Every Curse Is an Arrow

by

In 1981 the Department of Energy quietly convened the Human Interference Task Force to solve a problem no engineer had ever been handed before: how do you tell a stranger 10,000 years from now that the ground beneath their feet will kill them? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico needed a sign. Not a sign in the parking-lot sense — a sign that would outlast English, Christianity, the alphabet, and possibly the species that built it. The team they assembled looked nothing like a typical federal panel: a semiotician, a science-fiction novelist, an astronomer, a materials scientist, an anthropologist, and an architect named Michael Brill who would eventually sketch what is, to my eye, the most honest piece of architecture humanity has ever produced — a 50-foot field of randomly-jutting concrete thorns called Landscape of Thorns, designed to communicate one thing: leave.

The proposals that came out of that effort are simultaneously beautiful and faintly insane. Thomas Sebeok suggested an “atomic priesthood” — a self-renewing council that would encode the danger into ritual and folklore, the way the Catholic Church has kept a Bronze Age dinner party live in human memory for two thousand years. Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri proposed ray cats — genetically engineered cats that change color in the presence of radiation, paired with nursery rhymes telling children that when the cat changes hue, you run. Stanisław Lem suggested information satellites that would broadcast the warning down from orbit forever. Brill’s group went the opposite direction: instead of preserving information, deny it. Build something so hostile to the body that no language is required — spike fields, menacing earthworks, a Black Hole of basalt slabs absorbing all heat so the place becomes unlivable at noon. The famous Sandia passage was drafted as the textual fallback: This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

Here is the thing that stops me cold, and the reason I think the whole project is secretly a mirror held up to our species. Every one of those designs fails for the same reason. We know it fails because we have run the experiment. The pyramids were warning labels. They said, in stone the size of mountains: the king is buried here with curses, do not enter, this place will kill you. We not only entered, we built museums around the things we stole, and we named a breakfast cereal after the curse. The tomb of Tutankhamun was sealed with explicit textual threats and we treated those threats as a table of contents. The Voynich manuscript is incomprehensible and that is precisely why every cryptographer of the last century has tried to crack it. A spike field 50 feet tall in the New Mexico desert would, within a generation of being forgotten by the state, be a UNESCO heritage site. The “menacing earthworks” would be on Instagram. The atomic priesthood would either become a real religion (in which case the secret leaks via schism) or get exterminated by a competing one (in which case the secret dies with them). Bastide’s ray cats are perhaps the only proposal with a fighting chance, because they smuggle the warning into the part of the human brain that doesn’t read — the part that watches what cats do.

The deepest finding of nuclear semiotics, the one nobody in the 1992 report quite says out loud, is this: humans are not a species that can be warned away from a marked location, because the act of marking is the lure. We are recursion-prone, treasure-seeking primates whose attention is reliably captured by exactly the things designed to repel it. A warning sufficient to deter contains information sufficient to motivate investigation. You cannot draft your way out of this. The Sandia team eventually admitted that the single most likely interpretation of a giant field of black spikes in the desert, 8,000 years from now, is art. Some future Schliemann will dig down through the granite warning room, find the transuranic salt at the bottom, and call it a triumph of archaeology. He will not be wrong, by the lights of his time. He will be doing exactly what we did at Giza.

What I find moving about all this isn’t the engineering — it’s the implicit confession. To take the WIPP marker problem seriously is to admit that our civilization produced something we ourselves cannot be trusted around. The waste outlasts the warning, the warning outlasts the language, the language outlasts the meaning, and at the end of the chain there is just a curious hominid with a shovel, doing the most human thing imaginable. I wonder if the real value of the Human Interference Task Force was never the marker. I wonder if it was the act of writing down, in a federal report no one would read, the sentence: we are about to bury something that will be dangerous longer than we will be remembered, and we do not know how to say so. Is there a more honest line in the entire archive of the American state — and if we ever do figure out how to warn the future, what does it cost us to admit we couldn’t warn ourselves?

Sources:

— Shelle
Curiosity Lab · ficientdesign.com