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This is not a place of honor
- korethr 10y agoHonestly, reading this, I kept thinking to myself, "Man, this is just waiting to be turned into science fiction short story." It could go in different directions, future humans discover such a site, humans discover an alien analogue of such a site on $planet, aliens discover such a site crafted by humans on $planet, etc. Either way, there's potential for a good story there.
- djsumdog 10y agoI think the most interesting thing about this is the underlying assumption that warnings and containment must survive .. the death of our current civilization and States. 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.
- korethr 10y agoIt's a very sobering but realistic thought. Plenty of past human civilizations that were powerful and dominant in their day are now but decayed ruins of varying levels of mysteriousness. I do very much enjoy and benefit from being part of this civilization in this time and place, but I have no delusions that hundreds or thousands of generations from now, assuming the species survives, the works of here and now will similarly be puzzling ruins.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoIt's especially interesting to see a government body doing this sort of thing. Politicians don't usually care much about what kind of world they're leaving for their own children, let alone random citizens of the far future. 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.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Politicians don't usually care much about what kind of world they're leaving for their own children, let alone random citizens of the far future. Politicians probably care about this a lot much than they are given credit for; while plenty are actually short-sighted and narrowly selfish (just like plenty of non-politicians), no doubt a lot of the perception of that comes from people who disagree with them on what is best for the future portraying the politicians disagreement as disinterest. (This frequently happens when the disagreeing parties are not politicians, as well.)
- hardmath123 10y agoIn the full report [1], there actually is a sample short story or "scenario" (page F-139, "5.1 Scenario for the marking system (MFK)"). Extract: > 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/1992/921382.pdf http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
- thebrainkid 10y agoThanks for the link! The story really helps to show how some future people might regard such a site and all the warnings we might place on/in it.
- ubernostrum 10y agoYou might enjoy the short story "The Man Who Walked Home" by Alice Sheldon (usually published under her pen name of James Tiptree, Jr.).
- xzzx77 10y agoNot exactly the same set up, but "the Engines of God" by Jack McDevitt is a great example of that idea of future archaeologists trying to decipher an ancient message.
- Already__Taken 10y agoThe plot/premise of the mmo anarchy online is actually pretty close to this.
- tome 10y agoIt's not completely unlike Roadside Picnic, which I highly recommend.
- jcl 10y agoIt's actually not that dissimilar from the plot of "Alien". Or "Prometheus". Or "At the Mountains of Madness".
- feralmoan 10y agoOr 'The Mummy', loosely based on the legendary Curse of the Pharaohs
- hugh4 10y agoThe only way in which something like this will be useful is if, for some reason, civilisation collapses but humans survive. (If humans don't survive then 10,000 years is far too soon to worry about another intelligent species arising.) 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...
- gaur 10y agoSad that even in 1993 the government was still producing documents on a typewriter with shitty, photocopied black-and-white line art. Photoshop had already been available for three years at this point.
- frostirosti 10y agohttp://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ 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.
- ccvannorman 10y agoCats that change color as a geiger counter? Shut up and take my money!
- proactivesvcs 10y agoOne of the many discarded methods of solving Dwarf Fortress's cat population problems. We then had to expend many Dwarf-hours and precious resources safely disposing of the irradiated cat remains. The cats were still angry.
- emp_zealoth 10y agoIrradiated Cat-splosion. Stuff that nightmares are made of!
- grimaceindex 10y agoThe suffering of animals is amusing entertainment to you?
- amk_ 10y agoHoly shit. Dieter Ast was my landlord in college. This explains so much about my basement. 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.
- colanderman 10y ago… your basement was plastered with iconographic warnings against entering due to interminable life-ending substances contained within? … did you enter?
- 2bitencryption 10y ago>This place is not a place of honor. >No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. >Nothing valued is here. "But I just need to use the laundry machines." >...Fine.
- jean- 10y agoBrilliant. This just reads like a conversation with Death in a Terry Pratchett novel.
- willvarfar 10y agoAnd was there one saying "beware of the leopard"?
- turkeybone 10y agoHello, fellow Dieter tenant! I was one of his last tenants in 2013. I always enjoyed conversing with him.
- stonogo 10y agoIf their goal was to create a hokey-sounding quasi-spiritual ward that future generations will consider naive and ignore, they've certainly hit the nail on the head. 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.
- periphrasis 10y agoAdmittedly, I haven't read the article, but the tone of the message suggests that it's not meant for future generations of our civilization, but for future generations of whatever cultures come after our civilization is gone. 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.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago...and as such, any large monumental works are more likely to attract attention than to repel it. May even become a cult place of worship. More effective to bury and obfuscate the site entirely?
- yellowapple 10y agoIf it becomes a "cult place of worship", then that's probably Mission Accomplished; the faithful have a tendency to defend holy places against those seeking to defile them (read: dig into them and expose the world to nuclear waste). If they can be convinced that such sites are "God's Temples" and that defiling them will unleash all sorts of plagues (which they very likely will), then the current generation's job is done.
- stared 10y ago
- smegel 10y ago> Put into words, it would communicate something like the following 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.
- zyxley 10y ago> I expected more skulls and crossbones. "Sweet, it's like some secret pirate tomb! Maybe they buried some treasure here!"
- danieltillett 10y agoI would have thought that to an advanced civilization that a nuclear radioactive waste dump may well be of value. 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.
- manachar 10y agoThey're worried about people in the future who may not know about radioactive waste. This location will be dangerous for a very long time in a way that's invisible. 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
- danieltillett 10y agoUnderstand the reason for the worry, but given the climate change that has been kicked off by the CO2 released to date I don’t think people are going to be worrying too much about tripping over a radioactive waste dump.
- someguydave 10y ago>to an advanced civilization that a nuclear radioactive waste dump may well be of value. 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 https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_163.shtml
- greglindahl 10y agoIt (this particular plutonium isotope) is also really useful for building bombs. (edit: made it more clear what I meant)
- gruez 10y agoIt appears that most of the images are missing (there are figures that are refereed to but do not exist). Is there a complete copy somewhere? edit: found a mirror http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
- rory096 10y agoThey show up for me. Here's an imgur album. http://imgur.com/a/DGizu http://imgur.com/a/DGizu
- gruez 10y agoI see those images, but there are more that are missing. For example: Figure 4.3-18, which is referenced 2 times in text but has no accompanying picture.
- flomo 10y agoThe images were published in high-resolution in some sort of art magazine and probably numerous other places, I cut them out to decorate my dormroom. I've only seen these awful photocopy images on the web, but there are far better ones out there.
- mooreds 10y agoSee also Into Eternity, a movie about how the Finns are dealing with this, with a 100,000 year timeframe. http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/ http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
- e12e 10y agoIt is a very good documentary on the subject. For me it really drove home the idea that current nuclear power comes with too expensive externalities in the form of "keep this stuff safe for 100 000 years". We've never come close to doing something like that as a species. I don't think we ever will.
- bcg1 10y agoKind of makes you wonder if its really such a good idea to smash atoms just to boil some water.
- santoshalper 10y agoWe already live in the orbit of a giant nuclear reactor that puts out so much energy that its waste energy can power our entire world for any foreseeable future. Why build our own?
- Turing_Machine 10y agoActually, after a couple of hundred years it's no more dangerous than the ore from which it came. No one worries about putting up signs around natural uranium ore bodies. Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.
- Turing_Machine 10y agoExample: Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of natural uranium. It has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. By the "long half-life = ZOMG! DANGERRRRR!" standard it must be really, really bad, no? Nope. It's just not very radioactive. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and even get free shipping (no hazmat or anything). Uranium was also used to color glass in the early 20th century. While it's not used for that purpose any more (and I probably would not routinely drink out of a uranium glass vessel), it's not considered hazardous. There's a lot of it for sale on eBay. The really dangerous stuff tends to have a short half-life (= intensely radioactive, again by definition) and an affinity for body tissues. For example, iodine-131 -- half-live 8 days, and gets absorbed by your thyroid gland, or strontium-90 -- half-life about 29 years, and gets absorbed into your bones (it mimics calcium). The people who convinced you that isotopes with long half-lives are somehow more dangerous? They either didn't know what they were talking about, or they were lying to you.
- mesh 10y ago99 Percent Invisible episode on this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/
- ehnto 10y agoI feel like 99pi might become the "relevant XKCD" of podcasts soon. This was an excellent episode and it's a really fun problem to discuss.
- ageofwant 10y agoFunny stuff. A product of the narrative of the day, and in less that 30 years its already changed. Of course there will be no nuclear waste in the future, that stuff is way to valuable as fuel in modern reactors.
- homero 10y agoCan we tour it?
- apsec112 10y agoWe should just assume that nuclear waste lasts forever, like a lot of chemical waste does, and then treat it the same as the equivalent class of chemical waste. When someone says "10,000 years", people start thinking about how to wait it out. When someone says "forever", people give up on waiting it out, and start thinking about more realistic safety measures.
- ProAm 10y agoIn reality 10,000 yrs is probably longer than humans will be relevant on Earth.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoHm. One million years an counting so far?
- ProAm 10y agoBut we've only been relevant for ~7,000 and if we do not make the Earth inhospitable ourselves in the next 10k years then the chances of a cataclysmic event are ever increasing to assist us. 99.9% of all animals ever to exist on the Earth are extinct, we're not that special.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoPerhaps they are extinct because we've been erasing them as we reformat the earth to be more congenial to ourselves? Their extinction is not a signal that we may go extinct ourselves; just the opposite. Mesopotamian Ziggurat, Teppe Sialk, dates from around 2900BC (~5000 yo). Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years old?
- pedrosorio 10y agoThe 99.9% has nothing to do with humans. He was probably referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinction_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinct...
- Aelinsaar 10y agoIt's a fascinating problem, a way to communicate the concept that this is not a treasure trove, not a historical site, but something dangerous that was meant to be sealed away for many thousands of years due to its hazardous nature. The parting thoughts seem most telling to me thought. 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.
- bobbles 10y agoAll I can picture is an Indiana Jones like situation, where everything that would be done to protect the site will just be interpreted as something valuable being stored in the most dangerous section.
- pmontra 10y agoI can picture what people do when told "I give you this box but you must not open it".
- samplonius 10y agoIt also assumes the future people will be even dumber than the present population? 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.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSeems like overkill. What's a few poisoned people in 12,000 years? I imagine that people dying around the site will be the most effective ward to keep others away.
- andrewflnr 10y agoWhat's a few poisoned people in 12,000 years? They're people, is the important point. If nothing else, this is about keeping a clean conscience, knowing that you did your best to save them.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago...and success is measured in minimizing that number. The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. Not to attract pilgrims for centuries with mysterious messages and monoliths, who go home to die of unknown sores and blood problems.
- morgante 10y ago> The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now? Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
- crpatino 10y ago> How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now? 1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground. 2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later. 3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the more accessible areas of the site. Ideally, it should not leak out and should not be easily removable by human means. However, the main goal is to have people getting sick by repeated exposure. Nothing that kills right away, but something that leads to reduced life span and/or quality of life. > Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here." The point is not to issue any overt warning. People will be smart enough to create a story that fits the scenario. Instead of a fortress made to guard unfathomable riches with ancient evils, you want them to think of us like a bunch of idiots that messed with stuff they did not quite grasp and got Darwinized in the process. There will always be 3Ds jobs: dumb, dirty and dangerous. You masquarade as one of such places and people will not give it a second thought.
- labster 10y agoIt's really interesting to me to see architecture used for its typical antithesis. It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify. Here it is being used to desecrate, to decrease utility, to ward away. 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.
- bbcbasic 10y agoI don't have to think too hard to make a bad UI. It comes naturally.
- pluma 10y agoIt's the difference between incompetence and intentionally making things look bad. 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.
- rdtsc 10y ago> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify. Here it is being used to desecrate, to decrease utility, to ward away. 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.
- labster 10y agoDark patterns aren't uncommon, sure. But I feel like in trying to design a nuclear waste site they are using antipatterns, purposely trying to avoid or subvert every common pattern in design. Or in terms of the computing metaphor a dark pattern would be a website that splits content across several pages. An antipattern would loading MBs of webfonts and polyfills to display a single word and a link saying "Click here for the next word." (At least as I'm trying to use the word "antipattern"). 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.
- mholt 10y agoInteresting. I know that the idea of launching radioactive waste into the sun or out of the solar system is highly criticized for the potential for things to go wrong (and rightly so), but do the critics really think that the earth -- with humans on it -- will be more reliable in 10,000 years than space flight even 100 years from now?
- Joof 10y agoNo, but they won't be nearly as catastrophic or as expensive.
- Merad 10y agoGetting out of the solar system is incredibly difficult. Well, not necessarily difficult, but expensive. So far we've launched a grand total of five spacecraft that will leave our solar system, with a combined mass of just over 2500 kg. That doesn't even put a dent in the amount of nuclear waste we're talking about. 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.
- kaishiro 10y agoJust wanted to say I accidentally fat fingered a downvote while trying to do the opposite. Sorry!
- Bromskloss 10y agoIt's annoying that you can't retract your votes. What is the point with that? Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?
- Wingman4l7 10y agoThere's some karma threshold you have to achieve to get downvote privileges (possibly coupled with a minimum account age, but I don't know for sure).
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago> It's annoying that you can't retract your votes. What is the point with that? Supposedly it "encourages people to vote thoughtfully," which would be somewhat less silly if the buttons weren't tiny and about a millimeter apart.
- dang 10y agoUnvote is coming. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 and marked it off-topic.
- kaishiro 10y agoThanks dang. Just felt like I needed to let him/her know : )
- dbrower 10y agoI've read the report several times (it keeps coming back every 5-7 years or so) since publication, and I've never felt like a reliable solution had wither been found, or was in the offing. There is good thinking, but the problem itself seems very daunting. I think that is the real lesson.
- ageofwant 10y agoIt is because the problem does not exist. So no solution is required. Those "waste dumps" are prime fuel for next gen LFTR's.
- samplonius 10y agoThe solution was found already: keep reprocessing the nuclear waste into new fuel.
- topspin 10y agoThis has been haunting the news since the early '80s and it will go on for several more decades. Then, after whatever they finally come up with is constructed, there will be a creepy spectacle about which to write more tired news stories. 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.
- LoSboccacc 10y agoYeah the artifical constraint of understandable by everyone is quite limiting. I can see two set working best: scary faces and statues for primitives, atom structure of thorium or whatever waste is for educated. Optionally leave some stuff out in a ventilated but inaccesdible area so people die/get sick before releasing the whole toxic dump in the wild. Can be in stages like pyramids: first zone warning, then the second zone trapped. Inhuman, but if your priority is to protect the whole word from releasing the waste a couple curious casualty may be a compromise.
- ktRolster 10y agoTo prevent people from entering, they should place statues of soldiers in front of the entrance. Thousands of them. Each should be sculpted individually from terra cotta.
- inopinatus 10y agoMay I suggest two vast and trunkless legs of stone, accompanied by a pithy inscription. Shattered visage optional.
- taneq 10y agoLook on my works, ye mighty, and check ye sperm count.
- desdiv 10y agoDisadvantage: tomb robbers who steal the statues will receive radiation poisoning. Advantage: tomb robbers who steal the statues will receive radiation poisoning.
- proactivesvcs 10y agoOr discard of the waste on a small island and erect many large stone statues of scary-looking faces. I expect that, over time, the waste's emanations will kill off all of the local trees but it should serve as strong enough warning :-)
- andrewflnr 10y agoUse the heat of the waste's radioactivity to power infrasonic emitters, and induce horror and panic in anyone who comes close. Or maybe set it up so that the wind creates infrasonic vibrations. You'd stand a very good chance of convincing people that the place is literally haunted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Human_reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Human_reactions
- kordless 10y agoI have one computer that has been running (with help) for 8 years. That's a record for me. 10K years is a really long time to keep a computer running. Who's going to do that, other than more computers?
- andrewflnr 10y agoThat is indeed the trick, but who said anything about computers? Mechanical sound reproduction, even specifically using electricity, predates computers. I see no reason it couldn't post-date them in this application, as well. You would want to build the system out of simple, indestructible components, something closer in complexity to an electric doorbell than a computer.
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- kalleboo 10y agoI imagine the record for uptime with zero maintenance is held by something like the Voyager probes which are nearing 40 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 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.
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- tn13 10y agoCan someone summarize this page here ? It is too long and I am unable to understand the context.
- SCAQTony 10y agoWhat language(s) did the earth speak 10,000 years ago. The concept is electrifying for will English or any other language written or spoken today even exist? 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!
- stickfigure 10y agoI'm going to go out on a limb and surmise that, barring cataclysmic events, 10k years from now the majority of people will speak an english-derived language that is mostly understandable to someone living in the present day. Information transfer in the past was extremely analog, slow-moving, and lossy. Today we are rapidly approaching a "single meme pool" and your tweets are getting archived for eternity, whether you like it or not. Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.
- aomurphy 10y ago!0,000 Years ago was ~8000 BC. Nobody knows what languages people spoke back then. Our oldest reconstructed languages like Proto-Uralic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic are hypothesized to have been spoken around then, but they are very rough guesses and certainly are unintelligible to all modern humans.
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- joshmarinacci 10y agoWhile I appreciate the effort they put into it, trying to plan anything for 10,000 years in the future is sheer folly. We have no idea what humanity will be like in 200 years, much less 10,000. 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.
- kbart 10y agoAny marks would only attract people's attention. I can't come up with a single historical example where some marks would successfully keep people away. Even now we keep digging once forbidden and sacred places like pyramids, graves, temples, plague victims' burial grounds. Furthermore, a "menacing earthworks" example from the article looks like a treasure is buried inside that square. Why not bury it deep enough in an unmarked grave (for example, put it in the tunnels inside a mountain then blow all entrances up) so no primitive civilization could dig it up? If civilization is sophisticated enough to dig deep enough, they must be well aware of radiation as well.
- krkoch 10y agoI'm not so sure. Primitive mining in e.g. Røros, Norway goes back to 1740. Dynamite were introduced to the mine in 1870. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8ros https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8ros
- kbart 10y agoImho, that's still solvable easier than creating marks readable for 10000 years in the future. Simply choose a mountain that contains no valuable metals/minerals and is made of rock that's too hard for primitive tools.
- Hondor 10y agoOnly 40 years before the invention of the Geiger counter. If future primitive people have dynamite, it probably won't be long before the know about radiation too. This whole project seems to be being treated as far more important than it really is. It's only to protect a very small group of people in a very narrow window of technological advancement and only if civilization had somehow already been destroyed yet there were enough of us around that living in the desert seemed like a good idea.
- wtbob 10y ago> This whole project seems to be being treated as far more important than it really is. That's an excellent point. It does seem to have been a component of the overall exaggeration of the cost of nuclear power.
- takshak 10y agowhy not write in a language that has survived more than 10000 years?
- taneq 10y agoOr just write down exactly what's going on, in a broad variety of modern languages in a nigh-indestructible medium, along with an exhortation to update the documentation if it's getting archaic enough to be hard to read?
- orbitingpluto 10y agoI'm never understood this marker system. Graves have been marked in a threatening manner so that they would not be plundered. It doesn't work. 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...
- wtbob 10y ago> The point is to hide the waste. 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.
- neltnerb 10y agoI thought it was pretty interesting that they weren't really talking about making the site "threatening", but making it "repulsive". Poor craftsmanship, ugly terrain, uncomfortable heat, low value materials, etc. Some of their design photos were very different from what I'd assumed, and pretty much immediately triggered my "eww" response. Not intimidating exactly, just uncomfortable.
- patrickk 10y agoThey attempted to go with "repulsive" for a nuclear waste disposal site in Finland, there's a really cool documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ
- 10y ago
- valbaca 10y agoI had an internship here during the summer of 2010. For the most part it was incredibly boring as there was SO much emphasis on safety (rightfully so). 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.
- brbsix 10y agoI guess that's not very surprising. If you're used to thinking 10k years out, you recognize the inevitability of catastrophe in a way that others wouldn't.
- jtolmar 10y agoContrary to many of the comments here, I think they did a good job of considering what it takes to make something foreboding without sounding like "here be treasure." The pseudo-mystical messages sound hokey, but they're effectively a backup system in case the straight-up "This is atomic waste, here's a description of atomic waste" descriptions are incomprehensible to future generations. And the more primitive communications deserve more consideration, because that's the harder part. 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.
- kbart 10y ago"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." 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.
- twright0 10y agoThey might be aware of the dangers of radiation in the abstract, but they might not be able to read our current marking systems to learn that there is a specific threat from radiation at that specific location. 10,000 years is a very long time to try to preserve information across.
- aninhumer 10y agoIf the culture is advanced there are ways we could express the concept of radiation without needing a common language. There are a lot of innate scientific patterns to draw on, like the structure of an atom, the periodic table or a mushroom cloud.
- duckingtest 10y agoI don't want to sound evil... but why? It's not like digging up low-intensity radioactive waste is going to end the world. Just look at how alive Chernobyl zone is... So let's say some people bring it up, they get sick and die, which makes people remember that radioactivity symbol = bad for the next several hundred years or so. 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.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago> why? 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.
- socket0 10y agoOne clear problem with using A.D. (anno Domini) as measure for time elapsed, is that in 10,000 years Domini will no doubt be taken to mean either Bender Rodriguez or Donald Trump.
- Ih8registering 10y agoWhy not just dump the waste in the marianas trench? The waste will get subducted underneath the earths crust. Problem solved, FOREVER. There are plenty of ships that are sitting in mothballs that can be used for the purpose. Hundreds of them, actually. So really this is just a non-problem, and example of the "need" to create "busy work" so that fiat dollars can be backed by "something super important". Sigh.
- jrockway 10y agoI like the comic where the happy man has successfully plundered the nuclear waste. It contaminates him and he is observably less happy, though still exhibiting signs of above-average satisfaction with life. Then in the final frame, his beloved treasure stolen, he sadly dies of what appears to be thyroid cancer. His dying thought is that the person that robbed him of his ill-gotten plutonium squeezings will soon be suffering the same fate. Justice. 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!
- wobbleblob 10y agoI imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks! 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?
- restalis 10y ago"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?" That was my thinking too. The decision to label it as "waste" for the next 10'000 years seems so narrow-minded to me!
- michaelt 10y agoThe comic shows the tree has grown bigger in the final frame of the comic. So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)
- wobbleblob 10y agoIt would never occur to me to interpret it that way, rather than him moving the block closer to the trees. Wouldn't it take a human life time for a tree to grow that much?
- gadders 10y agoThis just makes me wonder what toxic substance the dinosaurs/space aliens buried under Stonehenge now.
- amelius 10y agoIt seems that what they are trying to accomplish is the exact opposite of advertisement.
- stared 10y agoI feel that all warning are doomed. If we discovered some ancient site (let alone ancient alien site), each marking would prompt us to dig further and explore more. 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.
- antihero 10y agoSurely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication. 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.
- creshal 10y ago> Surely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication. 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.
- vectorjohn 10y agoAnd yet nobody has yet to dig hundreds of feet under the pyramids to find out what they're really hiding. Also, the thing will be practically made of Rosetta Stone, designed on purpose to help translate. Really, there is nothing to worry about.
- antihero 10y agoSure, so what we do is, as the other bit of my post said, make the material sufficiently difficult to get to that it would take a long time and an advanced civilisation to be able to get to it, by which point they would have had plenty of time to figure out what the writing meant. We're not talking about a bunch of dudes with shovels here, we're talking about colossal industrial machinery or advanced explosives.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Bromskloss 10y agoDo the signs ever get to the point and say that it's about radioactivity?
- Leynos 10y agoYes. 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. This message is to be rendered in seven different languages. Subsequent messages explain the situation in more detail.
- Zelmor 10y agoIt is very optimistic of them to presume that there will be any kind of civilization here in ten thousand years. By then. either humanity moves to the stars, or moves back to fighting with sticks and stones.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoI worry an elaborate structure will attract unwanted attention. Think about it - would you be interested in visiting it? Aren't you already interested? Why would future-people be any different. I know, the average shmoe would hear about this thing in the desert and think "Whatever" and go back to eating cheetohs and screwing. But what about an architect? A philosopher? An engineer? A historian? An artist? Pretty much any intellectual would be fascinated. 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.
- justin66 10y agoThe goal with something like this is to build a series of deterrents, such that you have to be smarter and more capable (and therefore more able to interpret a warning) as you get closer to the real threat.
- agentgt 10y agoIt seems like one of the problem is that the place "is not a place of honor". 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.
- raisedbyninjas 10y agoSome monuments are safeguarded today, but not all. Fewer monuments were safeguarded in the millenia before we understood radiation. Your design relies on a culture that values the remnants of other cultures to the point that they are sacred. There have been times and places where the people just wanted to re-purpose the nice building materials like the Mayan temple that was destroyed to create road gravel. Wars can break out that destroy delicate structures too, like the archaeological artifacts that were scooped up by the U.S. military to fill sand-bags during the Iraq war. Choosing huge, ugly, low-value materials for construction avoids those dangers.
- PaulHoule 10y agoPeople 5000 years from now could very well see WIPP and Yucca Mountain as valuable sources of Plutonium, Uranium as well as other fuels and nuclear explosives. 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?
- tgb 10y agoWait, can we all just take a minute to relish the extreme nominative determinism in Ward Goodenough being involved in this project? This man was born for this role.
- finnh 10y agogood eye! if I could up vote you a thousand times I would.
- jtmarmon 10y ago> (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. Wow. reminds me of the ford pinto case: http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Leggett-pinto.html http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Legg...
- theoh 10y agoRecent documentary by Peter Galison and Rob Moss: http://containmentmovie.com/ http://containmentmovie.com/
- johnward 10y agoMy favorite part: http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/WIPP%20Exhibit%20Message%20to%2012,000%20A_D_files/dead01.gif http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/WIPP%20Exhibit%...
- pqhwan 10y agoI find the "human comes near box with radioactive sign/sign is on human now/human sick" drawing to be a pretty universal warning sign. No matter how many years we're aiming for the message to survive, as long as we're warning against humans, wouldn't using the human form somehow in the message be the best way? Isn't drawing narratives with bipedal stick figures something we've had since the dawn of humanity?
- cgriswald 10y agoOg came upon a cave and discovered a strange symbol on a strange kind of stone he had never seen before. The stone was flat, and the symbol was neither painted on nor carved. On the strange stone, there were also what looked like people to Og, but the people were strange. They did not look like Og looked. Maybe they weren't people at all, but demons. And these demons looked to be dying. Suddenly, Og understood. This cave was a holy place. Og would tell his people about it and they would make offerings to the gods. And when the demons caused fires and floods, they would flee to this cave.
- SCHiM 10y agoBut reading from left to right/top to bottom is definitely not universal. How will you make sure that the figures are read in the correct order? Perhaps a future culture will read the signs to mean that they should bring old and dying people to the stone to resurrect them?
- AnonymousPlanet 10y agoIs there any kind of science fiction or fantasy that includes such a place marked with repulsive myths and symbolism to repel explorers from nuklear waste?
- DanBC 10y agoThere's "Deep Storm", about a crashed alien ship that warns humans about the dangerous technology by using impossible or nonsensical mathematical equations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Storm (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.
- JoeDaDude 10y agoThis team should collaborate with the makers of the Clock of the Long Now (http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/), another device intended to last thousands of years. There is a discussion of their research into various methods pursued by different cultures over the centuries to pursue similar goals, see video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nphxoUxSvgY
- 3pt14159 10y agoWhat I don't get is why nobody ever thinks about the international relations angle. 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.
- stevetrewick 10y agoFull report at [0] (PDF, 351 pages). According to the WIPP Wikipedia page [1] the final report is expected around 2028. [0] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
- beedogs 10y agoWhy does the US bury its nuclear waste, and not recycle and refine it again? It seems incredibly stupid.
- hexane360 10y agoThese parts stood out to me: "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.