The Forever Warning
There’s that thing that happens when you fall down an internet rabbit hole—one link leads to another, then another, and suddenly you’ve lost three hours and become a frothing expert on something completely obscure. For me, it’s been atomic semiotics: the science of how to warn people ten thousand years from now about nuclear waste dumps they won’t understand using symbols they won’t recognize.
Atomic semiotics might sound like science fiction, but it’s real enough to raise the hair on your neck. For decades, scientists around the world have been wrestling with the same problem: how to scare future humans away from something like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico—a nuclear waste storage facility—assuming those future people won’t speak our languages, won’t recognize our danger symbols, and might not even understand what radiation is. The proposals get progressively more sci-fi: giant monoliths scattered across the landscape, genetically modified cats that glow under radiation, an atom pope
preaching nuclear gospel to devoted followers.
In 1991, a group of scientists, writers, and philosophers hammered out concrete proposals. The first layer of warning would be massive earthworks—either shaped like the radiation hazard symbol or a skull, or else jagged ridges pointing outward. These are just the introduction. They announce: something important happened here, we thought we were important, and this place is dangerous.
Monoliths would sit inside or on top of these earthworks, with messages carved at different levels. Level two pairs short written warnings with two faces expressing extreme negativity—one modeled on Munch’s The Scream, the other a disgust face designed by psychologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. The next levels escalate: longer passages about the danger, paired with increasingly complex symbols and diagrams meant to communicate what it is, where it is, and how long it stays dangerous—all without any shared language.
What really struck me is the design philosophy behind the empty center. For human beings, creating a center—we are here—is the first act of ordering chaos,
the designers wrote. A center has always been a place of privilege and honor. Here, we want to invert that. This center is not a place of privilege or value. It’s the opposite: uninhabited, despised, empty, a void, a non-place.
Turning the symbol inside out. That’s clever.
But would it actually work? That’s where things get philosophically dark. The 1991 group modeled out various scenarios where their warnings would fail entirely. In a feminist world,
twentieth-century science itself might be written off as arrogant male aggression, so all the warnings get dismissed as examples of that very same thinking. In a world of radical relativism, future people would see the messages as just one incompatible perspective among countless others—meaningless to their worldview. And symbols drift. The skull meant death and danger once; now it means pirates and treasure hunts.
For the slim chance that someone ten thousand years from now can read English, they’ve carved an inscription. This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
It describes the danger: what it is, where it is, how it intensifies toward the center. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
And at the end: This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
That last line might be the most honest thing science has ever written.
They’re still collecting proposals, decades later. Warning songs about radioactive flowers. A massive black monolith. Weird confusing structures inside the facility meant to spook intruders. A couple years ago, some designers won a competition with an idea to reshape the entire site using carbon dioxide, creating unnatural forms and garish colors that would make anyone think twice about going near it.
There’s something melancholic about it all—this enormous effort to communicate across thousands of years to people whose minds might work in ways we can’t predict. We’re throwing messages into the future like bottles into the ocean, hoping. But I also think we’re probably deluding ourselves. People don’t listen to warnings. We never have. We see a skull and we want to dig.