Warning Signals

Symbols for 10,000 years

Since the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Government has been planning to create gigantic, underground waste dumps where the deadly byproducts of nuclear-power and -weapons plants could be isolated. The Department of Energy is currently considering nine sites in six states for the high-level radioactive garbage. But since the material will remain toxic for thousands of years, the Department of Energy contracted a special 13-member study panel in 1980 to explore how future inhabitants of earth might be protected from hazardous waste sites. The Human Interference Task Force, a team of nuclear physicists, linguists, engineers, anthropologists and psychologists, has come up with a number of suggestions on how to commmunicate with the 120th century.

At the heart of the committee's problem was the unpredictable ways in which languages evolve: the panel had to devise forms of communication that could be understood by the next 300 or so generations. One suggestion is a waste repository with a series of raised earth barriers built around it in a triangular pattern. Within this wedge would be monument-like markers, as durable and detectable as England's Stonehenge monoliths. These structures would bear triangular warning symbols or cartoons as simple in design as the 17,000-year-old cave drawings by Cro-Magnon man in France. One proposed sequence of drawings: three human figures stand by a dump site; one of them drinks from a bubbling well and falls dead.

One of the most intriguing proposals came from Thomas Sebeok, a professor of semiotics at Indiana University. Sebeok called for the creation of an "atomic priesthood" to pass along, over the millenniums, rituals and legends that would explain the dangers of waste dumps. Such forms of communication, said Sebeok, could contain "the veiled threat that to ignore the mandate would be tantamount to inviting some sort of supernatural retribution." The task force cautioned that "there is controversy among historians over the efficacy of oral transmission as a method for accurately conveying information over long time periods" but suggested further study of the technique.

While the task force won credit for tackling a complex, difficult subject, its proposals struck some critics as naive. "The whole report wasn't that high level a job," complains a congressional staffer. "They're really going to have to come up with something better."