For my research essay I will recommend a plan to communicate to an unknowable future race of beings the catastrophic danger of my buried nuclear waste. In the modern day, there is nothing from the past that is an unknown danger, no magical trap or unknown toxin. But with our vast technological advancement, we now have those dangers that are unseen, unheard, and only detectable with modern age tools. Nuclear waste is one of those, the remains of fission in a reactor that is radioactive, will take hundreds of thousands of years to fully decay, and cannot be changed. Fortunately, it is easily contained in leaded caskets, stored deep underground in designated facilities, to be left there to safely decay in an unchanging state. Yet what would happen in one, or even ten thousand years in the future, and that in some way or another humanity has regressed or even disappeared entirely, someone discovers this waste storage site, and mislabels it? How do we communicate over an unknown time, that something is dangerous?

Mongoose Sources:

Source 1: Symbols Shifting Culture

Background: As time goes on, symbols of certain aspects in the world change overtime, be it similar to that of the swastika representing peace or rebirth being rebranded to hate and genocide. Time and time again the world changes and so do the interpretation of symbols that we hold dear.

How I intend to use it:

It’s to give a good example of a symbols and how they change. Something that can’t be found in nature, easily made and recognized, yet the meaning changes. The nuclear trefoil is one of those, but what would happen if rather than a hazard, it’s seen as a weapon, even if the items being marked as, it cannot be used as weapons and are a decaying waste that has the shape and marking of a valuable metal.

Source 2: How the English language evolved throughout history

Background: Development of how English has changed throughout the past thousand years, with how it was written to how the way it was spoken.

How I intend to use it: It helps give good examples of how changing language can be, and that English in the future might not be a language the majority of people speak. If a sign was warning us in Latin, the vast majority of people wouldn’t be able to understand it, and most would completely ignore the sign.

Source 3: Hostile Architecture

Background: Architecture is developed now to be hostile away to keep homeless away. It is almost an art, making an area change from one of friendliness or neutrality to one that pulls at your primal thoughts, that the area is dangerous or could be harmful to you.

How I intend to use it: It allows me to poke into the solutions that could be made, as trying to describe a tool or hostile area being made without examples is difficult. It’s easier to explain how a dangerous looking monolith or “forest” could scare off someone or something or create a sense of unease and push them away from the danger without having to tell them.

Source 4: Nature of Fear

Background: Explains the way fear works in animals, how the situation and environment institute fear and unease in someone or something. Something that is a predator or danger to oneself goes toward fear, it goes toward the base instinct, to preserve oneself, and that fear makes them flee, or fight.

How I intend to use it: Knowing how fear works is a great way to both describe fear in a way, and to find solutions that use this primal/instinctual feelings to keep someone away from our danger, without having to tell them with signs or symbols. Having people fear something and teach that fear to their children, AND have something hostile that constitutes with that fear keeps someone away.

Source 5: How the color red influences our behavior

Background: How the color red influences the way humans behave, either how it is represented with certain shades and how it sends signals to the brain.

How I intend to use it: I intend to use it to easily associate something that most people know, to something abstract. Using the color red, you can associate it with positive things that we know, roses, love, etc. But to a group of, maybe tribals, red could be associated with something else, danger, or death. Red as a color itself could be where blood was, which signifies danger. Smelling or seeing blood usually has animals change, be it the smell or the sight, which institutes fear, which goes back to danger.