The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

[dot_fennel]

In the early 90s, a group of experts issued fascinating, detailed recommendations on how to mark a site containing radioactive waste so that it would go undisturbed for the 10,000 years the waste would take to become harmless. Read this. (That page is excerpted from Appendix F to the full report, available here.) When you get to the drawings of some of their ideas you'll see that (though they didn't actually have one on staff) one type of expert whose wisdom would be useful in a project like this is "video-game designer".

Equally ambitious but less grave, and perhaps more optimistic, are the Long Now Foundation. LNF has much more going on than the last time I checked, including a beautiful chart showing the group's expenditures and projects over time that (perhaps because of inflation) takes the shape of several slim cones of light beaming into the distance, and the information that only one in seven LNF web denizens believes students will learn how to defend themselves against robots in the year 2150.

(WIPP links via laboratorium.)

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I was at Sandia during this time, and toured WIPP. It started a short-lived and slightly misguided fascination with soil science that brought me to NMSU for a bit.

Even without the sculpture, WIPP is pretty fucking cool.