Communicating through Time

The Read

The Hiding Place: Inside the World’s First Long-Term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste, by Robert Macfarlane.

An excerpt from Robert Macfarlane’s upcoming “exploration of the world beneath our feet,” this article concerns Onkalo, the first long-term nuclear waste disposal site.

The piece and prose is beautiful from start to finish, but I can’t stop thinking about the challenge that Robert Macfarlane poses about halfway through:

How to communicate with unknown beings‑to‑be across chasms of time to the effect that they must not intrude into these burial chambers, thus violating the waste’s quarantine?

A coalition of specialists from a range of fields — from graphic design to biology — were brought together to figure out how to communicate a message of grave importance across an inconceivable period of time.

As someone whose job it is to come up with the best way to communicate a message to an audience, I can’t let go of how beautiful and impossible of a challenge these people were given. How do you make a message last 100,000 years? Not through language. Not through stone.

It’s an impossible ask, but it’s beautiful to consider.