Forbidden Landscapes: The Strange World Of Nuclear Semiotics

On March 7th, 2022, Russian forces invading Ukraine took over the Chernobyl power plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Although the occupation has remained calm, the risks of taking over such a site are unavoidable. Already reports have trickled in of radiation spikes as military equipment churned up contaminated ground. “The situation is complicated and tense,” Yuri Fomichev, the mayor of the nearby city of Slavutych, admits.

The crisis has also brought up a question first raised in the early 1980’s. How do you keep future generations away from these hot spots? How do you create a warning system that could survive 10,000 years and make sense to future visitors?

Welcome to the world of nuclear semiotics. Semiotics from the Greek word sema or grave. An interdisciplinary field of research, it consists of scientists, philosophers, psychologists and science fiction writers, all united in a common purpose: keeping our descendants out of trouble.

Nuclear semiotics is the sinister twin of Carl Sagan’s Golden Plate. In 1977, when the Pioneer 10 space probe was launched, Sagan was consulted to design a record to communicate our place in the solar system. The result was a minimalist drawing, a pictogram of the human race. This led others to ponder how we could tell future generations about the hazards left behind in the environment. Signs similar to Sagan’s were proposed, but the results were unsatisfying.

That’s when the group landed on another possibility.

Hostile Architecture.

The way to discourage future generations from visiting these hazardous sites was to make them look as threatening as possible.

How could that be achieved?

The group made several suggestions.

Landscape of Thorns: Fifty foot high concrete pillars with jutting spikes that impede access and suggest danger to the body.

Black Hole: A mass of black concrete that absorbs solar energy and becomes impassably hot.

Forbidding Blocks: Bulks that might intimidate visitors and encourage them to turn back.

All of these solutions come with risk. By building such grand structures to warn people, are we making these sites more alluring? Treasures are often accompanied by threats and warnings. It stands to reason that the bigger the warnings and threats, the bigger the potential reward.

I can’t help but think of Cthulhu trapped in the hostile architecture of R’yleh.

No one has gone down there to explore, right?

Right?!

That is not death which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons, even death may die.

-H.P. Lovecraft