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Look out below!
Look out below! It’s a simple enough message, but will the people of AD 12006 understand our warnings about buried nuclear waste? Sally Palmer investigates
●
ONE day a group of people walked into a cave and painted handprints all over the walls. Ten thousand years later, archaeologists have no idea why. To be fair to the artists in question, they probably didn’t set out to create something that would make sense in 400 generations’ time. Even if thoughts of the future had crossed their minds, how could they possibly have imagined what would have become of the human race? Since that day mankind has invented the wheel, developed hundreds of languages and got through several major civilisations, not to mention remodelled the planet and its climate. But this is the kind of challenge now facing a group of scientists, historians and futurists who are trying to send a message to the people of the distant future. In what has been called the first ever attempt at “reverse archaeology”, they are designing a sign that will last at least 10,000 years. The message: Don’t dig here, we buried nuclear waste. The repository in question, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP, was constructed in the 1970s and 80s in a disused salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. In 1999, it became the first underground repository in the world licensed to house waste from the production of nuclear weapons. Once it reaches full capacity in 2033, it will be monitored by the US Department of Energy for 100 years before being abandoned. Computer models predict that within 1000 years the mine will collapse in on itself, sealing the chemical sludge, toxic waste and contaminated lab equipment inside. All things going well it should stay that way for the 250,000 years it will take for most of the waste to become safe. However, according to legislation drawn up in 1985 by the US Department of Energy a repository must be 44 | NewScientist | 9 September 2006
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safeguarded for at least 10,000 years, and that means it must be marked. This is a major challenge. In 10,000 years our descendants may have no recollection of our culture, languages or technologies. They may be more technologically advanced than we can imagine, or civilisation as we know it may have long since crashed and burned. “Communication with the future is one-way, so the word ‘communication’ is misleading,” says Roger Nelson, chief scientist at WIPP, and head of the project. “This is all about sending a message to the future.”
Set in stone Clearly the survival of the WIPP message depends on more than paper or digital records. Maps and technical details will be stored in libraries around the world, but the warning signs on the site itself will need to be big, obvious and permanent (see Diagram, right). They will need to survive over thousands of years without eroding, being looted or being destroyed by vandals. The plan is literally to set the warnings in stone, by carving them onto 8-metre-tall monoliths. A study of ancient rock carvings commissioned by WIPP in 2000 found that deep carvings on basalt survived well, as,
surprisingly, did those on sandstone. The team is now testing other rock types against freeze/thaw cracking and wind abrasion, as well as working on cheaper artificial alternatives. But making sure the message remains legible is only half the battle. It will also need to be understood, and, equally critically, believed. This is where things get tricky. Chances are the people of the future will no longer use language in the same way that we do. Even if they do use the spoken and written word to communicate, there is no guarantee their language will bear any relation to ours. In the early 1990s Nelson gathered two teams of historians, anthropologists and semioticians – experts in signs – and challenged them to come up with the perfect warning sign. The biggest challenge was choosing an image. Symbols do exist to illustrate radiation and biohazards, but symbols have a habit of changing their meanings over time. The swastika, for example, was first used by European tribes in 4000 BC and was a Hindu holy symbol long before the Nazis got hold of it. “The swastika is an abstract symbol [which] contains no inherent information,” says Dave Givens, an anthropologist who has worked on the WIPP project. “Sending a message with a single symbol is like trying to convey a sentence with a single letter of the alphabet.” Givens says there is no universal symbol that will convey danger to any human past, present or future. Interpretations of colours vary between cultures, and while depictions of animals like spiders and snakes may inspire fear, they don’t tell you what you should be frightened of. Facial expressions, though, are universally understood. “Fear is the most basic of emotions, and so would survive any cultural www.newscientist.com
evolution,” says Robert Aunger, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. With this in mind the WIPP designers came up with two symbols: a human face showing fear, based on the famous painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, and another showing revulsion and disgust. There will also be a description of the site in seven languages, plus the word “Danger” and today’s symbols for biohazards and radioactivity. So if the symbols no longer mean anything to our descendants, will the two faces be enough to get the message across? “Both are relevant I suppose,” says Robert Aunger, “although we argue that disgust is a response to threat only of infectious disease; radioactivity is not contagious. Fear is more relevant than disgust.” Aunger also points out that more real-looking images would provoke
www.newscientist.com
a better reaction. Barring extreme genetic modification, chances are faces will look much the same in 10,000 years, he says. The team admits there may be room for improvement. Givens thinks that while faces tell part of the story, a comic strip would be more effective than faces alone. One suggestion, still being considered, is a series of panels showing a human digging up a canister which discharges particles. The face registers disgust and the person keels over. The designs are due to be finalised next year, after which the WIPP team will take them to remote parts of Borneo and New Guinea and show them to people who have little or no contact with the western world. If they can understand the messages, the designs are likely to be adopted by nuclear repositories around the world, including the controversial Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Ultimately though, the team are resigned to the fact that they will never find out whether their efforts have succeeded. Perhaps they will avert a potentially fatal engineering project in the year 12006. Perhaps our descendants will laugh at our inability to neutralise radioactivity, or our primitive fears over cancer. Or perhaps, like the warnings of curses on ancient Egyptian tombs, the message will be understood but ignored. All we know is that nuclear waste is dangerous now and is likely to stay that way for a very long time, and that, Nelson says, means we have to try. “All we can show is that, people once feared the contents of the WIPP repository, and sites like it, enough to go to a lot of effort to warn future generations,” he says. The rest will be up to them. ● Sally Palmer is deputy editor of BBC Focus magazine
9 September 2006 | NewScientist | 45
●
ONE day a group of people walked into a cave and painted handprints all over the walls. Ten thousand years later, archaeologists have no idea why. To be fair to the artists in question, they probably didn’t set out to create something that would make sense in 400 generations’ time. Even if thoughts of the future had crossed their minds, how could they possibly have imagined what would have become of the human race? Since that day mankind has invented the wheel, developed hundreds of languages and got through several major civilisations, not to mention remodelled the planet and its climate. But this is the kind of challenge now facing a group of scientists, historians and futurists who are trying to send a message to the people of the distant future. In what has been called the first ever attempt at “reverse archaeology”, they are designing a sign that will last at least 10,000 years. The message: Don’t dig here, we buried nuclear waste. The repository in question, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP, was constructed in the 1970s and 80s in a disused salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico. In 1999, it became the first underground repository in the world licensed to house waste from the production of nuclear weapons. Once it reaches full capacity in 2033, it will be monitored by the US Department of Energy for 100 years before being abandoned. Computer models predict that within 1000 years the mine will collapse in on itself, sealing the chemical sludge, toxic waste and contaminated lab equipment inside. All things going well it should stay that way for the 250,000 years it will take for most of the waste to become safe. However, according to legislation drawn up in 1985 by the US Department of Energy a repository must be 44 | NewScientist | 9 September 2006
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safeguarded for at least 10,000 years, and that means it must be marked. This is a major challenge. In 10,000 years our descendants may have no recollection of our culture, languages or technologies. They may be more technologically advanced than we can imagine, or civilisation as we know it may have long since crashed and burned. “Communication with the future is one-way, so the word ‘communication’ is misleading,” says Roger Nelson, chief scientist at WIPP, and head of the project. “This is all about sending a message to the future.”
Set in stone Clearly the survival of the WIPP message depends on more than paper or digital records. Maps and technical details will be stored in libraries around the world, but the warning signs on the site itself will need to be big, obvious and permanent (see Diagram, right). They will need to survive over thousands of years without eroding, being looted or being destroyed by vandals. The plan is literally to set the warnings in stone, by carving them onto 8-metre-tall monoliths. A study of ancient rock carvings commissioned by WIPP in 2000 found that deep carvings on basalt survived well, as,
surprisingly, did those on sandstone. The team is now testing other rock types against freeze/thaw cracking and wind abrasion, as well as working on cheaper artificial alternatives. But making sure the message remains legible is only half the battle. It will also need to be understood, and, equally critically, believed. This is where things get tricky. Chances are the people of the future will no longer use language in the same way that we do. Even if they do use the spoken and written word to communicate, there is no guarantee their language will bear any relation to ours. In the early 1990s Nelson gathered two teams of historians, anthropologists and semioticians – experts in signs – and challenged them to come up with the perfect warning sign. The biggest challenge was choosing an image. Symbols do exist to illustrate radiation and biohazards, but symbols have a habit of changing their meanings over time. The swastika, for example, was first used by European tribes in 4000 BC and was a Hindu holy symbol long before the Nazis got hold of it. “The swastika is an abstract symbol [which] contains no inherent information,” says Dave Givens, an anthropologist who has worked on the WIPP project. “Sending a message with a single symbol is like trying to convey a sentence with a single letter of the alphabet.” Givens says there is no universal symbol that will convey danger to any human past, present or future. Interpretations of colours vary between cultures, and while depictions of animals like spiders and snakes may inspire fear, they don’t tell you what you should be frightened of. Facial expressions, though, are universally understood. “Fear is the most basic of emotions, and so would survive any cultural www.newscientist.com
evolution,” says Robert Aunger, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. With this in mind the WIPP designers came up with two symbols: a human face showing fear, based on the famous painting The Scream by Edvard Munch, and another showing revulsion and disgust. There will also be a description of the site in seven languages, plus the word “Danger” and today’s symbols for biohazards and radioactivity. So if the symbols no longer mean anything to our descendants, will the two faces be enough to get the message across? “Both are relevant I suppose,” says Robert Aunger, “although we argue that disgust is a response to threat only of infectious disease; radioactivity is not contagious. Fear is more relevant than disgust.” Aunger also points out that more real-looking images would provoke
www.newscientist.com
a better reaction. Barring extreme genetic modification, chances are faces will look much the same in 10,000 years, he says. The team admits there may be room for improvement. Givens thinks that while faces tell part of the story, a comic strip would be more effective than faces alone. One suggestion, still being considered, is a series of panels showing a human digging up a canister which discharges particles. The face registers disgust and the person keels over. The designs are due to be finalised next year, after which the WIPP team will take them to remote parts of Borneo and New Guinea and show them to people who have little or no contact with the western world. If they can understand the messages, the designs are likely to be adopted by nuclear repositories around the world, including the controversial Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Ultimately though, the team are resigned to the fact that they will never find out whether their efforts have succeeded. Perhaps they will avert a potentially fatal engineering project in the year 12006. Perhaps our descendants will laugh at our inability to neutralise radioactivity, or our primitive fears over cancer. Or perhaps, like the warnings of curses on ancient Egyptian tombs, the message will be understood but ignored. All we know is that nuclear waste is dangerous now and is likely to stay that way for a very long time, and that, Nelson says, means we have to try. “All we can show is that, people once feared the contents of the WIPP repository, and sites like it, enough to go to a lot of effort to warn future generations,” he says. The rest will be up to them. ● Sally Palmer is deputy editor of BBC Focus magazine
9 September 2006 | NewScientist | 45