Think negligent pollution and masking the CO2 emissions of your factory are bad? This desert land in Nevada has endured more than 900 nuclear detonations at the hands of the US government. The testing ground – from which the iconic “mushroom cloud” gained prominence – was always a pretty barren wasteland; now it’s a barren wasteland with extremely high levels of radiation (above and below ground) which are carried on the wind to southern Utah.
It is a point of controversy as to whether or not the testing is actually having a significant effect on the health of those in nearby areas; however it’s beyond doubt that the plains of Nevada themselves have been blasted, burned, scorched and razed beyond any hope of life.
The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) is located among 1,300 square miles of desert in the American Southwest. The NNSS is the location of decades of nuclear testing including the Yucca Flats, dubbed “the most bombed place on Earth.” Unsurprisingly, given this concentration of explosive tinkering, the NNSS has now turned its attention to storing radioactive waste, allowing it to decay over tens of thousands of years where it poses no harm to people. To this aim they created the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
In 1981, the US Government brought together a group of linguists, scientists, science-fiction writers, anthropologists, and futurists, called the group the “Human Interference Task Force,” and tasked the group with preventing people from coming into contact with the waste for 10,000 years.
The thinkers set about creating a system to warn possible future people regardless of what languages they spoke. Their ideas were thought-provoking, creative and at times seemed to exist more in fantasy than in reality. One suggested an atomic priesthood to pass down warnings from one generation to the next. Authors Jean-Francois Bastide and Paolo Fabbri suggested breeding cats that would change color whenever they got close to radiation. While not due to make a final report until 2028, the current plan is a series of rings of granite pillars and earthen walls inscribed with warnings in current languages with spaces for more.
Some of the documents from this research, like 2004's Permanent Markers Implementation Plan are fascinating reads. How do you leave messages to a future people who may be teleporting and riding chrome rockets—or living in post-apocalyptic death squads? How do you create a universal symbol for danger? Skulls aren’t universal: just look at Día de los Muertos. The papers talk about how to build structures that almost hurt to look at, enormous spikes projecting out of a field; ugly, jarring, asymmetrical blocks; sites that suggest misery instead of honor or shelter. These are designs that are meant to be viscerally repulsive to all humans, in order to keep them away.
One such proposed project is "Forbidding Blocks":
Stone from the outer rim of an enormous square is dynamited and then cast into large concrete/stone blocks, dyed black. Each is about 25 feet on a side. They are deliberately irregular and distorted cubes. The cubic blocks are set in a grid, defining a square, with 5-foot wide "streets" running both ways. You can even get "in" it, but the streets lead nowhere, and they are too narrow to live in, farm in, or even meet in. It is a massive effort to deny use. At certain seasons it is very, very hot inside because of the black masonry's absorption of the desert's high sun-heat load. It is an ordered place, but crude in form, forbidding, and uncomfortable.
These goals are extremely difficult to try and implement. What we see as a symbol of death and danger today might be a symbol of respect or celebration in the future. Languages change and disappear, and how exactly do you communicate to the future that an immense structure is “not a place of curiosity” like Stonehenge?
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