This story appears in VICE magazine’s Dystopia and Utopia Issue. Click HERE to subscribe to VICE magazine. At first, Jon Lomberg thought it was a joke. When the late Carl Sagan, his friend and mentor, told him about a US Department of Energy plan to future-proof an atomic waste site for 10,000 years, he wasn’t sure it could be real. But a few years later, in 1990, Lomberg signed on to help design the warning marker of this tomb of the Cold War.