Ontological Reversal and Deep-Time Responsibility

Deep-time artifacts are technologies that outlive their creators, address unknown recipients, and generate consequences only after all originally relevant stakeholders have disappeared. Existing evaluative frameworks, including contemporary bioethics, longtermism, and anticipatory technology ethics, are structurally incapable of assessing such artifacts because they presuppose living agents, identifiable beneficiaries, and forward-causal temporal horizons. Using UNAC, a proposed deep-time genomic archive, as a diagnostic case, this paper argues that contemporary rejection reflects evaluative incapacity rather than principled prohibition. To address this gap, it develops postmortem ethics, a framework for artifacts with no surviving interest-holder, and specifies three second-order design principles: backup non-substitution, rejection of salvation contracts, and controlled deferral with public gatekeeping, which together render deep-time option creation cautiously permissible despite persistent temporal disagreement. The analysis shows that UNAC functions not merely as an ethically assessable technology but as an ethics-generating artifact that reshapes the conditions under which responsibility, loss, and omission across deep time can be judged.