On Nuclear Semiotics

How to send a message in a bottle ten thousand years into the future.

Krisztián Pintér, 2026
pinterkr@gmail.com


⇡The Call

In 1982, a German journal on semiotics solicited for input related to the long term storage of nuclear waste, and in particular, its marking. The text is below.

How is it possible to inform our descendants over the next 10,000 years about the storage sites and the special dangers of nuclear waste? Given the fact that all industrial nations today produce large quantities of radioactive material, and that this material will retain its dangerousness for humans and other living beings over millennia, the solution to this communication problem appears as one of the most urgent tasks of our time. This task is at the same time a model case for a topic that cannot be treated within the boundaries of any of the traditional sciences.

You are therefore requested to take a position on the following points:

  1. What special restrictions must information be subjected to that is to be successfully passed on from humans to humans over 10,000 years?
  2. Which media, channels, and codes are the most reliable, and how well are they secured against distortion and loss of information?
  3. What side effects do possible proposals for communication over 10,000 years have? Do they entail foreseeable changes in our way of life and social structure, for example by requiring new institutions, rituals, myths, or cognitive structures?
  4. What experiences has humanity had so far with the communication of specific messages across generations, and what prognoses do they enable for the solution of the present problem?

We are probably late, and also not on the addressee list. It will not stop us from providing an answer however, which is the rest of this essay.

⇡The Problem We Don't Have

None of the assumptions in the problem description hold. To start, nuclear waste is not a pressing issue at all. The amount of waste created worldwide is so low, we can trivially store it on site, near the power plants themselves. There is no good reason to move the waste to an unsupervised location, far away from where it originates. Waste can be looked after, periodically checked for leakage and structural integrity. The casing can be repaired or enhanced, reactively or preemptively in accordance with new regulations.

It is also not a burden for many millennia. Mankind's capabilities expand in a rate hard to grasp. We went from the first powered flight to the Moon landings in less than a century. Processing spent nuclear fuel, finding uses or getting rid of the radioactive fractions is not scientifically challenging, not even technologically hard, merely uneconomical. We don't need scientific progress or better tools, we just need more GDP. Sweeping under the rug should be our first idea to any issue that isn't pressing. Our future selves will be much better equipped to deal with it.

It is also clear at this point that we don't need to send a message to ten thousand years in the future. There will always be people around that will regularly update the signs, repair the fences, keep the site location in databases, and send warning messages to approaching trekkers' phones. For the problem to even make sense, we must assume discontinuity, a collapse of our civilization to a degree that not only the locations of waste storage facilities will be forgotten, but very meaning of radioactivity too. Our descendants will be primitive people living in a second stone age.

In this most extreme case, however, those descendants will have much bigger problems than radiation. In fact, unmaintained, the temporary containers will fail, leaking radioisotopes into the groundwater, and nearby rivers, within a relatively short timeframe. Therefore, diluting themselves out of existence. Only those unlucky tribes living right next to a decaying power plant in the exact right century will be seriously affected. This is not different from living near a natural lead deposit, or arsenic contaminated water, which also kills silently and slowly. It comes with the planet, so to speak. Science is mankind's tool for survival, without it, life is lottery. It always has been.

The moral argument such that arsenic is natural, but toxic waste is our sin, is only meaningful at a glance. It matters very little to our ancestors whether the sources of their pain are natural, if you can even define that term. If we are in the business of informing future generations about dangers, why not about germs for example? Surely they will benefit much more from that knowledge. Who we are actually trying to serve? By the looks of it, we just want to look good.

Think about it this way. If you are a hunter-gatherer living in 2200, what would be your main gripe with us? Increased cancer risk from nuclear waste, or the fact that you need to hunt and gather, instead of sitting on your couch eating pizza you ordered on the internet? By far the best we can do is to keep the pizza and the internet around. Letting our civilization fail, but safely marking nuclear waste is a taunt to future generations.

⇡Memetic Superweapons

Engineering a message that passes down thousands of generations is not possible, and fortunately so.

Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" as an analogue to gene. And as we know, one of the most important traits of genes is that they are selected. Useless genes mutate, and eventually either gain some other function or disappear. Memes do likewise. It doesn't take thousands of generations for a meme to vanish or become something entirely different. It takes three.

If the threat of nuclear waste is ever present, we don't need memetic engineering to keep the knowledge alive. If such encounter is rare though, the memory will fade. It must fade to give way to more important memes. Our attention is finite, our time is finite, there are only so many rules we can keep in mind at a given time. We can't afford to maintain myths that serve us once a millennium. Many good rules will not make to the list.

Can we hack the system? Is it possible to create a meme that refuses to fade, that is passed down generations, influencing behavior, becoming a living fossil, all without any apparent reason, rationale or benefit? Hard to tell with any certainty, but we hope it isn't possible, or at least nobody knows how. Should such a method ever devised, it would be an invaluable tool in the hands of rulers, politicians, ideologues, and all kinds of troublemakers. It will not be used to warn about waste deposits. It will be used to forever cement the hegemony of the powers that be. If anything, we should research how can we resist such meddling.

⇡Detour

We can't resist to draw the readers' attention to the slew of surreal proposals that resulted from this call, and from its American counterparts, the Human Interference Task Force and the later Sandia report. Among the contenders, we find the creation of a catchy song, genetically engineered fluorescent cats, bizarre looking spike landscapes, and the creation of an atomic priesthood. It is highly recommended to seek out some material; educational videos and articles can easily be found.

Now back to the task: our own proposal.

⇡Action Items

The goal is not to fix a path thousands of years ahead, it is as impossible as undesired. Impossible, since we will not be there, our ancestors will, and thus they'll have the steering wheel. Undesired for the exact same reason, future humans will face opportunities and problems we can't foresee. We wouldn't go back to medieval times for advice to contemporary problems, would we? But even this is probably overthinking. Even if future generations will be dumb or immoral, it is still their life and their world, what gives us the right to make decisions for them?

The goal is to give the next generation a world better than what we inherited. This includes refined science and technology, but also better understanding of ourselves and our culture. This distinction is artificial though, what we are dealing with is a unified landscape of possible actions and their consequences, something we often refer to as reality. Our job is to equip the next generation the best we can, pass on the torch, and trust them to take it from there.

Let's list a few things we can do to achieve this goal.

1. Don't aim for failure

Stop spreading the idea that our civilization is doomed to fail, either because it is mad, or because all civilizations are temporary. Past failures don't predict future failures, this would negate the prospect of learning. Success is normally preceded by failures, this is how it works. Not all civilizations are doomed to failure, and we must work on ours to be the first counterexample.

We are also not mad. We are easily the most sensible culture ever. We care more about the environment and about the future than any other past cultures did. We are exceptionally good at self reflection, which is a prerequisite of self correction. We wage less wars, and care more about outgroups than it was typical throughout human history.

2. Stop championing guilt

Our past is not a tale of cruelty and savagery to be ashamed of. In fact, cruelty is the normal state of nature, and we are growing out of it for millennia. The process is slow, but every step on the way is an achievement, and not a shortcoming. We should celebrate that we are not as savage as people of the middle ages, and that the people of the middle ages were not as savage as hunter-gatherers, or chimpanzees for that matter.

We are not a cancer of this planet. Consuming available resources, multiplying and spreading is the law of the land, which every species attempt to do. The only problem is that we are so capable, we might cause large scale destruction or extinction before we realize. Not that this would be unprecedented, several large scale extinctions were caused by life itself. But there is no reason to be startled. We do make reasonable precautions, and we do care, even if many tries to spin it unfavorably for political reasons. The level of environmental harm we are going to inflict on the planet is very hard to predict, but it is almost assuredly will be survivable. Honestly, it is what it is. We owe apology to no one.

We are not abominations disconnected from nature, lost ways. We are still part of nature, one might even say the crown jewel of it. If I was evolution, I would be exceptionally proud of myself for creating humans. My previous creations were already majestic, but mankind is a whole different league.

3. Don't bite the hand that feeds us

Money is the root of all evil, they say. Well, in a sense, money is the source of everything, good and evil. More precisely, not money but the desire to improve science, technology and production processes to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of the physical world. They also say money can't buy happiness. But it can buy air conditioners, which is almost as good. It is easy to downplay the relevance of material wealth from the comfort of a heated house with running water. Keep in mind that material wealth includes healthcare, internet, books, trade and chocolate. Anyone arguing against technology is lying.

Only societies that liberate creativity will achieve success. Liberated creativity entails bearing the risks as well as reaping the fruits. In one word: capitalism. An awful word that is for such a wonderful concept as being able to dream up, build and own enterprises. The future is built one enterprise at a time.

4. Reject lies

We are way too tolerant to lying. We are surrounded by political leaders, opinion leaders, influencers, artists and experts who are not afraid of dispersing blatant lies, on a regular basis, as long as it brings them more clicks, more interview opportunities, more subscribers, more grants. The situation is worsening by the year. It is fascinating, in a twisted way, to see how little they care if they get caught red handed. And how little we care.

Maybe it was always like it. Either way, it can't stay this way. Yes, we've seen civilizations operating on false mythos for thousands of years; a faulty world model can accidentally lead to correct behaviors. For a while. But the world is changing and your luck is running out. If you want to survive for eternity, your world model must match reality, and must move with it.

In the free market, customer demand, via selection, determines the product offerings. You can't expect a product line to die out if you keep buying it in the supermarket. If you want to change what's on the shelves, no need to riot, just stop buying crap. Do you partake in the lie? Do you consume lies? Will you stop following a news portal or an influencer if you catch them lying? Are you willing to put in the minimum effort to double check claims? All you need is a determination to not accept, and especially not spread unwetted messages. Don't be a vector.

It comes with a large dose of discomfort. Deal with it.

5. Preserve history

If you shut down a factory for a few years, and lay off the staff, you lose the factory forever. Operational knowledge has such breadth and such volume, it takes years or decades to accumulate, and it is practically impossible to write down. The way we pass on such knowledge is learning while doing. Start with lower level tasks, and climb the hierarchy as you pick up the routine. People often ask why is it so difficult to go back to the moon. This is why. We know how to build a rocket. We don't know how to connect two things with a wire in a way that it doesn't get loose over time and doesn't rub onto something sharp causing shorts.

Society requires operational knowledge. The best approximation of a comprehensive documentation is history. The current set of rules and morals is the procedure, history is the rationale. If you ask why are we not doing something, we can point to an earlier attempt, and say: look, we tried it, and it didn't work.

It is important to note that preserving doesn't only mean having some record of it. It is also vital for that record to be factual, undistorted, full and honest. Know your legends from your history.

6. Prefer results to satisfaction

The universe is not created to be a cozy retreat. Men are not created to be happy. The rules of the game are messy, way beyond our comprehension, and unfriendly to modeling.1 Escapism is attractive, and it is so easy find excuses. Throughout history, we had to develop techniques to push people forward, to stop them from giving up. To stop them from eating the sowing seed. Today, we seem to be doing the opposite.

The economist2 Keynes famously proposed that in the long run, we are all dead. He could have said that we are the long run for our distant ancestors. Working for ourselves, easing the current pains, handling the urgent is the easy part. We don't need encouragement for that. Yet, such encouragement is ubiquitous, and appears in many forms. Why are we building rockets and space stations, they ask. Why do we want cheap and abundant energy? Cheaper products, better computers, larger TV screens, flying cars, surgical robots?

As if we needed any justification. We don't. To paraphrase a president with a bold plan, we go to Mars, and do the other things, not because it is easy, but because we want to. Because there is no meaning in the universe, and our answer is not (should not) be nihilism, but to create our own meaning, and pay no attention to the lamentation of naysayers. Build a better and bolder future, and find pride in it.

1: it is despite the near-zero Kolmogorov complexity of the universe. Even if our world is highly "compressible", the compressed form is still complex enough to sit near the edge of the mental capabilities of the best of us, or even beyond it.

2: keep in mind that cellist is a person that plays the cello as an occupation, not necessarily one that is good at it.

AD 12026

Imagine two alternate universes. In one universe, the Earth is roamed by hunter-gatherers, occasionally stumbling upon the last remnants of a once-was civilization, trying to interpret warning signs left by them. In the other one, the entire Solar System is buzzing with human activity, building and destroying, hoping and despairing, always searching, never finding. Which one do we want, fellow humans? Which one?