[This Place is Not a Place of Honor] Imaginary Book Review: The 10,000 Year Telephone Game

    The vast variety of proposed nuclear waste warnings, from 10-foot tall granite spikes to glowing cats, is instantly intriguing; however, many of the solutions seem to exist in isolation from the others, with a clear gap between the odd-ball marker proposals and the DOE proposals. The only sources which seem to discuss the entire breadth of the proposals are news and magazine articles, which barely scratch the surface of the topic so as not to bore the average reader. Nuclear Semiotics: The 10,000 Year Telephone Game bridges this gap, offering comprehensive background to the solutions, as well as their relationships to each other. It opens on an almost-narrative cautionary note, describing how millennia-old monuments such as Stonehenge and the serpent mound have become all but meaningless today, a wonder to behold but impossible to interpret. Proceeding in a chronological order, it first gives background to the field of semiotics and some of the previous work of those on the human interference task force, supplying the reader with context as to how the team arrived at their conclusions. When it finally describes the off-color solutions prompted by the Zeitschrift für Semiotik poll in 1984, it highlights the skeptical response of the Human Interference Task Force to each idea, and the solutions are referenced often in later chapters on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report in 1993, tracing the inspirations for the Sandia team’s menacing earthworks back to previous research in the field. With a particular focus on how each solution can influence a network of other marker proposals, The 10,000 Year Telephone Game gives its reader a full understanding of the small world of nuclear semiotics.