4 ms·

I don't wear a seat belt, because I do my best not to get into accidents.

• mikeash 9y ago
  What's the plan for warning future civilizations away from mercury, arsenic, and other long-lived toxic waste? The current approach for those things is to dump it in a suitable landfill or similar, and let it be. Nobody seems worried about what happens when some future civilization discovers it thousands of years hence.
  • beat 9y ago
    Maybe we should be worried.
    • wbl 9y ago
      They already have places full of mercury naturally: cinnabar mines.
    • mikeash 9y ago
      Maybe. But I find it really weird that people constantly wring their hands over a few thousand tons of nuclear waste because it remains dangerous for ten thousand years, yet pay almost no attention to millions of tons of chemical waste that remains dangerous until the end of time. I realize people can't worry about every single thing, and worrying about one thing doesn't mean other things aren't a problem. But at the same time, I see lots of people say that nuclear is worse than fossil fuels because of the waste problem, which makes no sense to me at all.