Talking across Time

The young designer Jon Lomberg had already built up a reputation as Design Director on the legendary NASA Voyager Golden Record when, in the 1990s, he received what was perhaps the most unusual commission of his life: the US Department of Energy asked him to work with a team of experts from various disciplines to develop a system of universal warning signs that would still need to be understood by people living 10,000 years from now. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a huge underground repository for nuclear waste that was still in the planning stages at the time, would thus be permanently protected from unwitting intruders. Today, the repository has long been a reality, located in a salt dome 660 metres below ground, somewhere in the sparsely populated no-man’s land of southern New Mexico. Since 1999, it has been filled year after year with tonne after tonne of nuclear waste, which will have lost none of its deadly radioactive power tens of thousands of years from now. Warning signs above the facility, however, will not be installed until the repository – which will be completely filled one day – is permanently sealed for good. In his lecture, Jon Lomberg, now seventy-three, reports on the unique challenge of developing a universal sign language that must be understood by all the generations and civilizations that follow us – far into an unknown future.