Image by Jon Lomberg
Jon Lomberg, who worked under Carl Sagan at NASA, is best known for designing visual presentations about astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial life. So he was a little out of his element when Sagan tapped him to create a marking system to deter humans from entering America’s only active nuclear waste repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), for the next 10,000 years.But a few years later, he found himself channeling his art into a simple concept that he hopes will withstand centuries and warn future people (and extraterrestrials) away from the toxic waste site."The cover drawing that I made…that drawing will last a thousand million years," he says on the podcast. "Maybe the longest lived piece of human art."The WIPP has already received more than 171,000 containers of nuclear waste to date, according to a WIPP spokesperson, and recently resumed operations after being closed for three years due to a leak. The 10,000-year marker will be built, theoretically, whenever the site closes, though what form it’ll end up taking is anyone’s guess. After all, Lomberg says, the nuclear tomb he helped create "is still just a design proposal."Motherboard's Brian Anderson spoke to Jon Lomberg about working with Sagan and designing this Cold War tomb on The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast.You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
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