Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion
downlode.org
downlode.org
Knowing that there is dangerous material at the site, future generations might want to disturb the site anyway, for the purpose of getting weapons.
The warnings are all about the things buried in the ground making people sick and killing them, which is precisely what people looking for effective weapon-making material would want.
They are targeting their message to superstitions uneducated persons. And they want the area ignored and forgotten.
This is fine.
Except that that opposite might happen: You might have very curious scientific people at the level just before Marie Curie, i.e. very scientific and interested, but knowing nothing about radioactivity.
All those messages and markers just about ensure that that area will be thoroughly investigated.
Instead, I would suggest making that area very prominent, and NOT forgotten and ignored.
We have buildings from 3000 years ago today and we know all about them, specifically because they were very important.
For those people, there's level 4: "Complex Information: Highly detailed written records, tables, figures, graphs, maps and diagrams."
IMO this is basically a solved problem (see http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ ), so the article focuses on the more difficult levels 1 and 2.
Marie Curie and her contemporaries had no warning the material they were dealing with might have been dangerous. In the case of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, there would be clear warnings.
Are you suggesting we count on, basically, oral tradition to pass down the fact that a big prominent structure is extremely dangerous ... for hundreds of generations?
And there is not a single instance of a case where passively warning people away from a site has worked.
This proposal will probably, as intended, communicate that the builders want people to stay way.
But what it won't do is actually cause people to stay away.
The only way to do that is to communicate it actively to each generation.
This proposal instead wants the area forgotten.
I don't think that's true; they're just giving more weight to the worst-case scenario where future people have no historical continuity to warn them about the site.
"WIPP is not scheduled to be sealed until the year 2038, and Yucca Mountain may be operating well into the 24th century; so humanity still has a little time to contemplate its warning to the future."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound
Combine that with the most evil-looking shrubbery/stone structures/whatever you can find. You'll have created a land of ghosts and demons for those future people, assuming the site isn't bingoed by a meteor.
Then, when they redevelop society to a point where industrial music is popular again, people can have raves there. They won't even need glow sticks!
(Come to think of it, I'd love to do something like that anyway. Sounds like a great landscaping project for a hunting lodge packed full of taxidermy.)