It seems plausible that over a long enough scale of time, the only reliable way to communicate "everyone who messes with this will die" regardless of language is by ensuring that everyone who messes with it does die.
I haven't typically thought along the lines of "this deadly trap is for your own good" but with radioactive waste it might really be for your own good.
I forget where it was but some radioactive components of medical equipment made it's way into a scrap yard and caused all sorts of problems including long term medical issues and death of several people as well as being in a densely populated area. It feels a bit weird to put a deadly trap into a medical device but there's at least one instance where it would have saved a lot of heartache.
And while these incidents aren't frequent, we are talking about very long time frames. It would be interesting if we could somehow look into the future and see how many incidents will occur.
Maintenance is a big concern. Although if we're willing to spend a lot of effort on how to label these things to appear obviously dangerous for long time frames then I think some time can also be spent on long term maintenance.
I expect that historic landfill mining will be a thing in the distant future, where it'll be economically viable to mine old landfills because of the high concentration of valuable plastics and metal resources.
The thought does appeal, on the whole: archaeologists and engineers working side by side, the former chronicling the deep and long-dead human past through its garbage, before the latter haul it away to melt down and rebuild into a new human future. There's a story in that, I think.
1: not a nuclear bomb of course, just as radioactive contamination.
We don’t even have the technology now. The main reason we don’t use dirty bombs now is that statistically increasing cancer rates decades down the road isn’t really tactically relevant in the moment.
From salting the earth[1], to gifting smalpox infected blankets[2], through carting away the grain[3], and a literal strong man sneaking literal nuclear waste material into tea to terrorise others[4].
What do you think reading more history will teach me?
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
2: https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi...
