Communicating With The Future

[Grant Barrett]

An interesting paper on how to express the message that a site
icontains nuclear waste to future generations, when such sites may be
dangerous for tens of thousands of years.

http://www.halcyon.com/blackbox/hw/wipp/wipp.html

 From the Executive Summary: "Sandia National Laboratories charged a
panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking
system for the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, and estimate
the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion. The goal
of the marking system is to deter inadvertent human interference with
the site. The panel of experts was divided into two teams. This is the
report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist
(who is at home with different, but contemporary, cultures), an
astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence), an
archaeologist (who is at home with cultures that differ in both time
and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how
people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within
them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a
materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for
implementing our marking system concepts). The report is a team effort.
There is much consensus on the design criteria and necessary components
of the marking system. Understandably, there is some divesity of
opinion on some matters, and this is evident in the text."