The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up.
Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate will think they have hit rock bottom... like Pharoahs' tombs or a multi-level pirate cache.
Or even better, put something horrible and poisonous twenty feet down. It might be better to obviously poison a couple people if they start digging this up. That would be easily understood and eventually avoided.
Remember the radioactive sign in the Star Trek episode where Data gets shishkabobed? They made jewelery...
Safes often include rubber pellets in the concrete pour between steel casing layers. Cutting into the safe with a torch or plasma cutter will cause these rubber pellets to burn and fill the room with noxious odors and thick smoke.
It doesn't necessarily increase the physical resistance to entry, but it makes the environment extraordinarily unpleasant.
I also like the breakdown they have of the different levels of communication. I can easily see it being mapped to product design- easy to digest information at the top of the funnel, more detailed/important information as you approach the bottom of the funnel.
Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly is? And what would the message be for those who defeat the poison to find the treasure that's obviously hidden by such a potent weapon?
Leave a fraction of the radioactive unshielded and buried less deeply, to ensure that wannabe grave-robbers die of radiation poisoning before they uncover much of the cache?
(a) We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.
The problem is that this was during the Cold War, and the site needed to operate on an ongoing basis, not just be used once and then hidden. They had to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack killing everyone responsible for the site, thus had to design a site which would still serve even if its operators disappeared.
> Jo climbed down and walked over, the sand squeaking beneath her boots. She followed Steve’s head around the shape, only to find another shape behind it. The sand had shifted in between the two, but the writing was still clear. She stood next to Steve and looked. There were faces, two of them. And there was writing, in many different forms. “Hey, I think that’s Chinese -- I saw something like it in my ancient history class,” said Steve as he knelt to get a closer look.
> “So send a picture to Cindy in Remote -- you know she likes that old stuff,” shrugged Jo. “What did they want around here? Those faces aren’t scary. That one looks scared and that one looks sick, I’m not impressed. ” She stepped out between the pillars and looked around. They had stopped just before the center. There was nothing there but sand and scrub. She squinted and saw that every passage way was blocked by these little shapes sticking up in the middle. She sighed. All this stuff for... nothing?
[1] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
These researchers are talking the long path .. how do we warn people who make not have any knowledge our civilization exists in its current form?
Too many people today think this will last forever; that we're in a golden age that we cannot easily return from.
Is anyone actually following these suggestions? My cynical assumption is that they'd be laughed out of the house by the people who actually hold the construction purse-strings.
As a hacker, I'm used to the thought of "what is the worst possible way I can make this UI", but it's cool to see it applied in an entirely different field.
Not that uncommon. I have known 2 architects who used architecture against probably what they learned in school or dreamed of building.
One was designing casinos. Apparently they did "dark patterns" before computer UI people did it. Think about open places, to inspire and generate positive emotions and so on, well their guidelines was to entrap, confuse, isolate and promote whatever kept people playing longer. She eventually quit and became a housewife.
The other one, lost their job where they designed office buildings, and the only job they found in their town was building prisons. Talk about soul crushing. Well, they said they didn't care it was just a job. But, I know it would bring me down if I was building that.
> She eventually quit and became a housewife.
I think she ended up working for IKEA.
I do not really know much about architecture personally, so I appreciate the input. I do feel sorry for the people who do the soul crushing work like that, making the world just a little worse in order to survive. We all have a choice, even if we can't see it now.
I'm not quite sure about that.
Lots of architecture is used to intimidate, to signal power and that you should be afraid.
I dunno, I can think of a modern architect or two who could design a dystopic hellscape intended to deter humans from entering for 10,000 years in his sleep …
> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify.
I certainly wouldn't attribute those purposes to, say, the Brutalists.
If a child draws like a child, that's probably not worth mentioning.
If a brilliant artist draws like a child, that's pretty damn impressive.
Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it.
You could even tier the messages, and use words that would likely be common and thus more likely to have been recognised based on discovering whatever other shit we've left around.
DEATH.
THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.
THIS MATERIAL WILL KILL YOU.
And progressively more complex and complete messages, etc translated into Chinese, Spanish, Braille, French, pictograms, what the fuck ever.
And if they're too lazy/careless to try and decrypt any of the fucking obvious messages, fuck 'em.
The pyramids were known for their entire duration of their existence, and investigated and/or plundered regularly. But we lost all knowledge of hieroglyphs for a time period of almost two thousand years (until we found the rosetta stone).
And at the same time we were using Uranium to give glass a wonderfully green sheen. And it glowed in the dark, too! Awesome!
If there is an event cataclysmic enough to wipe out all knowledge of nuclear repositories, it will likely wipe out human civilization at large. We can't make really useful predictions how much knowledge will be kept, and at what pace it will be rediscovered.
Really, there is nothing to worry about.
We're not talking about a bunch of dudes with shovels here, we're talking about colossal industrial machinery or advanced explosives.
I wouldn't be sure what that meant. They make death what? Great again?
Has a worst case half life of 50 years.
Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects.
But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.
There were two problems. The use of breeder reactors had some proliferation concerns: they can be used to make warheads. Not a big deal in the US, as the US can already make warheads, but harder if you want to export nuclear waste reprocessing to other countries.
Transporting the waste was deemed risky. More so after 9/11, as fresh waste is so radioactively hot, it needs to be kept in water, or it will overheat. If you crash a plane into a transport vehicle, or a re-processing plant, it will create quite a mess.
So there is no way the nuclear waste will stay in the ground for 10,000 years. I suspect it will be less than a hundred years before someone digs it up, and reprocesses it.
Burying nuclear waste is itself waste.
Additionally, I don't think the "no marker, anonymous patch of ground" plan is sound. 10000 years is a long time, which will hopefully be inhabited by peoples more advanced than us, and they could do a lot of digging in that time.
That said, the approach I'd suggest would just be a big plain monument that's physically obnoxious to get around. Although the insides of the pyramids have been robbed, the pyramids themselves will last another 10000 years, and I doubt anyone will try to mine under them during that time. And experience has shown that the best way to preserve a language is to make sure there's a large enough sample for someone to brute-force it, so these pyramids could contain chambers full of detailed explanations with pictures.
If these people are more advanced, there's no point to teach them the dangers of radiation as they will be well aware of that already.
Wow, so maybe the Egyptian pyramids were indeed built (or at least - planned) by aliens, so to cover a dangerous site... let's dig under then to see if it's true!
It has always seemed a waste of effort to me. If some primitive post-dystopian human were to dig hundreds of meters through salt (!) and come into contact with the waste they would be rapidly educated as to the hazard and go find something better to do. Anyone less primitive should have no trouble interpreting some straightforward pictographs preserved on a few strategically placed brass plaques embedded in granite. In the meantime surround the site in stainless barbed wire and perform routine inspections.
I guess it was kinda fun thinking about this `problem.' Once. Long ago. But since then it seems to have just devolved into a boondoggle attracting an ever greater circle of paper writers. Meanwhile, with all of these great minds sweating 10,000 year hypotheticals, the actual handling of waste is down to yahoo contractors mixing high level waste with randomly procured cat litter, producing nitrate fueled nuclear waste explosions...
Priorities. In order. Not.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 and marked it off-topic.
Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?
Supposedly it "encourages people to vote thoughtfully," which would be somewhat less silly if the buttons weren't tiny and about a millimeter apart.
To those who haven't read the article yet, the real title is Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Prof Ast was the material scientist on one of the multidisciplinary teams tasked to design warning symbols for 10,000 year nuclear waste storage sites. He used to go around collecting old lab computers that were going to be thrown out and resurrect them with Windows 2000 or Puppy Linux installs.
… did you enter?
>No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
>Nothing valued is here.
"But I just need to use the laundry machines."
>...Fine.
I was one of his last tenants in 2013. I always enjoyed conversing with him.
If I were watching a movie where the protagonist goes in to get some ancient artifact and this comic showed up on the wall, I would be like "yeah fucking right, some spooooky spirit kills the tomb raider? suspension of disbelief fail!" But of course this is real and is actually what would happen. If the society in 10,000 years is as cynical as me (and has forgotten about radioactivity), this comic will just egg them on!
>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.
Alright! I'm getting close to the superweapon!
I did notice that "video game designer" was not part of the multidisciplinary team.
Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?
So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)
That was my thinking too. The decision to label it as "waste" for the next 10'000 years seems so narrow-minded to me!
Advantage: tomb robbers who steal the statues will receive radiation poisoning.
Probably a better approach is to accept the fact that nuclear waste will either be cleaned up or destroy humanity long before ten thousand years comes to pass, and spend the money they spent on this exercise in speculative fiction instead on working toward a real solution.
There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.
I do think worrying about radioactive waste given how much carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere is a bit like bandaging a stubbed toe on an amputated leg.
Carbon dioxide is certainly a concern, but most of its problems will never produce a place that people shouldn't stumble or explore because of unseeable danger.
I often think of the story of the Goiânia accident to be applicable. Four people ended up dead because two people stole something they thought might have value but was radioactive.[1]
It is prudent to assume that dangerous waste should be disposed of in a way that assumes there won't always be guards.
Actually it has value to our civilization, because much of the low-grade uranium "waste" could be put into breeder reactors and turned into plutonium - and reused as nuclear fuel.
Read about it here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_163.shtml
(edit: made it more clear what I meant)
99pi did an awesome about this. I thought the most interesting idea was that culture permeated much deeper than anything else. So seed our world with these stories of cats that changed color near radiation or something like that would do best. Since symbols meaning change but oral tradition or old wives tales last much longer.
Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.
10K years is a really long time to keep a computer running. Who's going to do that, other than more computers?
But even if you cut out any electronics and use something as basic as a rock with a whistle carved into it for the wind to blow through, it will still be susceptible to getting clogged up/eroded.
edit: found a mirror http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
They wonder if this really worth it, since in the end coming into contact with the waste is a bit of a self-limiting problem, in that people exploring will become sick and die. It will ergo, become a "Place to avoid" anyway. If the cost is bound to be a few explorer's lives every few millennia in any case, and that's what will send the real message, then... well... you see?
Finally though, they just wonder how to construct something massive, durable, and yet not likely to be cannibalized for parts or scrap! They even raise the issue of what 400+ generations of unknowable humanity might do to the marker structure, without disturbing the rest of the site.
But also isn't it a treasure trove? Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into fresh fuel. The waste has a large amount of useful energy left.
The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, carbon fiber, or a material that wouldn't degrade in 10,000 years. Then inside the monument would have to feature even more information. WOW!
Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.
Somewhat counter intuitively, it's actually a bit more difficult to crash into the sun than to leave the solar system.
There's also the small problem that an explosion on launch could result in a massive area being exposed to highly concentrated radioactive fallout.
What's a few poisoned people in 12,000 years?
For example, people would have to be cleared from an area in order for janitors to vacuum an area, so that no one would trip on the power cord.
I did get to go down into the salt shaft which was incredibly cool (also literally cool, which was a relief because it was the summer in New Mexico).
For the most part I upgraded some software systems and helped with some hardware upgrades.
The engineers were all characters. Several of them were preppers convinced that I was silly for going into computer science and not stocking up on gold.
On a related note, wouldn't it make more sense to turn the radioactive waste into powder and dump it over a large area of sea or desert (Sahara is HUGE)? Given a large enough area it wouldn't even be detectable.
Largely because the project requirements said "we should warn people away from this dangerous site".
Assuming the standard (very generous) EPA figure of $4 million as the break-even point to save one statistical human life, and an unrealistically generous discount rate of 0%, there's essentially no way a project of the scope of the proposed earthworks would be worth it.
It could become the 'intellectual' version of a 'predator trap'. Like the LaBrea Tar Pits attracted more apex predators than most any other ancient formation (because of all the grazers trapped and dying, predators were captured in greater numbers than anywhere else in the fossile record).
Its almost a mechanism for ensuring that Idiocracy comes to pass - a trap that kills or reproductively damages smart/curious people only, draining the gene pool and leaving an ever-duller population of humans stuck in some post-apocalyptic dark age with no hope of getting themselves out.
So yeah I'm against it.
In modern civilization memorials and/or historically significant places are continuously safeguarded and most importantly remembered.
Yes they can be targets of attacks but they get rebuilt. That is their significance is remembered and protected. It seems like a bad idea to make a dangerous place forgettable.
So instead of hiding I propose a solution might be an extremely conspicuous stone like edifice built on top of the land with information about what is underneath etched in stone (I am assuming the land above is tolerable). Maybe even make it look nice so you know it gets protected. It could even become a cultural landmark.
Choosing huge, ugly, low-value materials for construction avoids those dangers.
The first written message a visitor to the site would encounter reads:
DANGER
POISONOUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE BURRIED HERE
DO NOT DIG OR DRILL HERE BEFORE 12000 AD.
(it's not, in my opinion, a good book.)
There are others where division by zero is used as a warning of a dangerous place.
I'm not sure if there are any where it's humans doing the warning; or where they're warning about nuclear waste.
That initial text was not intended to be written, but communicated through the design of the message system. Interesting.
I expected more skulls and crossbones.
"Sweet, it's like some secret pirate tomb! Maybe they buried some treasure here!"
Wow. reminds me of the ford pinto case: http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Legg...
Assuming we are around at all, we'll likely have mastered fusion power (thus no longer creating nuclear waste) or have mastered space flight (thus we can chuck it into the Sun) or have discovered that concentrations of radioactive materials are incredibly useful and not waste at all. A few hundred years ago crude petroleum was a waste product as well.
Say there is a biological weapons attack and humanity is wiped out aside from some remote communities like Alert, Canada. Some tech survives like gears, but obviously computers go away for a while. In 3000 years people are aware that humanity was once great, but then destroyed itself with hubris. They may even have a fairly developed understanding of science based on what they could save (university text books would _certainly_ be hoarded and copied 10 years after the bio-attack).
Now the society enters an age that is kinda like a more advanced renaissance. No more easy coal or oil, so they use electricity from wind turbines.
What happens when they figure out what is at that site? They weaponize it. It's so obvious to me. If we want to stop people from getting killed by it we should hide it as best as possible. Or make it as hard as obtaining enriched uranium. Humans have always had a "Do whatever it takes" approach to war and there is no way a emanating death object is going to be avoided once they understand what it does.
"We decided against simple "Keep Out" messages with scary faces. Museums and private collections abound with such guardian figures removed from burial sites. These earlier warning messages did not work because the intruder knew that the burial goods were valuable. We did decide to include faces portraying horror and sickness (see Sections 3.3 and 4.5.1). Such faces would relate to the potential intruder wishing to protect himself or herself, rather than to protect a valued resource from thievery."
"We must inform potential intruders what lies below and the consequences of disturbing the waste. If they decide that the value of the metal component of the waste far outweighs the risks of recovering the metal, the decision is their responsibility, not ours."
Interesting how much stock they put in both the rationality and irrationality of any future individuals. Appeal to their emotional side and appeal to their logical side.
[0] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
No warning works (even if an explicit one), when met with a curious being. See: Eve and the Tree of Knowledge (from Genesis) or Pandora and her box.
And when the beings are not curious, it is unlikely that they would develop technology, or be tempted to new, alien places.
What if 5000 years from now the Mormons and the Scientologists are fighting over the Yucca Mountain site in search of materials to build nuclear weapons?
If that happens, some major catastrophe has undoubtedly already occurred which makes the possible death of a bunch of future-cavemen who happen to start digging in the wrong patch of desert pale in comparison.
If we're really worried about this scenario we should worry less about marking specific sites, and more about trying to come up with a way to store all our existing scientific and cultural knowledge in a non-perishable manner, in many places, that can be dug up and hopefully eventually decoded by people of the future. Purely from an avoid-human-suffering point of view, telling people "don't dig here" isn't nearly as valuable as telling them about infectious diseases, and vaccination, and...
It seems incredibly stupid.
