Planning for a million years
BLDGBLOG has a fascinating interview with geoscientist Abraham Van Luik about how to confine nuclear waste for 1,000,000 years at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. One of the problems is keeping people away from the site in the far future:
We have looked very closely at what WIPP is doing -- the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. They did a study with futurists and other people-sociologists and language specialists. They decided to come up with markers in seven languages, basically like a Rosetta Stone, with the idea that there will always be someone in the world who studies ancient languages, even 10,000 years from now, someone who will be able to resurrect what the meanings of these stelae are. They will basically say, "This is not a place of honor, don't dig here, this is not good material," etc.