A Halloween Contest
How would you solve this government problem?
Give this one some thought. It’s not a race. Take your time.
In the late-ish ‘90s, creative people were buzzing about a national contest. The United States government was soliciting ideas, ways to ward future generations away from nuclear-waste dumps. The warding-off device couldn’t be signage, because no system of semantics had survived for the tens of thousands of years needed for radioactivity to dissipate.
Centuries from now, the site would still have to frighten or otherwise repel anyone who might venture there and become contaminated. And the device had to be self-sustaining. People talked about tunnels or horns that would use prevailing winds to create subsonic “brown” noise; this would sicken anyone who came within earshot.
People talked about breeding a plant that would emit a constant stink. They talked about an image that would transcend all time and scare away anyone or anything who saw it. The prize was big. A half million dollars or something. A sum that had every writer and painter and musician talking.
As far as I know, no one ever claimed the prize.
Now, given that premise, how would you frighten living things away from a site for the next zillion years? An army of self-replicating clones? A dense colony of hybrid poisonous snakes or scorpions?
The best answers will get Halloween gift boxes
I’ll set the deadline as October 25th. Please post your entries below in Comments.
I will not try to sell the government your scary idea.
Or we could create a horrible stench. I don't know ow how the nuclear subways do it but we could recreat that smell and everyone will stay away
The problem here lies in our ability as a species to not carry wisdom from age to age via genetics. It’s carried via written or spoken text. The problem with drawing a picture, making a sign, or an announcement is that future generations will not understand the intent. Maybe they will think that we are trying to hide treasures and go anyway.
Unfortunately death is the only thing that a species understands. So each future species that learns of this dangerous place must communicate in their own way they understand.
I say we make the facility very difficult to get into, one way in, one way out. Long. Dark. Imposing. Hard to traverse. Then after a certain distance we allow radiation to tick up quickly so they feel terrible and decide to leave, with enough energy to make it back to their civilization, to tell the story of where they went, and die shorty afterwards, as a warning to not go again as long as they can transfer that information to each other.
So the mechanism is a sacrifice.