ten thousand years

Reading the Sandia National Laboratories nuclear waste warning messages report - specifically the Team A apprendix, the one with the famous passage. We made a post about that passage a while ago but now we're thinking about the task they were set.

Like, any D&D player will tell you that a big warning sign with a clear map pointing to the exact place you're being warned about is enticing as all getout. But what are you even supposed to do?

Like, that's the thing, right? Imagine you, the reader of this post, were supposed to make it so some rando looking for treasure a thousand years from now - as far from now as "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum/þēod-cyninga⁠ þrym gefrūnon" is from now - would see the notice-board you put up and go, "Oh, I shouldn't dig that up"? How do you make it seem like a bad idea to try and get at something which clearly was made hard to reach? Even knowing it was a trash heap wouldn't help - archaeologists love trash heaps, love seeing what people had and threw away! It says here in this warning message that there's machine tools in that pit! We could use some machine tools! So what do you do?

And what do you do if you have to get that message across for ten times a thousand years?

It's easy to crack jokes about "this place should be shunned and left uninhabited" but there's something very compelling about looking at a manifestly impossible task and asking, "okay, but if we had to, what do we do?" It's a kind of bravery, to consider a horrible situation honestly and forthrightly, and do your best to manage it.

We don't have a solution for nuclear waste. But maybe we can try something. And maybe we can learn something from trying, even if we fail.

And maybe there's something comforting about spending time in a world where we do try, where we don't throw up our hands and say "it would mean a smaller yacht for Jeff Bezos so there's nothing we can do". A kind of grounded science fiction, not about starships but about dirt, and rock, and salt, and public health.

A suggestion we saw in the report that never really got turned into a joke was the visitor's center. The place where people visiting this very expensive public works site could go look at some placards, talk to museum staff, learn about the society that made nuclear waste and the society that tried to protect its children from it. Maybe watch a looping video with a CGI representation of the site and its design. Buy a hat with a picture of the berms embroidered on it.

Or not. Who knows what a visitor center would look like after ten thousand years?