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It's a fun exercise to think about every time this comes up, but it always strikes me as very much perfect being the enemy of the good. It's impossible to desi

It's a fun exercise to think about every time this comes up, but it always strikes me as very much perfect being the enemy of the good. It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years, and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. The more defences you add, the more someone can say "yes, but it's insecure against a hunter gatherer society that somehow has dynamite and plasma lances, and a religion that requires them to seek out, excavate, cut open, grind and feed to babies anything in gigantic, obviously artificial steel containers deep in solid rock and they also think that any warning or sickness is a test from God." Sure, you saved an extremely hypothetical group of future humans from death. But to be honest, any human society that hasn't figured out radiation will lose more people to cutting down thousands of meters into the rock then they would to the radiation. In fact, if we take it to the extreme, should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

foxglacier 2y ago
In addition, this society has to fail to identify what the resulting health problems were caused by. If only the people who ate the excavated material or live in its vicinity get sick, that should eventually be obvious before they spread it to the whole human population through their weird global religion.
- bumby 2y ago
  The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.
BytesAndGears 2y ago
Plus add the fact that — if society collapses so dramatically that we forget about radiation and where we stored it, then humans wouldn’t be capable of finding the waste anyways. We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter. Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.
- trhway 2y ago
  >a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter. even Ancient Greeks could have put some copper windings and iron together to produce electricity from wind. Add mirrors concentrated on a boiler and you can generate from solar. Availability of fossil fuels may as well be a damnation of our current civilization.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Wind power, yes. But anything that requires boiling water is tough without high-quality metalworking, which is tough without easy availability to energy. The ancient Greeks has toy machines driven by boilers, but there's a reason the steam engine didn't arise until the industrial revolution.
jrowen 2y ago
It's not even the perfect, it's the pointless. A new society that completely lost touch with ours is about as knowable as what's on the outside of the universe. How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.
- kryogen1c 2y ago
  Earth's path through the universe slaloms through asteroids. It is not a question of if humanity gets reset, it is a question of when.
  - dustingetz 2y ago
    broadly Jupiter is sheltering Earth from asteroids, to such great extent that it may be a prerequisite to life that habitable water planets share the system with a gas giant. Certainly you’re right that this solution is not perfect.
    - vikingerik 2y ago
      Bit of a nitpick - Jupiter tends to shield the inner solar system from comets that originate far out, but not necessarily asteroids. For bodies in the asteroid belt, there's some thought that Jupiter perturbs as many to a perihelion near Earth's orbit as it diverts away. And without Jupiter, the asteroid belt itself would have accreted into a terrestrial planet instead of remaining loose. Jupiter's overall effect on shielding Earth is uncertain.
  - Retric 2y ago
    A reset requires enough people to survive the event for humanity to bounce back, while also forgetting everything they know about science and technology. Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.
- threetonesun 2y ago
Neikius 2y ago
Yeah, good point :) Fully agree with this. The site will be very hard to reach anyway. But for the case of industrial society at the tech level of 1800s and no knowledge there are things you can do too. Like make some of the bad stuff reachable with a bit less of an effort and allow people to figure it out by themselves. Our ancestors didn't all die due to bad mushrooms did they? So smart people will still be able to figure it out. Just give em a little help.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Mm, radium water. They'll figure it out alright. After they explored the commercial opportunities. :)
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  If we wanted to help the hypothetical future humans not die, we should make sure there is no lead available, so they can't use it for pipes, sweetener or fuel additives. Mine all the galena and store it safely with the nuclear waste. Would save millions and millions of hypothetical lives.
wat10000 2y ago
It seems like bad ROI unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later. If it’s merely possible but not inevitable, then some basic precautions make sense, but after that your effort is probably better expended in trying to avoid the collapse rather than trying to save some lives after it happens.
- psychoslave 2y ago
  Well the obvious way to unsure that these waste are not going to threat human lives in whatever long period of time is to not create them in the first place. And not doing it is even easier than saying we could not produce them. Note that I'm not antinuclear or collapsist. Maybe in 10000 years there will be so much progresses in ways we don't expect that this material could be turned easily into safe or even useful material for human beings.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later. There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it. We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher. There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again. * The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.
snakeyjake 2y ago
> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry. It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years. It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it. Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years. Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona. There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind. I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron. I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on. I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease. We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility"). edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference. Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years. The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place. > I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on. Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that. > Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this. Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.
nine_k 2y ago
Why not just put more information there, not just a short warning sign? Well above the nuclear waste, bury a tablet that teaches a language in a few different ways, like the Rosetta stone but designed for teaching from scratch. Add some easy texts for study. Add more complex texts to study after the easy texts. Add an elementary, qualitative intro into the ideas of nuclear physics. Now explain the danger of the buried substances in a sensible way! (Better yet, build a breeder reactor, burn the "waste" as the nuclear fuel it is. Stop being deathly afraid of reprocessing plutonium, at least in the nations that already handle it and have nuclear weapons for last 60-70 years anyway.)
- notahacker 2y ago
  We know what modern humans do when they find something really interesting buried under the ground like massive tablets which appear to be an attempt to explain a civilization to posterity. They dig deeper. Digging is easier than translating texts in an unknown language, especially if that unknown language is about nuclear physics.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    I just don’t feel like it would be hard to put a picture on the thing of a guy like getting close to it then dying. The basic idea that it’s hazardous wouldn’t be too hard to communicate.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      That would certainly stand a higher chance of conveying the right message than overengineered solutions like monumental spikes or attempts to impart taboos against certain colours of cats or tablets that combine an English dictionary and a nuclear physics lecture But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
This whole thing brings to mind stuff like Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, where people dig into a Cretaceous-era ruin that should best be left alone. There's lots of stories about buried evil. In Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company, we have The Barrowland, which is basically undone by assisted climate change. There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc. When I was considering land for a new-build near Berlin, some of the advice was specifically "don't bother with Oranienburg, there's a high chance the builder will find an unexploded WW2 bomb in the ground". It wasn't this specific article, but close enough: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii-bombs-pose-growing-threat-in-germany-a-859201.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii...
turnsout 2y ago
Yeah, too much overthinking. The comic panels are great actually. The problem with specifying order can be solved pretty simply by adding one panel with the person as a baby. Or show a seed, then a small tree, then the tree fully grown, then the person enters. You can also add arrows. I think arrows are probably understandable across cultures.
- amenhotep 2y ago
  They did add a growing tree! Presumably the future autoobscurantist civilisation might simply interpret that to mean that the fountain of youth is so powerful that it has an effect on its surroundings, reversing time for plant life as well as people.
quickthrowman 2y ago
> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years I beg to differ, there’s already one that will last 10,000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... > and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. Where is this hypothetical future society going to get their energy from? We have extracted the coal and oil fields that are easy to access already.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
Just to note, dumping the waste in the ocean makes it considerably more inaccessible than burying it deep in solid rock, and it's easier to do. > should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that. This isn't even something to be concerned about. It already happened, to us. We got over it.
Anotheroneagain 2y ago
I think the best solution would be to keep samples around in somewhat reachable parts. Occassionally, people will get sick, and learn that the signs mean danger, without causing an accident of catastrophic proportions, and recognize the huge radiation signs that label the actual storage as ominous signs.
stevenwoo 2y ago
It's not just an exercise, there is a 10,000 year plus nuclear waste storage facility being built in Finland set to be operational in a couple of years, there's the book written about it, Deep Time Reckoning and if one doesn't want to read a book, here's a short podcast episode about it. https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&segmentID=5 https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&s...
- i_love_retros 2y ago
  Also a very good documentary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

foxglacier 2y ago

In addition, this society has to fail to identify what the resulting health problems were caused by. If only the people who ate the excavated material or live in its vicinity get sick, that should eventually be obvious before they spread it to the whole human population through their weird global religion.

bumby 2y ago
The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.

BytesAndGears 2y ago

Plus add the fact that — if society collapses so dramatically that we forget about radiation and where we stored it, then humans wouldn’t be capable of finding the waste anyways. We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter. Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.

trhway 2y ago
>a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter. even Ancient Greeks could have put some copper windings and iron together to produce electricity from wind. Add mirrors concentrated on a boiler and you can generate from solar. Availability of fossil fuels may as well be a damnation of our current civilization.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Wind power, yes. But anything that requires boiling water is tough without high-quality metalworking, which is tough without easy availability to energy. The ancient Greeks has toy machines driven by boilers, but there's a reason the steam engine didn't arise until the industrial revolution.

jrowen 2y ago

It's not even the perfect, it's the pointless. A new society that completely lost touch with ours is about as knowable as what's on the outside of the universe. How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.

kryogen1c 2y ago
Earth's path through the universe slaloms through asteroids. It is not a question of if humanity gets reset, it is a question of when.
- dustingetz 2y ago
  broadly Jupiter is sheltering Earth from asteroids, to such great extent that it may be a prerequisite to life that habitable water planets share the system with a gas giant. Certainly you’re right that this solution is not perfect.
  - vikingerik 2y ago
    Bit of a nitpick - Jupiter tends to shield the inner solar system from comets that originate far out, but not necessarily asteroids. For bodies in the asteroid belt, there's some thought that Jupiter perturbs as many to a perihelion near Earth's orbit as it diverts away. And without Jupiter, the asteroid belt itself would have accreted into a terrestrial planet instead of remaining loose. Jupiter's overall effect on shielding Earth is uncertain.
- Retric 2y ago
  A reset requires enough people to survive the event for humanity to bounce back, while also forgetting everything they know about science and technology. Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.
threetonesun 2y ago

Neikius 2y ago

Yeah, good point :) Fully agree with this. The site will be very hard to reach anyway. But for the case of industrial society at the tech level of 1800s and no knowledge there are things you can do too. Like make some of the bad stuff reachable with a bit less of an effort and allow people to figure it out by themselves. Our ancestors didn't all die due to bad mushrooms did they? So smart people will still be able to figure it out. Just give em a little help.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Mm, radium water. They'll figure it out alright. After they explored the commercial opportunities. :)
grues-dinner 2y ago
If we wanted to help the hypothetical future humans not die, we should make sure there is no lead available, so they can't use it for pipes, sweetener or fuel additives. Mine all the galena and store it safely with the nuclear waste. Would save millions and millions of hypothetical lives.

wat10000 2y ago

It seems like bad ROI unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later. If it’s merely possible but not inevitable, then some basic precautions make sense, but after that your effort is probably better expended in trying to avoid the collapse rather than trying to save some lives after it happens.

psychoslave 2y ago
Well the obvious way to unsure that these waste are not going to threat human lives in whatever long period of time is to not create them in the first place. And not doing it is even easier than saying we could not produce them. Note that I'm not antinuclear or collapsist. Maybe in 10000 years there will be so much progresses in ways we don't expect that this material could be turned easily into safe or even useful material for human beings.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later. There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it. We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher. There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again. * The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.

snakeyjake 2y ago

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry. It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years. It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it. Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years. Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona. There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind. I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron. I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on. I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease. We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility"). edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference. Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

rbanffy 2y ago
> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years. The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place. > I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on. Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that. > Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this. Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.

nine_k 2y ago

Why not just put more information there, not just a short warning sign? Well above the nuclear waste, bury a tablet that teaches a language in a few different ways, like the Rosetta stone but designed for teaching from scratch. Add some easy texts for study. Add more complex texts to study after the easy texts. Add an elementary, qualitative intro into the ideas of nuclear physics. Now explain the danger of the buried substances in a sensible way! (Better yet, build a breeder reactor, burn the "waste" as the nuclear fuel it is. Stop being deathly afraid of reprocessing plutonium, at least in the nations that already handle it and have nuclear weapons for last 60-70 years anyway.)

notahacker 2y ago
We know what modern humans do when they find something really interesting buried under the ground like massive tablets which appear to be an attempt to explain a civilization to posterity. They dig deeper. Digging is easier than translating texts in an unknown language, especially if that unknown language is about nuclear physics.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  I just don’t feel like it would be hard to put a picture on the thing of a guy like getting close to it then dying. The basic idea that it’s hazardous wouldn’t be too hard to communicate.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    That would certainly stand a higher chance of conveying the right message than overengineered solutions like monumental spikes or attempts to impart taboos against certain colours of cats or tablets that combine an English dictionary and a nuclear physics lecture But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

This whole thing brings to mind stuff like Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, where people dig into a Cretaceous-era ruin that should best be left alone. There's lots of stories about buried evil. In Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company, we have The Barrowland, which is basically undone by assisted climate change. There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.

ben_w 2y ago
> There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc. When I was considering land for a new-build near Berlin, some of the advice was specifically "don't bother with Oranienburg, there's a high chance the builder will find an unexploded WW2 bomb in the ground". It wasn't this specific article, but close enough: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii-bombs-pose-growing-threat-in-germany-a-859201.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii...

turnsout 2y ago

Yeah, too much overthinking. The comic panels are great actually. The problem with specifying order can be solved pretty simply by adding one panel with the person as a baby. Or show a seed, then a small tree, then the tree fully grown, then the person enters. You can also add arrows. I think arrows are probably understandable across cultures.

amenhotep 2y ago
They did add a growing tree! Presumably the future autoobscurantist civilisation might simply interpret that to mean that the fountain of youth is so powerful that it has an effect on its surroundings, reversing time for plant life as well as people.

quickthrowman 2y ago

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years I beg to differ, there’s already one that will last 10,000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... > and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. Where is this hypothetical future society going to get their energy from? We have extracted the coal and oil fields that are easy to access already.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

Just to note, dumping the waste in the ocean makes it considerably more inaccessible than burying it deep in solid rock, and it's easier to do. > should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that. This isn't even something to be concerned about. It already happened, to us. We got over it.

Anotheroneagain 2y ago

I think the best solution would be to keep samples around in somewhat reachable parts. Occassionally, people will get sick, and learn that the signs mean danger, without causing an accident of catastrophic proportions, and recognize the huge radiation signs that label the actual storage as ominous signs.

stevenwoo 2y ago

It's not just an exercise, there is a 10,000 year plus nuclear waste storage facility being built in Finland set to be operational in a couple of years, there's the book written about it, Deep Time Reckoning and if one doesn't want to read a book, here's a short podcast episode about it. https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&segmentID=5 https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&s...

i_love_retros 2y ago
Also a very good documentary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)