This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
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.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location. It increases toward 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.

intended message of the warning marker design project at long-term nuclear waste disposal facilities at Yucca Mountain and WIPP, meant to discourage future generations from disturbing the sites for up to ten thousand years. (via starfoozle)

OK, since several people I follow have reblogged this extraordinary passage (hello, morethanslightly, emilyenrose, and septembriseur), I can’t help adding that the report this comes from was actually one of two reports commissioned by the Department of Energy on this topic. The other was the product of an earlier interdisciplinary team called the Human Interference Task Force, which included the likes of linguist Thomas Sebeok and science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.

Among the suggestions made by the Human Interference Task Force made: an “atomic priesthood”, an elected council who would pass the information about the nuclear site through ritual and myth, and “ray cats”, genetically engineered cats that would change color in the presence of nuclear radiation and whose significance would be relayed through oral tradition like fairy tales and songs.

If you’re interested, you can read both reports in full: “Reducing the Likelihood of Future Human Activities that Could Affect Geologic High-Level Waste Repositories” (1984) and “Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant” (1993).

(via likecastle)

99% Invisible did a fantastic episode about this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

(99% Invisible is ace, incidentally)