Marcel Winatschek

Ten Thousand Years Is a Long Time to Hold Anyone’s Attention

You know how it goes: somewhere in a YouTube or Reddit spiral at midnight you stumble onto something so strange and specific that you lose the next three hours to it. My most recent version of this was nuclear semiotics—the science of warning future humans about nuclear waste sites, on the assumption that those humans won’t understand any of our languages or symbols, and might not even know what radioactivity is.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico—WIPP—buries transuranic nuclear waste deep in salt deposits and has been accepting material since 1999. The problem is that the contents will remain dangerous for roughly ten thousand years. Nobody alive today knows what human civilization will look like in ten thousand years. Nobody knows what languages will exist, whether the concept of radiation will be understood, whether anyone in the year 12000 will have any reason to connect symbols carved in stone above ground with the thing buried five hundred meters below it. And yet something has to stop them from digging.

A working group formed in 1991—scientists, authors, philosophers—developed concrete proposals in the form of a layered warning system, each tier more detailed than the last. The outermost layer would be earthworks visible from above: either the trefoil radioactivity symbol or a skull shape, or irregular outward-pointing earthen ridges—forms designed to communicate, at a pre-linguistic level, that this is a message, that its senders considered it important, that they were powerful, and that this place is dangerous. No gatehouse, no entrance, no implied welcome.

Moving inward: monoliths carrying the second tier of messages. Brief written warnings paired with two faces—one modeled on Edvard Munch’s The Scream, one designed by ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt to express nausea at something close to a biological level. Beyond those, more detailed inscriptions with diagrams and symbols designed to communicate the nature of the hazard, its location, and its duration to a civilization that shares no language with us but has presumably developed to the point of scientific literacy.

The designers were specific about what the center of the site should convey: emptiness, not importance. In their words: For human beings, creating a center—"We are here"—is the first act of ordering chaos. A center has always been a highly valued place. In this project we want to reverse that symbolic meaning and convey that this center is not a place of privilege, honor, or value, but its opposite. This center is uninhabited, reviled, a void, a hole, a non-place. The inversion of the sacred is the point.

What I find genuinely troubling is the skull problem. The skull and crossbones was once unambiguous—death, poison, stay away. Now it’s pirates and Halloween costumes and streetwear. Symbols don’t hold still. A symbol that survives a thousand years of cultural change without being reinterpreted into something neutral or appealing is nearly impossible to design. The working group knew this. Their report considered scenarios including geopolitical collapse, mass migration, and global catastrophe, but also—and this is the part that made me laugh despite myself—a "feminist world" in which twentieth-century science was dismissed as the misguided epistemological arrogance of aggressive men, and warning markers at the site would be ignored as inferior, inappropriate, and twisted male thinking. They also included a radical-relativist scenario drawn from Thomas Kuhn and Herbert Marcuse, where future people would regard the warnings as the output of an incommensurable perspective with no binding authority over them. The breadth of human failure modes they tried to account for is itself a kind of archaeology of anxiety.

There were wilder proposals too. Genetically modified cats engineered to change color in the presence of radiation—the idea being that the behavior would propagate through culture as a reliable signal even after written language failed. An "atomic priesthood," a self-perpetuating institution modeled on religious orders, whose sole purpose would be transmitting oral warnings across generations as sacred knowledge. The fact that these ideas were put forward seriously, in serious reports, by serious people, tells you something about how hard the problem actually is.

For any future visitor who makes it through all of that and still wants to know what’s down there, the proposed final inscription reads: This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important 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 was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards 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.

WIPP is scheduled to be filled and sealed in 2133. After that, a hundred years of active monitoring, and then the markers go in. The design competition continues in the meantime. Tei Carpenter, Arianna Deanne, and Ashley Kuo won first prize in one recent round with a proposal to use carbon dioxide to transform the landscape—forcing unnatural shapes and hallucinatory colors into the terrain, something that would read as wrong to any creature evolved to recognize normal land. Something that wouldn’t need words.

I’m not sure any of it will work. I’m not sure anything could. We can barely get people to read warning labels in their own language in their own lifetime. Asking a symbol to hold its meaning for ten millennia feels like optimism of a very strange and desperate kind—which is, I suppose, the only kind available once you’ve buried something that dangerous and run out of better options.