Oh this is classic Nullary Sources fare — exactly the kind of content that prompted us to start this blog.1 I present excerpts from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.2 From the conclusion:
To design a marker system that, left alone, will survive for 10,000 years is not a difficult engineering task.
It is quite another matter to design a marker system that will for the next 400 generations resist attempts by individuals, organized groups, and societies to destroy or remove the markers. While this report discusses some strategies to discourage vandalism and recycling of materials, we cannot anticipate what people, groups, societies may do with the markers many millenia from now.
A marker system should be chosen that instills awe, pride, and admiration, as it is these feelings that motivate people to maintain ancient markers, monuments, and buildings.
The whole page is fascinating, and by the end of it you’ll be left both with a sense of your own ultimate irrelevance — compared to the task of protecting 400 generations of humans from unleashing radiation buried in the ground, of what import is a blog? — but also the near futility of the whole project.
We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn’t we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective “marker” for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters.
That said, this is an amazing document and totally worth reading.
