Lately I’ve become nigh-obsessed with the semiotic field of long-term nuclear waste warning messages. It’s considered something of an ongoing problem–how do we mark sites where radioactive waste is stored to prevent people of the distant future (generally regarded as 10,000 years or longer from now) from disturbing it and being poisoned? The languages spoken in the future will likely be vastly different from those of the present, and we can’t be sure even that present-day languages will be decipherable at that point if information isn’t preserved well enough.
A report from Sandia in 1996 laid out a series of key messages that any nuclear waste warning system should try to get across non-linguistically. As they are written in the Sandia report, the messages are a deliciously grim piece of accidental poetry.
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.
Spooky as hell, right? Other strategies have been proposed, and many are amazing nutso sci-fi shit. Taken from Wikipedia, here are a few choice cuts.
- A series of extremely large spikes emerging from the ground at different angles.’
- Large mounds of earth shaped like lightning bolts, emanating from the edges of a square site. The shapes would be strikingly visible from the air, or from artificial hills constructed around the site.
- A network of hundreds of house-sized stone blocks, dyed black and arranged in an irregular square grid, suggesting a network of “streets” which feel ominous and lead nowhere. The blocks are intended to make a large area entirely unsuitable for farming or other future use.
- French author Françoise Bastide and Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed that domestic cats be genetically engineered to change color in the presence of dangerous levels of radiation. The significance of these “radiation cats” or “ray cats” would be reinforced through fairy tales and myths, the story being that one should move away from sites where such creatures are encountered, or where domesticated cats begin to exhibit such behavior.
My favorite:
- Linguist Thomas Sebeok… proposed the creation of an atomic priesthood, a panel of experts comparable to the Catholic church, which has preserved and authorized its message for almost 2000 years. The priesthood would preserve the knowledge of radioactive waste’s locations and dangers through rituals and myths.