; Ward & Brownlee, 2002). If we colonize other solar systems, we could survive longer than our sun, perhaps another 100 trillion
years, when all stars begin burning out(Adams&Laughlin, 1997).We might survive even longer if we exploit nonstellar energy sources. But it is hard to imagine how humanity will
survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 1032 to 1041 years (Adams & Laughlin, 1997).3 Physics seems to support Kafka’s remark that “[t]here is infinite hope, but
not for us.” While it may be physically possible for humanity or its descendents to flourish for 1041 years, it seems unlikely that humanity will live so
long. Homo sapi-ens have existed for 200,000 years. Our closest relative, homo erectus, existed for around 1.8 million years (Anton, 2003). The median duration of mammalian
species is around 2.2 million years (Avise et al., 1998).