Ten Thousand Years – 99% Invisible

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert to visit Waste isolation pilot plant. They’ll be there on a mission.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the only permanent underground nuclear waste repository in the United States. Radioactive byproducts of nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear power plants. WIPP is designed to handle not only various forms of nuclear sludge waste streams, but also more mundane things that interact with radioactive materials, such as tools and gloves.

Located deep in the New Mexico desert, WIPP was designed to store all of this radioactive material and keep us all safe.

Eventually, WIPP will be shut down and ignored. Years passed and those years would turn into decades. These decades will turn into centuries, and those centuries will turn into thousands. People on earth will come and go. Cultures rise and fall. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, that waste-filled cavern will get smaller and smaller until the salt eats up all those oil barrels and buries them. Then, all the old radioactive gloves, tools, and fragments of the bomb – still radioactive – will solidify in the Earth’s crust for more than 200,000 years. Basically forever.

Storing something securely permanently is a huge design problem. In fact, the jury is still out on whether WIPP has solved the basic problem of storage. February 2014, WIPP detected leak Several workers were exposed to radiation, and WIPP has since been closed. The Department of Energy now predicts it could take three years before WIPP is fully operational again.

We know these facts because we can find them and read the news in a common language. The problem that the above-mentioned group convened to solve was how to convey these messages to people Ten thousand years in the future.

This WIPP site will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, although the team is only responsible for adequately marking the place for humans within the next 10,000 years – thinking beyond this time frame is considered impossible.

Although the next ten thousand years is still quite unthinkable. Ten thousand years ago, the largest new technology spread on Earth was agriculture. Culturally, we have almost nothing in common with anyone who was alive at the time. Who knows what the world will look like in 10,000 years?

The group starts by thinking about language. But language, like radioactive material, has a half-life. Beowulf, written just 1,000 years ago, remains difficult to understand today.

The group also considered symbols, which seemed like they might be more universal. Smiley faces seem to have global appeal. And facial signs have been used as warnings.

Carl Sagan (who was invited to the group, but had a scheduling conflict) sent a letter to the WIPP group saying that the whole labeling problem could be easily solved with the right symbols, and he only knew of one: the skull and crossbones.

But symbols also change over time. The skull was not actually a symbol of death at first, but a symbol of rebirth. Its earliest use was in medieval religious painting and sculpture. At the foot of the cross where Jesus was crucified, lies a skull with two bones inside, shaped like a cross, not an “x.” The skull is supposed to be that of Adam.

Centuries later, captains began painting small skulls and crossbones on the logs, alongside the names of sailors who died at sea. Sailors began to associate this symbol with death.

Fast forward to another century. Pirates realized they could use symbolism to intimidate their targets into submission. But in addition to the “Jolly Roger” used by pirates, there are several different designs, including an hourglass and a bleeding heart. The flag of Edward Teach (aka “Blackbeard”) was both.

Later, in 1720, a pirate named Calico Jack Rackham was captured and tried. The trial was a sensation and everyone in England was talking about it. As it happens, Calico Jack’s symbol is the skull and crossbones flag, although in his case the bones are replaced by a pair of crossed swords.

After that trial, the skull and crossbones permeated the culture as a symbol of danger. By the late 1800s, it began to be used as a symbol of poison. Then in the 1940s, the Nazis adopted it in their SS death squads.

Around the world, the skull and crossbones have come to be associated with danger and death. But its meaning hasn’t really become universal.

Over the past few decades, the Jolly Roger has become mainstream. now you will see it Backpack, Toddler onesieseven on water bottles. It just means poisonous.

With language and symbols out of the way, the group considered some form of visual storytelling. Team member Jon Lomberg believes the radioactive trefoil symbol can be defined by a series of events.

But if you look at that cartoon from the bottom up, it looks like the man has found the fountain of youth!

Another panelist, a landscape artist and architect named Mike Brill, realized they actually needed to carry their message into the future. They just need to make people afraid of being in this dangerous place. He imagined giant needles sticking out of the ground—a “thorny landscape.”

But we had no way of knowing that this ominous landscape wouldn’t become an attraction in its own right and truly invite people to explore it.

However, the most popular 99pi solution did not come from WIPP brainstorming; Human Interference Working Groupa similar group was formed in 1981 for the now defunct Commission Yucca Mountain Project. It was proposed by two philosophers, François Bastide and Paul Fabry.

Bastide and Fabry concluded that the most enduring thing humans create is culture: religions, folklore, belief systems. They may change over time, but an important message can remain for thousands of years. They proposed that we genetically modify a cat that changes color when exposed to radiation and then release it into the wild as a living Geiger counter. Then we would create folklore, write songs, and tell stories about these “ray cats,” and the moral was, when you see these cats change color, they run far, far away.

This is all our great, great, great grandchildren have done to protect our people no way Know. And in our own time, people have been harmed by the consequences of nuclear weapons creation.

The town of Tallewaste, Florida is a small, predominantly African-American community south of Tampa, Florida. In the 1960s, a beryllium processing plant was opened in the center of town, which was used to make components for nuclear bombs and build parts for the Hubble Space Telescope. As it turns out, the factory was never good at handling waste.

Talwast residents began to notice that many people were being diagnosed with cancer and other illnesses, including beryllium poisoning from exposure to beryllium. Tallevast filed a lawsuit against Lockheed Martin, the company that owns the plant. Lockheed took years to drag out the suit.

Lockheed Martin happens to be Sandia National Laboratories parent companywhich operates WIPP sites in New Mexico.

It makes you wonder whether the best way to protect people 10,000 years from now is to make sure we take care of those who are alive today.

99% invisible contributors Matthew Kilty Chat with artist Jon Lomberg; archaeologist Maureen Kaplan; and Roger Nelson, chief scientist overseeing WIPP.

Original music provided by musicians tenth emperor. His song “Don’t Change Color, Kitty” is sure to be stuck in your head for 10,000 years. This song is just one of the songs in his new EP, 10,000-year-old earworm hinders settlement near nuclear waste repository Available now on Bandcamp.

Thanks also to Steve Lerner, author sacrifice zone;arrive Rob Mosswho is about to make a movie about WIPP; Matt Stroud and Jordan Olinger on edge; and Abe Van Luick of the Department of Energy.

**Correction: A previous version of the written story stated that beryllium dust contaminated the water supply in the town of Tallawast. While some Tallevast residents did contract beryllium disease and other illnesses from interactions with beryllium dust, this dust was not the cause of Tallevast water contamination. quite, Tallevast’s water is contaminated with another toxin called Trichlorethylene (TCE), also originates from beryllium refineries. We regret this error.