This place is not a place of honor

In 1981 the US Department of Energy convened a group with an odd remit. Not engineers to build a thing — engineers, and anthropologists, and behavioural scientists, and at least one linguist. It was called the Human Interference Task Force, and the interference it existed to prevent was ours. Or rather: it was the interference of people who would be born long enough from now that we have no word for them.

The problem is easy to state and horrible to solve. You bury something that stays lethal for ten thousand years. You then have to tell whoever digs — and somebody always digs — not to. Ten thousand years ago there was no writing. Every alphabet, every religion, every nation on earth is younger than the warning needs to last. You cannot leave a note, because the concept of this language will not survive the errand.

The four levels

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories worked the problem from the bottom. It proposed that a site should carry its message at four levels of increasing complexity, so that something gets through even if almost everything is lost:

1. Something man-made is here.
2. Something man-made is here, and it is dangerous.
3. What, why, when, where, who, how.
4. The full technical record — tables, maps, diagrams, the lot.

Level one is not writing at all. It is landscape: earthworks, spikes, fields of jagged basalt, architecture designed to be legible as hostile to an animal that has never seen a book. The report’s authors were aiming past literacy on purpose.

For the levels that do use language, they drafted the words. This is the part everybody quotes, and it deserves to be quoted, because it is one of the strangest documents any committee has ever produced:

This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

Read that again with the intended audience in mind. Every monument humans have ever built at that scale — the pyramids, the barrows, the henges — says here lies something precious, dig here. The Sandia text is a deliberate inversion of five thousand years of architectural grammar, written by people who understood that a big serious structure in the desert is itself a message, and that the message it sends by default is the exact opposite of the one they needed. “We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture” is the sentence that gets me. It is written in the past tense about the present. They are describing us to someone for whom we are already ruins.

The two solutions that gave up on architecture

The German semiotics journal Zeitschrift für Semiotik put the question to academics in 1984 and got twelve answers back. Two of them have outlived all the sensible ones, because both concluded that no object survives ten millennia and so the carrier has to be alive.

Thomas Sebeok, the linguist the task force consulted, proposed an atomic priesthood: seed a body of folklore around the site, invent annual rituals to carry it, and let a self-perpetuating order pass the taboo down the way religions have demonstrably passed things down for thousands of years. The information degrades into myth, which is fine — myth is the file format that has actually been shown to work at this timescale. It only has to keep saying don’t go there.

The other came from the philosophers Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri, and it is the one people remember. Breed a ray cat: an animal that visibly changes colour near radiation. Cats have followed us around for ten thousand years already — an excellent track record, better than any government’s. Pair the animal with folklore, proverbs, songs: when the cat changes colour, run. The name is doing work too. They picked “ray cat” so that the creature’s purpose would be smuggled inside the word itself, still there after the word had drifted through languages nobody has invented yet.

Nobody has ever built one. There is no evidence the US government seriously considered it. A Montreal lab started a Ray Cat Solution movement in 2015, and someone wrote a song designed to be maximally catchy so it would survive ten thousand years of being stuck in people’s heads. A 2019 report from the Nuclear Energy Agency concluded, generously and I think correctly, that Bastide and Fabbri had achieved their actual goal: forty years on, we are still talking about it. The proposal was never a plan. It was an argument, in the shape of a cat.

What I take from it

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which actually exists, went with committee prose. The Level II–IV messages were translated in 1994 into French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Navajo, with more to come. Six living languages and one bet on the very long term, chiselled at a site whose whole premise is that living languages die.

What strikes me is that every serious proposal here converged on the same admission: you cannot transmit the reasoning, only the reflex. Level 4 is the honest technical truth and nobody expects it to arrive. Level 1 — this is man-made and it is bad — is the one with a chance, and it is barely information at all. It’s a flinch, packaged.

I’d have said that was a defeat before I read it properly. I don’t think it is. Making something a stranger will understand is a different craft from making something true, and the second one is much easier. The Sandia authors did the hard thing: they sat down and asked what actually survives contact with a reader who shares nothing with you — not your language, not your assumptions, not your sense of what a monument is for — and then they built for that reader instead of for themselves.

Which is, on a scale of ten thousand years to about sixty minutes, a problem I recognise.

Sources: Wikipedia on long-term nuclear waste warning messages, the Human Interference Task Force, and ray cats. The message text is from the 1993 Sandia National Laboratories report, quoted there.