The 10,000 Year-Old Warning Sign

Yucca Mountain, located 80 miles from Las Vegas, is the planned location for the storage of the majority of America's nuclear waste over the next century. The material deposited in the mountain has a half life sufficient enough to render it deadly for the next 10,000 years. As a result, a team has been put in place to come up with a system of warning signage to ward off any potential ignoramuses from the area for the next ten millennia. To put 10,000 years in perspective, the earliest 'writing' found dates from around 5,000 years ago. Here are some notes on what they have come up with so far.

My favourite passage:

If the WIPP is ever operational, the site may pose a greater hazard than is officially acknowledged. Yet the problems involved in marking the site to deter inadvertent intrusion for the next 10,000 years are enormous. Even if knowledge exists that would allow translation of the message on the markers, there might be little motivation to solicit such knowledge. Pictorial messages, however, are unreliable and may even convey the opposite of what is intended.

This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines.

If in doubt, make it as big as you can and hope its bigness will convey something other than bigness. The mechanics of language are such that even in half a millennia something as beautifully composed as Milton or Shakespeare becomes challenging to understand, and moving further back to the time of Chaucer, and then Beowulf, things start to get plain difficult. That's just in the English language, which itself has only been a recognised language for a fraction of the timescale being worked on here. The idea of a 'universal symbol of danger' raises all sorts of questions which I don't believe can be answered now. We're simply too young.