Suppose you wanted to send a message to someone living thousands of years in the future. How would you do it?
We can forget about trying to express it in electronic form. Personal computers have been around for only 30 years, but already quite a number of file formats have become obsolete — and replaced by others that are much more complex. There’s no telling what will survive the next 30 years, let alone 300 or 10,000.
Will people in the far future still read? What language will they use? We have no way of knowing. All of our knowledge of human language is limited to the past 6,000 years — and during that time, humanity has experienced countless migrations and cataclysms. It would be foolish to assume no dark ages, vanished civilizations or geological activity during the next ten millennia.
Now let’s say the message is a warning — and it has to be understood by the descendants of Mad Max, who have gone back to living in caves.
The 10,000-year plan
For 20 years now, the US Department of Energy has been considering this scenario, and others like it, when thinking of how to keep people away from its long-term nuclear-waste storage facilities for the next 10,000 years. For its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico, it will use both Stone Age and Space Age technology.
The radioactive caverns will be surrounded by a perimeter: a high earthen wall along which 10-meter-high pylons will be spaced at regular intervals. The pylons will display symbols indicating a general warning. Intruders who wander closer to the center of the site will see other pylons with more and more specific information — in the six official United Nations languages as well as Navajo — about the kind of danger present. Space will be left for warnings in future languages to be added.
Experts have looked at prehistoric stone paintings from the region to find out which materials last longest in that environment. The warnings will thus likely be engraved in granite. In addition, markers will be buried at random points and at various depths within the ground. These will be strongly magnetic and reflect radar, so as to tip off future geologists and archaeologists.
About 15 years from now, when the facility is nearly full and ready to be sealed, linguists will devise and test the pictograms and wording. But why not start now, with sites like — oh, I don’t know — Fukushima, Japan? People are still living nearby. One local woman told a German camera team it was because her kids don’t want to move away from their friends.
A stronger message
If we can’t talk sense into people who are around now, and whose language we can speak, what are the odds of convincing our descendants of a danger they can’t sense? Language and symbols may not be enough. Something much more visceral might be needed.
My suggestion is to build an artificial sand dune. Dunes made of particular kinds of sand focus sound waves as air passes among the grains. The dunes hum at a low frequency, often very loudly, which sounds downright spooky. Perhaps the materials in an artificial sand dune could be fine-tuned to create a frequency that’s infrasonic — just below the deepest sounds we can hear.
The body’s reaction to infrasound is fear and panic. Animals that live in close contact to the ground detect infrasound better than we do; this is why some of them know to run away or seek shelter when an earthquake or volcanic eruption is impending.
A spooky sound or a general feeling of unease might be a more effective way to communicate “Keep out!” than warnings in languages that will probably become extinct.
