Serendipitously, I was driving around New Mexico while re-listening to a Seminar About Long Term Thinking that Neil Gaiman had given several years ago. It reminded me about the Human Interface Task Force which the U.S. Department of Energy had formed in 1981 to develop long-time nuclear waste warning messages to warn off generations in the distant future from digging up radioactive waste that we bury today.
Linguist Thomas Sebeok‘s proposal was the creation of an “atomic priesthood” who, through ritual & myth, would preserve knowledge of off-limit sites where nuclear waste was buried and the dire consequences of transgression.