I had forgotten about this. I stumbled across it again, and it’s just as incredible to me now as it was the last time I saw it.

Imagine for a moment, that you belong to a culture of humans generates it’s power in such a way that as a side product a terriby lethal, nearly indestructible substance is created which will remain mortally dangerous for 10,000 odd years. What do you do with the substance? It needs to be stored somewhere where it will not kill or harm you. Moreover, if your culture is an ethical one, you need somehow to mark the storage sight in such a way that will not only discourage people from your own culture from compromising it (that’s the easy part), it has to be able to deter people from cultures 10 000 years in the future. Without knowing a thing about those future cultures, their language or values, you are faced with a difficult question: how do you adequatley warn them?

To the credit (?) of the US government, they decided to take a crack at it. Specifically, Sandia National Labratories put together a working group of anthropologists and materials scientists and such who wrote an Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (document SAND92-1382 / UC-721). Excerpts from it are located here.

Appropriately, they took into consideration lessons learned from successes and failures of the pyramids and other Egyptian immortality-buildings. Of course, the pyramids have only survived half as long or less than the specs for the nuclear waste markers require.

Many of the considerations here are of course similar to those facing the builders of the 10 000 year clock. It’s remarkable that two different groups should be working on such an unlikely project at the same time. It’s remarkable in a lot of ways, and equally weird. And eerie. And scary.

The design of the whole site itself is to be a major source of meaning, acting as a framework for other levels of communication, reinforcing and being reinforced by those other levels in a system of communication. The message that we believe can be communication non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a “natural language,” encompasses Level I and portions (faces showing horror and sickness) of Level II. Put into words, it would communicate something like the following:

• This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
• Sending this message was impotant to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
• This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
• What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
• The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
• The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
• The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
• The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
• The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

In case you wondered, I came across this report again when I found a t-shirt with part of the “message” on it.