How would you communicate the message “Do Not Disturb” to your future generations, warning them that this place is storing something that is extremely harmful to human and other living creatures, and that must be stored and remain undisturbed for tens of thousands of years?

After watching “Into Eternity” (official site / Japan official site), a documentary movie about constructing a permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel that must last 100,000 years, this question caught my attention. The disposal site, by design, must function without human intervention and maintenance, and should be left alone for 100,000 years for the radioactive material to decay. We build this repository to keep you and your future generations safe. The design team, however, identified that the most unstable feature that might jeopardize the protection function of the repository, is ironically human himself.

According to a design report from the WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D. the design must satisfy the following criteria:

• The site must be marked. Aside from the legal requirement, the site will be indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal. We must complete the process by explaining what has been done and why.
• The site must be marked in such a manner that its purpose cannot be mistaken.
• Other nuclear waste disposal sites must be marked in a similar manner within the U.S. and preferably world-wide.
• A marking system must be utilized. By this we mean that components of the marking system relate to one another is such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
• Redundancy must play a preeminent role in the marking system design. The designs considered here have redundancy in terms of message levels, marking system components, materials, and modes of communication.
• Each component of the marking system should be made of material(s) with little intrinsic value. The destructive (or recycling) nature of people will pose a serious threat to the marking system.
• The components of the marking system should be tested during the next few decades while the WIPP is in operation, not only for the longevity of the materials but for the pan-cultural nature of the message. In other words, as with the repository design itself, the team was comfortable with the thought of designing a marking system that would last 10,000 years if left undisturbed. Our efforts focused on making it understandable while providing minimal incentive to disturb it. We also consider a public information effort a necessary part of the marking system design. A system that is not understood today has no chance of being understood in the far future.

In addition to the criteria described above, varies interviewees are also concerned about the following human factors:

• war and political landscape can change the countries above ground in matter of few generations. That is very unpredictable.
• economic downturns may make it financially difficult to maintain the disposal facilities.
• what we consider waste now may be conceived as valuable in the future, whether it is based on full understanding of radioactive energy, incomplete knowledge (lost knowledge and misunderstanding), or mis-interpretation as religious item.
• the future generations will not share the same sense, appearances, language, knowledge and needs, as we do now.
• scientists predict that there will be another ice age in 60,000 years. By then, everything above ground such as vegetation and human artifacts will disappear. Whether human race will be able to survive the period or not, the markers must survive it and be able to communicate the message continuously.

One important point that I’ve learned from the discussion about designing the marker is that, instead of focusing on designing the message and then develop a medium/vehicle to contain the message,

…McLuhan and Fiore [Ref. 2-1] take that even further, arguing that “the medium is the message.” Given this, rather than our attempting to first articulate messages, then to select their form, and then to design their vehicle, we choose to do as much of this simultaneously as is reasonable, attempting to accomplish

a Gestalt, in which more is received than sent,

a Systems Approach, where the various elements of the communications system are linked to each other, act as indexes to each other, are co-presented and reciprocally reinforcing, and

Redundancy, where some elements of the system can be degraded or lost without substantial damage to the system’s capacity to communicate.

This is, by far, the most challenging design requirement that I have ever seen. Without relying on text, language and symbol that are developed in our civilization, the few options left are “feeling” and “emotion“. Some designers came up with some solutions using architecture, geometry to comunicate such abstract entities. Here are some of the better developed ideas:

Figure 4.3-4. Spike Field, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).

Figure 4.3-1. Landscape of Thorns (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).

Figure 4.3-14. Forbidding Blocks, view 1 (concept and art by Michael Brill).

The Ultimate Design — Death

Dispatch the ethical argument, perhaps the most effective marker material is Death. In his remarks of personal thought, Woodruff Sullivan express his view that:

We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn’t we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective “marker” for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.

All illustrations are citied from WIPP.