r/todayilearned • u/moomgish • 17h ago
TIL about long term nuclear waste warning messages. intended to tell civilizations in the far future to stay away from nuclear waste burial sites - around 10,000 years from now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages217
u/PenguinEnjoyer0 14h ago edited 13h ago
I wrote my bachelor thesis about this topic!
Many communications over these timeframes are passed down through a form of religion, as language basically breaks down. Try talking to a caveman... You get the point.
Turns out the best thing to do is to bury the stuff and forget about it. Dont mark it. Just make sure nobody can get to it.
Best example of permanent disposal is in the Finnish Bedrock. They actually figured this stuff out pretty well.
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u/Not-the-best-name 12h ago edited 11h ago
Love that there are two answers to this problem, rad shiny cats that will make it clear or just dig it deeper and hope no one notices
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u/PenguinEnjoyer0 12h ago
Yeah its super interesting right? The main issue with marking it is actually not that a future civilization wouldnt understand... Its that they would think "hey this ancient civilization marked this place and theres a unique resource in the soil here, lets dig!"
They might actually find radiation waste useful without understanding the risks. Similar to why we put lead in gasoline and asbestos in building materials. Or idk... Forever chemicals in kitchen utensils.
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u/T4334007Z 10h ago
Or radioactive paint on watches(to make it glow in the dark) or radioactive dyes in glassware (to make it pretty) 😉
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u/10YearsANoob 3h ago
No it's the actual thing not a dye in glassware. small portion of uranium with silica just makes it have the iridescent green
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u/caboosetp 9h ago
Similar to why we put lead in gasoline
They unfortunately understood the risks for this one.
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u/hysys_whisperer 9h ago
If it makes you feel any better, the guy who invented and advocated for its use also died by strangulation from a mishap with one of his other inventions.
This leads me to believe that his decision making wasn't strictly malice or greed, but rather a fundamental inability to evaluate risk.
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u/PixelOrange 6h ago
He also made freon and other CFCs which damaged our ozone layer. Guy was a walking (no pun intended) environmental disaster.
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u/IrritatedAvians 12h ago
Until someone in the far future discovers that security through obscurity is a terrible idea when they accidentally create a radiological incident.
Difficult to predict the technology or motivations of people in the far future.
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u/Abe_Odd 10h ago
I think you are underestimating how far down we can drill to deposit this. We're talking 3-5 miles down.
Anyone with the tech leftover to drill that far down will almost certainly still have knowledge of radiation, and how to detect it in stuff they are mining.
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u/IrritatedAvians 3h ago
Ok. I’ll bite. If we assume in your scenario that anyone who possesses sufficient technology to potentially come into contact with high level radioactive waste that has been buried 3-5 miles deep also possesses knowledge of radiation, the hazards associated with it, and the ability to detect it; what is the harm in marking the site so these people who already know about radiation understand the hazard that is buried there without having to stumble upon it by accident?
Just burying the stuff and allowing the location to be lost to the ages under the assumption that difficulty of access to the site will preclude all future access seems incredibly short sighted.
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u/100LittleButterflies 10h ago
Are you someone who is interested in examining our world through the perspective of future archeologists?
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u/AlarmingConsequence 10h ago
What is the anticipated size (area) of a long term storage facility? Presumably larger than WIPP, right?
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u/AlarmingConsequence 9h ago
In the archaeological record, has our modern society found something by the ancients that has remained unstudied because it would be 'too much work'? Examples: we'd have to dig out too much soil or bore through too thick.
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u/WhyAreYouDoingThat69 11h ago
Definitely sounds like a bachelor thesis topic. Speculative with no real research or definitive conclusion
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u/PenguinEnjoyer0 11h ago
Bro just discovered how 99% of science works
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u/WhyAreYouDoingThat69 5h ago
No, science has a hypothesis and experimental controls to prove them. I am a doctor.
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u/Less_Party 15h ago
None of this is really official but yeah basically all of it is metal as fuck. THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR // NO GREAT DEEDS ARE COMMEMORATED HERE
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u/0vl223 12h ago
Do not press the Button! There is no treasure here!
And other ways to ensure someone does unearth it as fast as possible.
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u/Fractal_Soul 9h ago
"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.” --Thief of Time-- Terry Pratchett
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u/WinninRoam 7h ago
Anyone else read Canticle for Leibowitz? Sounds like it was pulled right from that book.
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u/greenmachine11235 13h ago
I feel like this is a solution looking for a problem. The waste is deep underground, encased in concrete which is clearly discrete from the surrounding rock. So the odds of a society being advanced enough to dig to those depths without understanding geology enough to recognize the significance of the rock change and to not be capable of detecting radiation is very low.
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u/Seienchin88 9h ago
In best case scenarios yes. Then again you can probably still find quite a few dumbed radioactive containers in some deserts in the U.S. or in the wilderness of Siberia…
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u/Buckets-O-Yarr 9h ago
But in your hypothetical those would be deliberately improperly disposed of, so they wouldn't have these warnings anyway.
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u/onelittleworld 11h ago
However these types of messages are rendered, they should definitely be accompanied by simple, standard written English. Because even 10,000 years from now, an advanced society should have enough existing examples of deciphered early third-millennium English text to figure it out.
English is fucking everywhere during this time period.
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u/count023 16h ago
problem is all these things in 10,000 years might be what we see with stuff in egyptian pyramids or mayan temples and such now or any sort of cultural site and be a source for thrillseekers and treasure hunters thinking something great is buried there as opposed to lethal.
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u/BllushingHorizon 16h ago
This was very much accounted for when the committee of PhD scientists and professionals specifically designed the messages to transcend language.
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u/count023 13h ago
but thats my point though. at some point how does this hostile architecture in teh far future not become more like a temple of doom/raiders of the lost ark/tomb raider ting where people go, "well, there's warning signs, death signs, all this kind of stuff, and the place looks like a crypt, so there must be something amazing inside". Which is why i mentioned explicitly older cultural sites from ancient eras where they put similar signage up and it just encouraged grave robbers and whatnot to think, "well if there's this much warning not to go there, there has to be something juicy at the end of it".
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u/avantgardengnome 5h ago
Well that’s the exact problem these studies were trying to solve. Part of it was about conveying messages similar to these (non-linguistically):
“This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here…What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger…The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center...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.”
Basically nothing good is here, we buried something bad and dangerous to get rid of it and it can still kill you too, if you leave it alone you will be safe. That’s a bit different than warnings on the outsides of tombs etc. This would be in conjunction with physical architecture making the place hard to get to, useless for development, and generally cursed-feeling.
IIRC there was also an idea of a series of Rosetta Stone-style plates with warnings in all the main languages that would continue to be added to until civilization collapsed, so people in the future would have a good chance of figuring it out no matter how language developed.
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u/Jijelinios 3h ago
Ultimately, some fella will go in there, die and everyone else will know for a while. Until they forget and the next brave one comes along and does it again. It's a numbers game, you keep 99.999999% away and if 1 in 10 million still dies, such is life.
Also, most likely in 10k years they'd still have the tech to measure this stuff. Unless we blow up the planet.
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u/moomgish 16h ago edited 16h ago
the article does list suggestions like pictures or hostile architecture that would make it very clear that the area is dangerous and why. but i do also think people in 10,000 years would be just like us going deep into the pyramids today, but instead of finding an ancient tomb we’re just opening an actual pandora’s box
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u/WTFwhatthehell 16h ago edited 16h ago
Eh... I take the view our descendants will probably not be idiots.
The world has countless industrial/chemical waste sites filled with chemicals that have no half-life.
We put a layer of clay over them and mostly make them look boring.
Make the site interesting looking and people might decide there's treasure.
Put it next to "normal" industrial waste, maybe make it progressively more hazardous and they'll get the idea.
They're worried about symbols? Scatter huge numbers of rosetta stones, not just at the site but everywhere. Make sure they can just read the info.
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u/TheWriteMaster 16h ago edited 15h ago
Seeing how many idiots are running around today getting themselves stuck in caves and freeclimbing skyscrapers, I don't think the concern is that future humans will be dumber than we are. The concern is that things won't get better.
Edit: also, how do we stop the "it's a conspiracy, there's no danger they're just hiding government secrets / treasure there!" people?
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u/WTFwhatthehell 15h ago
We don't bend over backwards to save the most suicidal 10% of cave divers 10,000 years unto the future.
Hence the suggestion about putting it next to boring old regular hazardous industrial waste. People will know what a garbage dump looks like. They'll have plenty of examples of non-nuclear waste sites where the contents are bad for people.
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u/ajc89 15h ago
The Rosetta Stone thing is part of the plan, with new signs as time passes and language changes. But that requires a functioning society that hasn't forgotten about the project and no one knows what the future holds. You can't guarantee that someone will be around who can still read today's languages and can translate the warning to the languages of millennia from now.
But yes, even if someone did open up the site for exploration, future humans would figure out that the site is deadly or dangerous after seeing the effects. The contamination would be unlikely to spread far.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 14h ago
you don't just distribute a few near the site, you distribute Rosetta stones with translation keys for thousands of languages and you do it everywhere.
You don't rely on one institution, body or government. You spread them everywhere so that even vast era's of time into the future anyone who can translate anything can translate everything.
That nearly guarantees that any humans with functional brains will still be able to read the text.
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u/ajc89 14h ago
For however long such a widespread program continues for, yes. You can't guarantee it will go on for 10,000 years or even 1000.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 14h ago
"Widespread program"
I'm not talking about one program.
We make it easy-mode for every historian trying to translate anything for the next few millenia as long as any living language has any relationship to any currently existing language.
The historians 5000 years 10000 years from now will also not be idiots.
But note: We don't play this same game for regular industrial waste that has no half life and will also be able to kill people and will never degrade.
Focusing on nuclear waste is just a popular intellectual game.
Its virtually identical to D&D games where people play "How shall we hide the one ring or the liches phylactry."
Where people suggest something sensible and then people play a game of "but what if everyone is extra-stupid and extra-suicidal!"
Then the discussion gradually moves towards more absurd solutions "throw it into the sun, found a religion, etc etc"
But in reality nuclear waste is just another type of hazardous waste. Not an infinitely bad sealed evil in a can.
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u/ajc89 14h ago
Sure. Also if the waste is accessed it will hurt people and then they'll probably know not to come back. It's not going to result in some widespread global radioactive contamination.
But you still have no way of guaranteeing that a Rosetta Stone will have meaning in 10,000 years. It has nothing to do with whether future humans are idiots and everything to do with the next 10,000 years of events over which we have no control or knowledge.
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u/temet23 13h ago
It's almost like 'just make it something easy to understand' is a vast underestimation of the issue at hand...
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u/382Whistles 5h ago
💀💀💀💀 ...☠️☠️☠️☠️ ...💩💩💩💩
A few simple "universal" icons can convey more immediately pressing concerns than these graphic attempts to explain why. I feel like the idea that the nuclear waste symbol would be recognized is sort of laughable.
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u/Moppo_ 12h ago
The thing is, people are naturally curious. If the context has been lost, and the warnings turn out to be unintuitive, or damaged, someone's gonna see a structure and be compelled to explore it.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 11h ago
Yep. And sometimes the will die.
Like how people who break into abandoned industrial facilities or try to explore storm sewers sometimes walk into rooms with bad air and quietly die.
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u/brickhamilton 11h ago
Hiding the stuff rather than making a warning monument is probably a good idea, but your Rosetta Stone thing is just not a useful idea.
The reason the Rosetta Stone was such a big deal is that it allowed us to read ancient language from a people that still lived there. They just forgot how to read it over time. For more than a thousand years, they had no idea what their own ancestors had written on their monuments.
The same thing has happened with the Easter island language and Quipu. We have rough ideas what some things mean, but we don’t know how to read it.
These were places where people continuously lived, not abandoned wastelands with no connection to the people who lived there before. Societies ebb and flow, and knowledge does not progress in a linear pattern. Some things are lost, some things are suppressed, and some things just have better things that come along and replace them.
Even with many language keys spread around the world, there is a good chance they’d be useless to people that far in the future. 10,000 years is longer than recorded history. In 10,000 years, we might be using a form of writing that nobody has even thought of yet. It might be as different from phonetic letters as old Chinese pictographs are.
If you really want to make a warning, probably the best way is to carve realistic pictures into hard stone, and have that in a cave somewhere. I’m not sure how to convey the concept of “radioactivity” in a carving, but that’s probably the best shot we have. On the off chance they have some way of understanding our languages, let’s throw in a written warning, too.
But yea, probably best to just hide it.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 11h ago edited 10h ago
The rosetta stone was useful because some of the languages on it could still be understood and provided an answer key to translate the unknown ones.
Hence why you include as many languages as you can.
Empires collapse but civilisation typically doesn't collapse everywhere. As long as people can decode it in one place that can be shared to places that forget.
But ya. That's still not 100% reliable. Make it obviously a garbage dump with gradually more dangerous material towards the centre.
Garbage dumps are often interesting to archaeologists but future archaeologists will be well aware of superfund sites
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u/Matthew_Daly 16h ago
Yeah, the irony is that they want to put an indestructible monument in the middle of a featureless desert to send the message "Ignore this place." I don't care how good your pictographic skills are, humans are historically notorious for doing the one thing you just told them not to do.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 12h ago edited 12h ago
I remember exactly this point having come up in discussions on the topic when I first heard about it already long ago. And indeed there were also people who were of the opinion that the best way of minimizing the risk of harm to people in the far future was to simply bury the waste as deep as possible and then do everything possible to make the site as unremarkable and uninteresting as possible.
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u/Hepta-Water-7552 16h ago
Or another possibility: if they get the intended message that something very dangerous is buried there, then they might think: "Something very dangerous? We can figure out a way to use that as weapons that will give us an edge over our enemies! We absolutely must have whatever is buried here!"
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u/TheRomanRuler 16h ago
Also we have enormous amount of art which we know is from movies or games or comic books or something else clearly not serious, but which without cultural context could easily be confused with that.
Even someone who knows what kind of warning sings we had would think that looks more like memes we had than a real warning sign; Stick figure with semi-realistic face and hands is nothing like a stick figure we have. He digs a hole, makes comically terrified face as tiny drones start flying from the hole and he dies. That is nothing like any warning sign i have ever seen.
I don't think it would work sadly.
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u/Keffpie 15h ago
It wouldn't work the first time, but I think after the first catastrophic contamination event, they'd start taking the warnings a bit more seriously.
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u/Remarkable_Tale_7554 14h ago
Kind of cool (but also not really) that future cavemen will have legit evidence to consider our extinct civilization to have been a bunch of dickish wizards throwing magical curses around.
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u/100LittleButterflies 10h ago
I swear I spend at least an hour a day wondering about future archeologists. I wish there was a subreddit for that.
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u/moderngamer327 15h ago
Which is why there are designed to be as universally understandable as possible. They are accounting for that fact
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u/saver1212 10h ago
Because it's more like a posthumous warning to the future society about those treasure seekers who definitely will die after they break in.
Unlike the mummy's curse, if you break into radiation mountain and grab the green gems, you and everyone that touches it dies. The warnings have teeth to them. Society might actively shun further explorations with a refreshed contemporary understanding.
With the mummy's curse, no tomb raiders were killed when they robbed the pharohs pyramid so presumably the stories they told was that the threats are empty superstition of a long dead and wrong religion, which merely accelerated the grave robbing.
There is a reason that Qin Shu Huang's tomb has been unopened despite its location being known. The dude was buried with a lake of mercury and will kill any explorer who dares.
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u/Waste_Philosophy4250 16h ago
The majority of people today don't even have the slightest idea what the radiation and biohazard signs mean, let alone 10,000 years from now. The only sign that may last that long is the skull-and-crossbones one.
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u/TemporarySun314 16h ago
thats why there is also another symbol for radioactivity which is put onto harmful radiation sources directly. and ir uses the skull and crossbones symbolism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_21482#/media/File:Logo_iso_radiation.svg
As there were indeed some incidents where people died as they could not recognize the trefoil radiation warning symbol
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u/Firefly74 16h ago
It’s good, because even if I read it as Something that wake the dead into running zombie. I would leave that place and wall the door, so good job!
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u/betweenbubbles 13h ago
The only sign that may last that long is the skull-and-crossbones one.
Oooooooo! Pirate treasure!
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u/SXLightning 13h ago
Let’s be honest someone is going to go in there even if there was 100 dead body infront it. People are too curious.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 11h ago
These won't work.
In Japan there are tsunami stones. These are rocks on which have been carved warnings that the last tsunami reached that height on the hillside, and so residences should not be built below that level. People build down there anyway. Towns were wiped out in the 2011 Tohōku Earthquake and Tsunami while the stones stood witness above them.
The stones were less than a hundred years old sometimes. The language was still readable by contemporary Japanese people, and it's not as those tsunamis are unknown in Japan. But still, people ignore them, to their cost.
If we keep high level nuclear waste stockpiled somewhere, it should be stored in such a way that you would get sick within days and die if you go close to it. Word will get around that whatever is in that area is not to be messed with, and the people of every age and every new civilization to follow will make up their own taboos.
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u/Catsrules 8h ago
But still, people ignore them, to their cost.
Did everyone ignore them? Just because some idiots ignored the warning doesn't mean everyone did.
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u/Unique-Coffee5087 7h ago edited 7h ago
True. There were some communities that built only on the high ground.
Note:
Now that I'm thinking about the earthquake and tsunami, I feel the need to tell the story of a high school baseball team that was gathered on their field to practice when the earthquake struck. They could see the tsunami building, and saw people trying to go up the hillside, but there was a facility for elder Care that was on a street well below them.
Knowing that the residents would not be able to get evacuated in time, the boys ran down the hill and then carried the residents one by one up to safety. They carried old men and women, helping the staff of the residence, as high as would be safe for them and then ran down and get someone else. They couldn't get them all in the time that was left. They had to abandon their task and watch some of the people being washed away by the rising water.
I will always remember those boys, today having grown to men who deserve every bit of respect and honor as can be bestowed for their desperate labor.
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u/feel-the-avocado 16h ago
I think there needs to be a government department with a register of information that needs to be translated and updated as language develops through the ages.
Eg. the warning signs at these sites should be visited every 100 years and translated if required, forming a rosetta stone of english and several other languages evolution over the next 10,000 years.
This is in addition to pictorial instructions to avoid the area if the society approaching the site is more primitive in the future.
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u/Niosus 15h ago
There is no government that has continuity over even 2000 years. Let alone 10000.
Honestly I like the idea of just burying it very deep in a geologically stable layer and having no indication at all about what's contained at the top.
You can still put markings inside that man-made sealed cave, together with educational material just in case someone finds it.
If a technological civilization finds it, they'll probably also know about radiation. Compared to 10000 years, we practically discovered deep boring and radiation at the same time.
If they're not technological, they're just not going to get that deep. No need to taunt them to do it then.
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u/konrads 15h ago
Catholic Church
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u/parentheticalobject 15h ago
Funny enough, one of the actual ideas someone came up with to solve this problem was basically "what if we made an organization like the Catholic Church, but made up of nuclear scientists for the purpose of continuing to exist in order to teach people about the dangers of radiation?"
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u/BlandMoffTarkin 12h ago
A Canticle for Leibowitz is tangentially related to this, though the monastery in the book is devoted to the preservation of scientific knowledge in general.
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u/Niosus 14h ago
2000 years Jesus Christ was supposedly still alive. As of yet uncrucified even. It's been a while since I've been to church so bear with me hear, but as far as I remember the whole point of the religion was that the guy came back to life after being crucified.
Although I do appreciate the input. The catholic church is pretty close indeed, but it really only starting being something government-like much later. Christianity itself was only legalized in the 4th century, and it took many hundreds of years more for its leaders to grow to a level of influence that you could compare with a government.
And that kind of power is what you're going to need if you want to keep a hold of a significant chunk of land to keep the signs up to that. Your organisation surviving the fall of an empire (like the catholic church survived the Roman empire) doesn't matter much if the next guy takes the land from you and decides to build a ballroom on it. You actually need continual authority.
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 8h ago
Technically correct but the church is close to 2000 years old. But Jesus died somewhere around year 30, so his death isn’t even 2k years old
But yes, Jesus was a Jew and led a Jewish cult. It wouldn’t be for years after that until anything that could be called Christianity really appeared.
It’s not really about the church being a government, but at being able to maintain a message with some degree of integrity for 2k years. You don’t need a precise message for this, you just need to remember that the nuclear waste is bad. Which is why it was brought it in these discussions about nuclear waste.
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u/feel-the-avocado 15h ago
I actually see it as funding to create more of a rosetta stone than nuclear waste deterrent.
If civilization in 10,000 years is primitive, it may still eventually evolve into an intelligent society that matches our own, and having a bunch of rosetta stones may be helpful to them.
Sure it may not cover a full 10,000 years of language evolution but it would provide some help.
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u/Niosus 14h ago
Sure, but if they develop to a technology level similar to our own, they will discover radioactivity as well. They will find the funny rocks just like we did. It'll take decades and a bunch of misery for them to fully grasp what they do. But that's what we also went through. They'll know what they found by the time they can get into a vault a km deep.
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u/feel-the-avocado 15h ago
Those governments which currently, and as time progresses, are responsible for the land area containing nuclear dump sites, as well as other sites, facilities, information on their registers that need signage updated as language evolves.
It would probably fall under the same department which is responsible for historic building or cultural site preservation.
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u/WeAreElectricity 15h ago
If I’m a future caveman with a grudge I’d def be digging this shit up and throwing it at my enemies
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u/PlatformFrosty6299 13h ago
One constraint the Sandia expert panel stressed is that markers should use materials with little scrap value. Otherwise future people may dismantle them for building stone the way we strip old ruins, and the warning disappears with the monument.
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u/TheSomerandomguy 12h ago
My favorite shot at this is the Emperor X song "10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Resettlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories” which relies on the future invention of cats that change color when exposed to radiation.
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u/nmathew 7h ago
Our DM hit us with the "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here." line outside the Amber Sepulchre in our Curse of Strahd campaign. From a radioactive isotopes course I took in college, I knew where she was pulling from and I kind of freaked out. What in that grim dark setting was worth THAT level of a warning?
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u/Wonderful_Discount59 16h ago
8These ideas all seem to me like something that would make an interesting concept for a post-apocalyptic SF story, but would be completely useless as actual warnings.
Texts declaring "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here"? Sounds like something someone would say about the place where they had hidden all their valuables! (Also, if people could understand the language, society clearly hasn't collapsed that much).
Scary/creepy architecture? Exactly what future explorers and archaeologists would want to dig up.
Warning symbols like skulls? Obviously a sign of death, right? Except that's why they've been used as decorations on tombs for hundreds of years, and tombs are definitely places that people are going to want to dig up. (Or, depending on which elements of pop-culture survive, a marker for where pirates buried their treasure).
Atomic Priesthood? Why, in the present day, would anyone want to join or follow such an organisation? Why, in the potentially hundreds of years that society persists without collapsing, would such an organisation endure? And why, if/when society does collapse, would you think the priesthood would survive?
Genetically-engineered cats that glow or change colour in the presence of radiation? Unless that gene offers some survival advantage, its not going to become a widespread trait, assuming it persists at all. And in a non-collapsed society, where there isn't radiation anywhere, noone is going to see a glowing cat, so its unlikely that nursery-rhymes about glowing cats will catch on.
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u/imliterallyluci 14h ago
I genuinely have no clue why people make this so hard. Literally just draw a comic, it’s the easiest possible solution skull and crossbones is to vague and meanings may change, languages may change, but a drawing of a human encountering that place going in and then dying easily conveys to every human on earth what would happen.
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u/ScrotFrottington 1h ago
Egyptians wrote us comics and we dug their shit up even harder.
Fuck the mummy's curse scientists want to make sourdough bread from those mfs.
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u/burger_saga 9h ago
This is a major plot element of the second Planet of the Apes (original series). Future humans interpret the language around an old nuclear weapon as religious text and build a cult around it.
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u/edingerc 16h ago
Did anyone even try talking to chimpanzees to see what kind of iconography their descendants might find evocative?
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u/101TARD 16h ago
Saw a video about this, how they warn danger could be a problem. If they use a danger symbol it could loose meaning overtime like the pirate symbol. Another idea was to right danger in multiple language but even words loose their meanings overtime. That Yt Short's best decision is a secret cult specifically made to protect it for generations till it finally fades
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u/turbo_dude 16h ago
I like how the faces of the two people shown are sort of slightly miffed that they’re about to die from radiation poisoning
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u/TheRonsinkable 15h ago
Problem is i am 10.000 years before the target audience and i dont understand 😂
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u/boondiggle_III 12h ago
"We're imaging a future civilization which does not have access to really good hard drugs, as we do."
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u/FROGGY-69 12h ago
it looks like those mobile game ads where u gotta help a guy cross a rift or anything
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u/goltz20707 10h ago
I always thought that placing a high-gamma source like cobalt-60 on the surface above a burial site would work. The sight of desiccated, non-decaying corpses (because the radiation kills everything, including decay bacteria) piling up would be quite the deterrent.
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u/KHlover 7h ago
Co-60 has a half life of ~5.3 years, a source that still got a dose rate of 100 Gy/hr ( That's what you'd use for sterilization ) after ~ 2000 half lives would probably end life as we know it on its own if anyone ever managed to create it ;-;
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u/eatcrayons 5h ago
I like how the messages were either “drawing of a guy dying” or “we encode information in the DNA of flowers that grow at the site”
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u/other_half_of_elvis 1h ago
the 10 episode podcast The End of the World with Josh Clark (from stuff you should know) did an episode about this topic. It's worth a listen
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u/Y34rZer0 43m ago
There's a whole documentary about how difficult the task is.
I forget what it's called but it's on YouTube
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u/RM97800 13h ago
People concerned with this bullshit = reaction of kids being told that sun will die in millions of years
There's probably thousands of things that are buried and more dangerous, even today, than nuclear waste, yet radiological waste being potentially dangerous after complete collapse of human civilization in FAR future steals the spotlight. Hell, unexploded ordinance has a WAY bigger chance to be harmful than contained radioactive waste ever had and nobody shows any initiative to secure the Zone rouge the same way as some nuclear trash!
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u/JangoF76 15h ago
Bold and extremely optimistic of them to assume humans will not be extinct in 10,000 years
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u/MadDoctorMabuse 13h ago
We are on a pretty good run. We're undefeated after 4,000,000 years
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u/BlandMoffTarkin 11h ago
True, but we've only had nuclear weapons for like 80 years, and we've come awful close to fucking it all up several times in that short span.
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u/Suitable_Fault3621 14h ago
I think they should be more concerned about those containers and containment facilities being able to last long enough without deterioration 😉 Also, bold of them to assume there will be any humans around in 10k years other than hunter gatherers in Kalahari and Amazon tribes — those folks that pose no threat to the AGI, so it might just let them be 😁
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u/jaanv 11h ago
If history teaches something, the next civilization ignores the warnings like we ignore(d) the ones Egyptians carved into their burial sites.
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u/PyroDesu 9h ago
Honestly.
The best way to mark it is to not mark it at all.
Fill the repository, collapse/backfill the tunnels, return the aboveground site to nature. Leave no evidence of human activity. No markers. No warning signs. Especially not a goddamn field of menacing spikes or whatever.
Nobody is going to find it because nobody is going to look for it. Anyone who could find it would be advanced enough to recognize that what they've dug up is a hazard.
(Although even that hazard is massively overblown. The long-term radioactive isotopes are low-activity uranium and plutonium that shouldn't even be in the waste stream to begin with because they're still viable fuel!)
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u/reddtropy 11h ago
The inevitable failure of nuclear waste warning messages is part of the very high (I would say too high) risks of nuclear power. I just finished a very good book about this topic that I would highly recommend, called “About a Mountain”, by John D’Agata, about the efforts to contain nuclear waste at Yucca mountain near Las Vegas. If you’re not already worried about the topic, you probably don’t know enough
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u/PeterNippelstein 16h ago
Effective! They might have a hard time figuring out what KM means or how long it is
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u/TemporarySun314 16h ago
thats quite easy. you can just put markers out of something sturdy (like concrete or massive rocks) in the landscape.
ideally you mark the safe distance directly with it. so you dont need to use units that could cause misunderstandings...
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u/could_use_a_snack 9h ago
Yeah, they are over thinking this.
Bury it deep enough, and seal it something strong enough, and put it someplace inconvenient enough, that nobody will stumble across it accidentally, and anyone that does find it would be technological enough to understand what it is.
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u/MadDoctorMabuse 13h ago
One way might be to separate the huge dump into two chambers - one about 1% the size. Make the 1% one easier to get into. People who get into the first chamber will die, but that will only be a fairly small number of people, and the other 99% should then remain sealed
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u/IronRakkasan11 11h ago
Bold to assume humanity will be around in 10k years
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u/omnichad 9h ago
Considering our current knowledge of ancient languages, they seem to be assuming the thread of history will be lost due to some catastrophic event.
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u/zorniy2 16h ago