How to Design a Warning To Last 10,000 Years

We can't keep a phone working for 10 years, but some designs will need to last 10,000 years if we want humanity to survive. Right now, there are nuclear waste sites that will stay dangerous for several millennia. Our job is to stop our descendants from digging up the radioactive waste. If they don't understand our warnings, they won't survive. But how do you warn people who won't share our language, symbols, or culture? How do you design architecture and objects that communicate with strangers thousands of years in the future? And this goes way beyond nuclear waste sites. This video is sponsored by Framer, a noode website builder that lets you launch your site in minutes. But anyway, the problem is humans think in months, not millennia. Our entire lives are run by quarterly financial cycles, weekly trends, and even the recent past is foreign to us. Show this thing to a 10-year-old and they won't know what it is, and they certainly won't know how to use it or repair it. But this VCR was the most common way to watch movies only a few decades ago. If we struggle to explain a 30-year-old gadget to people alive today, how are we supposed to design a message to people thousands of years from now? It's really complicated. For example, back to the nuclear site. Why not just make a giant indestructible sign that can last 10,000 years to warn people? That'll keep people out, right? Nope. Language changes too much. Early modern English is barely understandable to us. Just try reading original Shakespeare manuscripts. — letting I dare not wait upon I would like the poor cat of the adage. I have no idea what I just said. And that's only 400 years old, about 4% of the minimum amount of time the sign would need to be understandable for future humans. If you go back 1,200 years, English isn't even English as we know it anymore. It's basically unreadable without training. Cunia form is one of the earliest written languages and it's only a thousand years old and there are really only a couple hundred scholars who still understand the writings today. Okay, so language won't work, but what about designing a symbol? Some symbols have lasted for thousands of years and have become timeless icons. This symbol has been around for 7,000 years in southern Asia as a sign of health, luck, and prosperity in the Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Certainly, the meaning of this symbol would never change. Okay, so that idea probably isn't going to work. So yeah, the meaning of symbols changes just like the language does. So a giant indestructible sign or symbol isn't going to save us, at least not by itself. And if we fail to communicate real danger in this context, innocent people of the future will pay for the mistakes we've made today. It gets even worse when we realize that one consistent feature of humanity across all history is that we are very curious. If the designs we make today fail to convey danger, but instead look intriguing, mysterious, or sacred, future archaeologists will want to dig there. The more dangerous you make it seem, the more curious people are going to be. This is like the core theme of pretty much every treasure hunting adventure movie ever. Now, I've painted a pretty bleak picture, and it seems like it's guaranteed that our future descendants are doomed to dig up a bunch of nuclear waste by accident. But through the power of design, there still is hope. The Aulan hand axe proves this point. For over a million years, across continents, people kept making the same teardrop shape. While it's true that no single hand axe was used for that entire time, the recipe for how it was made persisted. It survived because anyone from anywhere could recreate it from local stone with no written instructions. When the object can't last, the pattern for its use can survive. That's an important hint at how we make an object that is understandable tens of thousands of years later. To be fair, we don't know exactly what these hand axes were used for. But if you see a sharpened edge like this, it's fair to assume that it's designed to cut or tear. Even if the materials themselves might fail, if we can keep the tradition and culture around it alive, we have a fighting chance. And if a designed object's function can be understood just from its shape, it travels farther through time. For this video, I spent a lot of time thinking about what designs can last thousands of years while still serving their functional purpose. And I came across this story. In 1797, two boys discovered a subterranean cave in the Mendip Hills of England. Inside, they found scattered bones, barbed spears, periwinkle shells strung as necklaces, and several other ceremonial objects. Archaeologists later learned that this cave held the remains of a small hunter gatherer society more than 10,000 years ago. It was a burial site. Burial sites are some of the earliest and most lasting man-made designs. They span cultures and eras, and it's a very straightforward design brief that simply asks the living to leave a place undisturbed. The finality of death is one of the only things our architecture can carry cleanly across millennia. As bleak as that might sound, this gives me hope since the nuclear waste sites we were talking about before are essentially burial sites, too. We bury our dead to remember, but we're burying this waste to forget it and keep people safe long after we're gone. As a technology for keeping something intact, burial is simple and smart. Hide it deep and let time do its work. This is a trend that you'll see across this video quite often. But this has a fatal twist. You'll notice that our first impulse was to explore that cave in the mend hills of England. The moment a foreign culture discovers a

site, things change. Markers that once said, "Leave this alone," become invitations to unearth the burial. That's the tension. We worship Egyptian pyramids for surviving thousands of years and then feel compelled to crack them open to see what's inside. So, the question becomes, how do you keep people from exploring an ancient burial site? Charles Baldwin, an environmental health engineer, led an experiment to design the biohazard symbol. In testing, this symbol was demonstrated to be the most memorable with no prior meaning or association. He wanted something that was memorable but meaningless so he could educate people as to what it means. It became a national standard and unlike most other symbols, it doesn't reference an existing physical object or idea. But as mentioned before, even the most iconic symbols with the richest history can only go so far. Meanings do change. This symbol can mean many different things depending on the context. It can mean pirates. It can mean poison. It's also associated with treasure, Johnny Depp, or Halloween. So, other experiments throughout the 1970s tried different methods to communicate danger across all cultures and languages. One answer was to skip symbols entirely and make the place feel scary through architecture. Spike fields, broken angles, jagged blocks. The goal is simple. Trigger an instinct to stay away without needing a shared language. Spiky, jagged angles are pretty universally viewed with fear. It's biologically hardwired in us to see them as off-putting or scary. But even still, what looks terrifying to one culture can read as monumental art to another. Maybe the intimidating architecture would fascinate some curious people and motivate them to explore further. Other scientists thought of putting the scream face on signs, but once again, you risk turning a warning into an attraction. In my opinion, the design of this particular site should be unceremonious and uninteresting. No doors, no decorations, nothing that sparks curiosity. make the site extremely low charisma and as high clarity as reasonably possible. But really, the best way to ensure that the nuclear waste stays buried underground goes way beyond the site itself. It's about creating redundancy and bureaucracy, public registries, off-site records, and boring recurring practices that keep the do not dig story alive without turning the place into a glamorous legend. It needs to be a system more than anything. Just like the Ashulian handax, you need to protect the cultural and contextual understanding to make the idea live on. You know, we've talked a lot today about how proper communication and presentation can quite literally save humanity from inevitable doom. Some designs last because they're impressive, others because they're everywhere and easy to access. Your website can be both. That's why I want to quickly talk to you about today's sponsor, Framer. It's a no code website building tool that's genuinely impressive. I've been using Framer myself to build out a new design portfolio. And honestly, it's game-changing. You don't need to know any code. It just feels like using the design tools you're already familiar with. But instead of static mock-ups, you're creating real live animated websites. Here's how easy it is. I started by picking one of over 1,000 professionally designed templates and customized it to showcase my work. You can even add super slick, no code scroll animations to make everything feel polished and interactive. Custom domains and lightning fast hosting are built in, so publishing is really just a few clicks. The entire process took me just a couple of hours from start to finish. Framer has built-in SEO tools and analytics so you can understand how and where visitors engage with your work. It also has an advanced content management system to help you manage and organize your website efficiently. It's perfect for anyone looking to launch a portfolio, marketing site, or landing page. Framework can help you make whatever you need to put your best foot forward online. If you're a creative person or marketer or really anyone who wants to quickly launch a professional, visually impressive website without the hassle, Framer is the tool for you. Launch your site for free at framer. com and use my promo code for a free month of Framer Pro. This one's worth the hype. I highly recommend Framer. Back to the video. Without cultural caretakers, even the most durable design drifts into myth or becomes forgotten. The Swallbard seed vault is fighting against this possibility. It's designed to be remembered and preserved. It's essentially a doomsday vault burrowed 100 meters into Arctic bedrock within the perafrost holding over a million seed samples of crops from around the world. About 15 crops supply 90% of the world's food, which means a single blight, war, or grid failure can destroy entire species of plants that we rely on to survive. If climate change or disaster wipes out all vegetation, or even some of it, this vault contains many of the seeds that could help us regrow. Even if the power fails at Swallbard, the cold perafrost could keep the seeds preserved for hundreds or in some cases thousands of years. There are already hundreds of seed banks very similar to this, but they're vulnerable to flood, fire, politics, and war. That's why Spalbart exists as a backup to all these backups. Every collection of seeds here is a duplicate of something stored elsewhere

sealed and still owned by the depositor. Organizations store their seeds here, and the owner can withdraw them whenever they need to. And the system works. During the Syrian civil war, researchers were no longer able to access their seed collection in Aleppo because it became a dangerous war zone. If the samples were destroyed in the fog of war, some plant species would be gone forever. But they fortunately had backups at Swalbard. They withdrew seeds from there, regrew them in safer locations, and then redeposited fresh duplicates in Lebanon. The Swalbard vault sits a few hundred miles from the North Pole on a frozen island, which makes it relatively safe from war and natural disaster. But what really keeps it alive is institutional will. Hundreds of countries and organizations have a stake in making sure the vault survives. Without that institutional heft, even the most durable concrete will eventually crumble. Most designed objects that last a while tend to have institutional backing. The building looks very severe and bleak on the outside in my opinion. And when you go inside, it's not much better. It just looks like a freezing hyperfunctional Amazon warehouse. More like a morg than an inspiring museum. And I guess when you're designing something that's meant to preserve humanity's future in the middle of the Arctic, there just isn't a lot of room for excess. But I really do wish that the design rose to the occasion a little bit more, especially considering how important it is. The one humane gesture is the glowing glass and steel beacon on the facade. A shifting band of light contrasted against a brutalist concrete wedge symbolizing hope in a desolate place. It's a quiet signal that something human is being protected here. The Spalbard seed vault stands in sharp contrast to monuments that try to endure by becoming important cultural objects rather than reliable systems. Strategically, this can work. People are more likely to protect things that have cultural value. That's true. But that cultural value also can become a target. When a nation is conquered, an invader's takeover is not just about acquiring land and resources. It's about destroying cultural identity. This is why one of the first targets of any conquest starts with destroying libraries. A new regime ensures their vision of the future survives by erasing the past. The library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most significant knowledge projects of the ancient world. It was damaged and destroyed as regimes shifted. The conqueror Umar I supposedly said that the library of Alexandria was not necessary since his religious books had all of the knowledge anyone could need. So he burnt the library of Alexandria to the ground. It was over 600,000 scrolls in total or the equivalent of like 120,000 modern books. The scrolls were reportedly used to heat the public baths of Alexandria and it supposedly took 6 months to burn all of it. Only 1 in 10 Greek classics survived the burnings, gone forever. And this is hardly a rare occurrence. The burning of the books during the Chin dynasty, the Mongolian sacking of Baghdad, the Spanish destruction of Mayan cotices, Nazi book burnings, the list is endless. It can take centuries to build a cultural treasure and only a single careless act to destroy it. That's why starting a new with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. Imperial sackings, purges, and book burnings are all incredibly harmful because they're so easy to achieve and almost impossible to undo. But there are rare exceptions to this rule. In 1196, the Sultan of Egypt wanted to destroy the pyramids. Allegedly, he thought there was treasure underneath or something. Because the cultural relevance was lost to him, he had no problem destroying the priceless cultural artifact. But the structure was extremely difficult to demolish. They had to remove each individual brick one at a time. It was taking as long to destroy the pyramid as it took to build it. After 8 months of hard labor, all they were able to do was put a dent in the smallest of the three pyramids before they just gave up. The sheer magnitude of an object can outlast even the most determined conqueror's destructive carelessness. But there are other strategies that make things difficult to erase as well. Check out this little metal disc. Notice the letters spiraling smaller and smaller. If you zoom in a little bit, you'll see a series of little rectangles, each one only a half a millimeter wide, about the width of five human hairs. If you zoom in even closer than that, you'll notice those rectangles aren't solid blocks. They're actually individual pages written in over a thousand languages. Modern research has shown that without written records, it only takes about three generations to lose the memory of something historically significant like a disaster. For example, even language itself is dying at an alarming rate. 50 to 90% of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century. Many with little or no significant documentation. Rosetta Disc is a very small, very stubborn answer to that. There are over 13,000 pages written in over 1,500 languages. All of this is etched into a palmsized sheet of hyperdurable nickel. This artifact could plausibly last thousands of years. And because each page is a physical etching, you don't need any software to read it. Although you do need a powerful microscope. Individual pages are visible around 100x magnification. The

key here is that it doesn't require software or electricity to decode, just magnification. The spiraling text that gradually gets smaller and smaller is really clever in my opinion. Even if you don't understand the more visible inscriptions on the surface, the design sort of encourages you to look more closely in order to read the full text. The glass dome on top also magnifies the text slightly. There's one critically important strategy of the Rosetta Disc. With many giant monuments, they persist because they're simply too big to destroy. But with the Rosetta Disc, the strategy is to make it tiny and make lots of copies. The trick is balancing durability and cultural value without turning it into a target for thieves. Anything rare enough to be priceless is also loot in the next conquest or culture war. But if you make thousands of copies, at least a few are likely to survive. That's why you should also subscribe to this channel so these ideas can live on in all of us. But anyway, that's why alongside a few immaculate museum grade discs, the Long Now Foundation also made a more widely reproducible version, the Rosetta Wearable. It contains fewer pages than the full disc, but anyone can own one if they make a very generous $1,000 donation. In 2016, they even sent a probe out into space to put a Rosetta disc on comet 67P. It's almost certain that no one is ever going to read this thing, at least on that comet. But it still proves the point. Spreading the risk across space, institutions, and pockets maximizes the chance of at least one of these discs surviving tens of thousands of years into the future. Archivists call this strategy locks. Lots of copies keep stuff safe. Religious institutions are arguably the most durable of mankind's cultural organizations. While these institutions are far from perfect, at their best, they can move people beyond immediate self-interest toward a greater good. But over millennia, even religions rise and fall. So, what can you build that points past any single culture? One organization's plan is to honor time itself. This is a small prototype of the clock of the long now. The final build has been underway since 2009, designed around one question. What lets an object survive 10,000 years? The team behind the design have studied what keeps artifacts alive and folded those lessons all into this clock. To last 10,000 years, an object needs a set of features that are seemingly contradictory. It needs extreme durability yet regular maintenance. It needs to be awinspiring but not so charismatic that people destroy it as a statement. And it needs to be understandable to everyone yet hard to access. Let's talk about the durability. It's made of materials like titanium, ceramic, stainless steel, and sapphire. These materials will allow it to survive for 10,000 years with minimal corrosion or wear. Even if we all blow ourselves up or face some other apocalyptic event, it is conceivable that this clock could still be maintained and repaired by just a few people with fairly primitive technology. The clock is fully mechanical and serviceable with bronze age tools and technology. All mechanical clocks eventually go out of time, so it can self-correct for several decades without any human intervention. The clock calibrates itself from the sun. Around the summer solstice, the sun's light shines down into a small chamber. That sunbeam heats up a trigger that synchronizes the clock to true solar noon. But even the strongest materials can corrode, and that's why they chose to bury the clock hundreds of feet deep into an extremely dry mountaintop in Texas. The temperature remains a stable 55° F year round, and the dry climate slows down corrosion. It's a perfect environment for an internal clock. But that's still not enough. The real thing that will keep this design alive for 10,000 years is stewardship. The clock depends on visitors to adjust the time and maintain the site. It needs us to survive and to function. Admittedly, we haven't been the best stewards in the past. Valuable things get stolen and curious people will tinker and accidentally break things. Just look at how we excavate and open ancient tombs. But perhaps another deterrent from that is the continual maintenance and modification of the design. The makers of this clock don't really expect it to be a static, unchanging artifact. They have designed it to be repaired, modified, and continually developed rather than sealed away and preserved. Things survive when communities keep working on them. The Torah is a religious text that is over 3,000 years old. A common ritual in Jewish tradition is to copy each individual letter of the Torah onto a new scroll. It can take over a year for a transcribe to copy almost 305,000 letters. And if even one single error is made, the entire scroll may be considered invalid. The constant reading, repairing, and copying of the document has become a powerful ritual that ensures longevity. The same will hopefully be true for this 10,000-year clock. Another aspect that's important to preservation is location. The choice to put the clock deep inside of a remote mountain is a practical engineering choice, but it's also driven by psychology. High deserts with broad horizons make the site impressive. You hike up a desert mountain, go into a dark tunnel, climb a spiral staircase cut directly into the stone of the mountain. You pass the massive 10,000lb bronze weight that powers the clock. You move past these massive gears. Perhaps the most

important part of any lasting artifact is to make it awe inspiring. And a visit to this site is designed to feel more like a religious pilgrimage rather than a tourist attraction. Of course, predicting the future is impossible. We have no idea if the clock will make it to 10,000 years or even just 10. Just look at any sci-fi illustration from the 1900s trying to show what the year 2000 would look like and just see how incredibly far off they were. The pace of technology and change is only accelerating, making the future even more uncertain than ever. Maybe the project will be completely forgotten. But even if the clock doesn't last that long, it still isn't necessarily a failure. Leonardo da Vinci dedicated over 500 drawings and 35,000 words to the concept of flying or flight. Even though Da Vinci never flew, he brought attention to that idea and his concepts helped to make flight feel possible, even inevitable for later generations. This is what Thomas Frey refers to as an attractor. If we can change people's vision of the future, behaviors today. And it's the same thing with this clock. It's also an attractor. It's an invitation for us to think out thousands of years. Even if the mechanism changes or fades, it anchors a habit. Show up, wind the weight, and take a longer view of humanity and our choices. The clock is a concrete picture of deep time that bends behavior now and hopefully steers us towards a better future. Even when the clock dies, the idea of deep time can still live on. Right now, a golden record is riding on the Voyager probes into deep space. It contains songs, images, and greetings from our tiny world pressed into metal. The odds that any sentient beings will find it, decipher it, and understand it are basically zero. But that's not really the point, at least in my opinion. It's our way of saying we were here and we cared. Humans live by imagining tomorrow and changing today. We don't always know why. We just look forward and build. I'm still afraid of things ending. It's not really fear of death, whether it's mine or my designs. It's knowing there's still so much I want to create and there's never enough time. I'll never finish everything and you won't either. All of it will fade. So, why build anything at all? For me, it's connection while I'm here. When I make these videos, I talk with my editor. I argue with friends about the cut. I read your comments and consider new perspectives. or maybe I'll spot a product I designed out in the wild. It's my way of saying I tried to leave you something useful. In a similar way, these 10,000-year designs are for us, the people alive now as much as they are for the people of the future. Creating, building, and changing our world fills the time productively and makes the present feel worthwhile. It says tomorrow is worth imagining because someone else will be here to enjoy it. None of us will beat time. All we can do is work together to carry the weight a little farther. — That's what these designs are trying to do. They tell our descendants that we care enough to make something for them. Even if we're successful, no one will know our names, but maybe we can help them to keep going just a little bit longer. And that's enough for me. If you enjoyed this video, consider supporting me on Patreon. I want to give a big shout out to my existing patrons, as well as any of the people who helped me with this video, especially my big brother Joe and my good friend Rafie. I hope you learned something and have a great day.