Oddly enough, a similar warning will be posted at RIAA headquarters: In 1996, Sandia National Laboratories assembled a panel of outside experts and charged them with designing a marking system for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The markings would need to designate the site as "shunned land ... poisoned, destroyed, unusable" and discourage human intrusion for the next 10,000 years. A daunting challenge, warning future generations about the toxic legacy we leave to them. How does one communicate the dangers buried beneath WIPP to a society that might communicate in a way completely foreign to us, that might be puzzled by our message to them in the way an archaeologist today might be by a crudely drawn pictogram. Sandia's experts did their best to answer those questions, conjuring up a marking system of "menacing earthworks" and "shapes that hurt the body" that would all communicate the following message symbolically:

  "Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ... nothing valued is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location ... it increases toward a center ... the center of danger is here ... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."