I feel like there's something to think about here since we couldn't even keep the page with this information active for a decade and the goal is to keep the actual warning around for 10,000 years.
If you use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, it's also enough to (in Firefox or Chrome or any other browser where the URL bar functions as a search bar) prepend the URL with "!wayback " (without the quotes, but with the trailing space).
All this is irrelevant to the issue of warning aliens about radioactive waste however, since if we could preserve archive.org, I'd assume we could also preserve a database of radioactive waste locations.
“The idea is to more or less forget it. It’s based on passive safety,” he says. “There aren’t any plans to put any kind of warning signs or anything like that. There won’t be anything.”
Looks like Finland is taking the complete opposite approach.
One conclusion in the article is that it is unlikely to cause widespread disaster.
>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.
We should create something like the olympiad to gather together and re-tell the epic story of danger every few years, rather than building a monument and hoping it still means something on its own.
There was an episode of the podcast 99% invisible about the facility mentioned in the OP. It concludes with the idea that the best way for ideas and messages to survive for thousands of years (and transcend language barriers etc.) is to engrave it in the culture of the people at the time. A great example, and one used by the podcast, is to create genetically engineered cats whose eyes glow in the presence of radioactive waste, and to then create culture about this idea. For example, a song / nursery rhyme that impresses the idea that when a cats eyes glow, you aren't safe. [1]
To be honest, I was just trying for the repeat posting meta-joke...
But, I do think that some active process and culture to guard or maintain a waste pile is probably necessary. So, don't fixate on some naive visitor you have to protect from all harm in the distant future. Settle for minimizing the delay and accumulative harm before new visitors figure it out and become the new keepers of the message.
No it's just a place where you can find enough Plutonium to destroy your enemies or enough U238 to run your civilization for 1000 years...
I used to dream that maybe 2500 years from now the Scientologists and the Mormons would fight it out over Yucca mountain but now it's clear the Scientologists won't last that long.
Ha! That would make a great story. Mormons already have a hollowed out mountain[1] but at least ostensibly it's full of genealogical records not plutonium. (Also I'm a Mormon.)
Mormon belief is that baptism is one of the few strict requirement for entry into Heaven, but that it can also be performed for the dead by volunteer proxies. Even the most obstinate sinners and nonbelievers will gain entry into the lowest-but-still-pleasant level of Heaven if they haven't committed the unpardonable sin[1]... so long as they've been baptized, in person or by proxy. Combine those premises and it becomes an obvious moral imperative to gather as much historical genological information as possible to perform proxy baptisms for as many deceased people as possible.
Of course, this presumption of religious axioms also has a history of upsetting people of other religions, and the extensive information-gathering involved often uses borderline unethical methods, such as the various geneology research service websites that are run in one way or another by the LDS Church and include terms of service that let them use the info you piece together however they like.
In Mormon culture it's understood to be something you can only do if you've had life experiences that should convey extraordinary faith. (IMO GP makes a bigger deal of this particular quirk of Mormon doctrine than is needed for the topic, fwiw.) Judas Iscariot is commonly referenced as an example of someone who as a disciple of Jesus should have believed in His divinity but betrayed Him. Most Mormons aren't concerned about accidentally committing an unpardonable sin, and most teaching in the Mormon church focuses on the idea that all sin is forgivable because of Jesus' atonement, with scant mention of the idea that there might be sins that could be unforgivable.
(Note that despite commenting on this thread and being a Mormon I'm hardly an examplary Mormon in a variety of ways. It's rare that a topic comes up on HN that I know much about though, so may as well contribute some info in the spirit of satisfying intellectual curiosity!)
I'm not Mormon, but I was married to one. I got that I was safe as long as I never believed. But that once you believe and then renounce, you're at least at risk. Or maybe that was belief as documented by baptism.
Sure, but "feigning belief" is not "belief". I mean, any deity worth believing in would know whether you believed or not. So they'd also know if you really believed, and then renounced. It's like manslaughter vs premeditated murder.
The one sin is to, as far as I can tell (not a Mormon here), refuse God's light once you have seen it.
It would take a crazy man, the kind that would say "the sun does not shine when he sees it", to deny a revelation.
Arguably... Anyone who doesn't believe because they have not seen anything has not sinned. The sin would be, for example, to realize "the Mormons were right!" as you face the gates too paradise and say "I don't believe this. I am an Atheist." As you are staring down the pearly gates.
Basically, knowing you do the wrong things, since you ignore the truth in front of you, and doing it anyway. But you have to see it to really unforgivably sin.
It seems pretty well-specified. It's about internal peace, not external vision.
Seems rather uncharitable. If you are not rational enough to recognize divine truth, are you really in a position to be condemned for your ignorance? Seems like it's targeted towards the mentally ill and disabled.
I think the point is it can only be committed if you understand it rationally and still reject it. So seeing the pearly gates and believing it to be a hallucination, for example, would not qualify.
I am a (non-theistic) Satanist, and I find it easy to understand. The sin in question is to know that there is a God, but reject it even so - or, more broadly, to consider the possibility of God existing as described, but then to conclude that even if it did, one's moral duty is to oppose it.
Mormons believe that some religious ordinances (like baptism) are necessary for salvation and that if a person isn't baptized while alive then a baptism can be performed for them after death. Members of the church are encouraged to research their own family history and perform these ordinances for their deceased ancestors.
I could see celebrity participation in Scientology declining, but the actual organization itself has a ton of money and I don't see it going away anytime soon. If anything I see it going underground and pivoting into a full blown crime syndicate if their legal moneymakers aren't sustainable anymore.
I always imagined a concept such that instead of trying to deter people from entering was designed to convey that it was trying to keep something dangerous from escaping.
Someone trying to keep you out of an ancient tomb? Clearly there are valuables in there. An ancient tomb that's locked from the outside? That's creepy.
An ancient tomb that's locked from the outside? That's creepy.
Going by 20th and 21st century media, there should be lots of Asian tombs with "seals" placed on the outside of them. Reality is probably quite different.
IIRC the Egyptian tombs / pyramids all had warnings similar to "trespassers will be cursed"; didn't stop the tomb robberies, and didn't stop Tutankhamun's sealed tomb from being unsealed and opened.
The parallels to this are pretty clear; supposedly, there was a mold in there that ended up killing a few of the archeologists.
Re: the article, and I'm sure I've mentioned this in the previous discussions, they should try and explain radiation as a scientific thing. "This is not a place of honor" is far too vague, and only piques people's interest - like, "well what is it then?", or, "Why would they go through all this trouble?". Either find a way to explain radiation, or - probably preferable - put it in a location that is invisible on the outside and will only become more inaccessible over time, like down a geological fault line.
Right, the point I'm making is that warning people to stay out is futile. If someone wants to keep you out, it's because they're protecting something valuable. On the other hand if they're not trying to keep you out, but keep something in, is that really somewhere you want to enter?
Isn’t that exactly what an psychopath/despot/arch-villain would want? To unleash destruction on the world... and be the one to find, conquer and control it.
I think perhaps the Finland approach of complete obscurity may be better.
That's what I thought as well when I saw the picture of the human being poisoned by the radioactive waste and dieing. A culture might think: "This may be a great poison, let's use it to destroy our enemies and lay waste to their lands forever". Not entirely unlike some of our own plans for using nuclear weapons only with less bang.
Yeah but if they know what's in there they're going to want it regardless. I thought the purpose of these messages is to deter people who might not realize the danger of what's inside and accidentally poison themselves.
"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."
A practical consideration. If you spend human life time on efforts to prevent loss of human life, you risk a net loss if you don't trade the cost against the benefit.
I think we need only reflect on our own likely response to any conceivable attempt by a previous civilisation to so forewarn us, to realise the futility of our attempting likewise.
I think that's exactly the mindset that the Sandia National Labs panel adopted: how would we react to any conceivable attempt to warn us away from such a site? What wouldn't work on us, why, and how could we improve that? The article summarizes their conclusions.
Well, we looked at those gigantic pyramids, translated the hieroglyphs in some places to mean that a dangerous curse would afflict anyone who entered, and then went in to explore / loot the places.
So... yeah. That's the level of being willing to ignore warnings that we have to prepare for.
This whole discussion reminds of the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. i.e., a society arising in the centuries after a nuclear war failing to learn from their ancestors' mistakes.
As I understand it, the reason you'd want to communicate that a radioactive waste dump is harmful is because of the very slow feedback loop that it causes. It would take people a long time, and many deaths/mutations to figure out that such an area is harmful; the signal has a very long wavelength, and could easily get lost in noise. It's easy to attribute that harm to other things, much like how many cultures didn't know about lead poisoning, even though it was happening all around them. I think a simple solution would be to dramatically increase the feedback loop, by putting nerve gas or landmines or other fast acting dangers in the area. It would very quickly be understood to be a "cursed" and dangerous place, and after very few deaths, people wouldn't go there anymore.
> "Rubble Landscape": A square outer rim of the caliche layer of stone is dynamited and bulldozed into a crude square pile over the entire Keep. This makes a rubble-stone landscape at a level above the surrounding desert, an anomaly both topographic and in roughness of material. The outer rim from which rubble was pushed inward fills with sand, becoming a soft moat, probably with an anomalous pattern of vegetation. This all makes for an enormous landscape of large-stone rubble, one that is very inhospitable, being hard to walk on and difficult to bring machinery onto. It is a place that feels destroyed, rather than one that has been made.
"Landscape of large-stone rubble" describes, among other things, New England, where all of those stone boulders were carefully (or more often carelessly) stacked into stone walls to more-or-less clear the fields for planting or pasturage.
I went looking for this page to confirm the exact quote for a story I'm writing. The original link on HN where I found it was dead, so I had to go to the wayback machine. Hopefully no one has to do that again...
I was really trying to find the exact thing I had seen before. I think the "motherf_cking webpage" aesthetic adds to the effect. Also, the PDF is a bear to search for the juicy parts, and I actually don't remember seeing that first link.
I've actually thought about this quite a lot. Not because I have an expertise in the matter--I don't. But because it's such a fascinating thought experiment.
My proposed solution goes something like this: It is hard to convey that there is nothing of value and only danger within. So what if you just made the site actually dangerous on the surface? Is it possible to build something like a lake of acid that would make the area uninhabitable, dangerous, and impossible to develop?
Or, to keep it more abstract: Maybe the problem is that we're looking for the right symbol. But instead of symbols we should make the fact of the area itself the deterrent.
Given enough time, literally anything that indicates the slightest bit of "don't go in here" will make someone ask "why go to the trouble if it isn't valuable?
I'm pretty sure the only way to keep people out is to hide it.
The solution is simple in my view. Just make it dangerous enough that they can't get it no matter how much they would want to loot it. And if they can outsmart the dangers we face them with they must be smart enough to figure out how to deal with the radio activity.
That was in fact suggested unironically in addendum initialized "WS" at the end:
> 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.
I'm not convinced. I guess there are levels of radiation poisoning that have effects immediate enough to make it obvious from whence they came. There are also many levels which are not, but will still end or ruin lives.
The big danger isn't individuals dieing from radiation, the danger is contamination of ecosystems with radioactive isotopes.
Above all, engineering and use of the site is to be prevented - nobody should dynamite it and release radioactive dust, nobody should lead a river through it or flood the site, nobody should use parts of it to build anything. Immediate proof that the site is dangerous, by people coming in contact with it dieing while not being contaminated with any kind of radioactive dust, may be a safe and universal isolation of it. Even animals may learn to avoid it.
The only problem is that it's probably impossible to have sufficiently high levels of radiation on the outside of the 'Keep' while still keeping the isotopes safe from any kind of disaster or environmental effects.
The authors seemed to think hiding the site was impossible. However I find it difficult to believe it's harder to hide it than it is build massive earthworks all over it.
Aside from the fact that we'd notice something that radioactive today. It is easy enough to hide something from being seen, it would be harder to hide it (especially something as carefully monitored as radiation) from a technologically advanced civilization.
Not a bad thought. Though I think it had some problems that they already considered.
They mention not wanting to overstate the danger ("touch this and you die") in case someone touches the rock and does NOT die, putting doubt on the whole message. I think that poisoning the area creates a similar risk.
If you poison the area then you run the risk of a future civilization cleaning up the obvious poison at the surface, thinking that the message refers to only that poison. This would leave them thinking that the area is safe after their cleanup.
Personally, this seems a more interesting experiment from the perspective of language and communication, and only incidentally about the risks of nuclear pollution.
That is exactly what it was, a very interesting piece of foundational research in anthropology justified by allusions to the dangers of nuclear pollution.
Maybe we are thinking of this with too much of a helicopter parents view.
If there was a high exposure death area, and a way to easily send an animal into it, the truth and reality of the danger there would be very easy to convey.
Yeah, pretty sure any advanced civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is pretty radioactive; we shouldn't stick around", while any primitive civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is definitely cursed; we shouldn't stick around".
Having a visual cue there (I like the jagged pointy structures) would certainly help reinforce that and/or delineate exactly where the radioactive/cursed place actually is.
> while any primitive civilization will quickly figure out "hey this place is definitely cursed; we shouldn't stick around".
After a while, when quite a few people have died, and maybe their whole village and all their farmland is contaminated. This is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
By that example, it sounds like "after a while" would be "a couple weeks". That's a short enough timeframe to piece together "oh darn, this happened because we went into that scary place with all the jagged rocks and took the curse of that strange land back with us". Maybe that particular village is doomed, but villages do communicate/trade with other villages and could spread the word that "hey, we visited this weird place with jagged rocks and a couple weeks later we all got crazy sick, so like, don't go there".
Soon enough, the Curse of the Jagged Land will become part of the local folklore/religion, at which point Mission Accomplished. Worst-case, you might see an uptick in animal and/or human sacrifice at the site to appease the God of Plutonium.
Did you miss the part about “we prefer that people don’t die at all”? Or the contaminated land? How many deaths per generation on average do you feel is acceptable to store our radioactive waste?
And in the linked example it was highly radioactive, and people fell sick and died within days. More likely is higher rate of cancers, stillborns and different kinds of genetic damages. How long is it going to take before people connect those things to the strange mines?
> How many deaths per generation on average do you feel is acceptable to store our radioactive waste?
My point is that only one generation (maybe two) would be impacted, since future generations would have learned from prior generations that "Hey, if you go to this very-ominous-looking place with giant black spikey stones sticking out of the ground you're gonna get really sick and probably die". That sort of thing is the exact sort of thing that gets passed down from generation to generation via oral history.
It's obviously better that people don't die at all, but that's an idealistic goal. If people are going to die, might as well make it as easy as possible to associate that death with the trespassing that preceded it.
> And in the linked example it was highly radioactive, and people fell sick and died within days.
That... only proves my point further. That's even less time between cause and effect, making it easier to associate and connect the two. Especially - again - when it's associated with a place that has a physical appearance that screams "this land is evil; stay the hell away".
> More likely is higher rate of cancers, stillborns and different kinds of genetic damages.
In the example you linked, the rate of incidence for these things among those exposed to the radiation was not higher than the baseline for that locality.
> How long is it going to take before people connect those things to the strange mines?
No, the example was atypical. In the general case, it will take longer, and will be harder to figure out than in the example. And in timespans of hundreds of thousands of years, this might have to repeat several times.
I'm sorry, if you think people that it is acceptable that a lot of people in future generations get sick and die, because of our short term economic gains now, I can't help to consider you as evil.
> I'm sorry, if you think people that it is acceptable that a lot of people in future generations get sick and die
Oh yes, because the contaminants polluting the Earth from solar panel manufacture are so much better[1]. And let's totally ignore that coal power is actively spewing radioactive soot into our atmosphere and water and food right now at this very moment day in and day out[2]. Who cares about that, right?
Oh, but surely we can bury those byproducts deep in abandoned mines where they're relatively isolated and quarantined... oh... wait... hmm...
If you think that it is acceptable that a lot of people in current and future generations get sick and die, because of our myopic and irrational fear of a power source the harmful byproducts of which are trivial to contain, I can't help to consider you as evil.
----
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt... ← In fairness the situation is apparently improving, and future technologies will hopefully make this less of a problem, but this is nonetheless a problem now, and unlike nuclear waste we're doing far less to try to contain these pollutants.
This was not a discussion pro or con nuclear power. I don't consider you evil because you are pro nuclear power. I consider you evil because you so easily dismisses as acceptable human suffering and death.
Just imagine your own grief and rage if it was your own children who got sick and died because someone else in a distant past just didn't care about what they did to your local environment.
I consider it one of the greatest problem we as humanity has right now that so many seem to be incapable to sympathise with people just because they are distant (in time or space). A death of a child or a spouse hurts as much in the Middle East or in thousand years (most likely) as it does in the US in 2019.
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.” -- Terry Pratchett
A few days ago, I was just thinking of the phrase 'This place is not a place of honor' and the foreboding aesthetic of the field of spikes warning nuclear waste buried below. I first saw this document many years ago, yet it stuck with me enough to have my mind wander to it on occasion.
Every time this is posted, many comments on this topic echo comments made in the past. This is reassuring, because many people throughout the years will independently arrive at some of the same critiques, as diverse as those critiques may be. There's concerns about the longevity of the artifacts intended to communicate the message, there's concerns about whether the symbolism will be understood to signify danger, and there's concerns about whether the message of danger will be heeded. There's also the argument that drawing overt attention to the site is more risky than concealing its location, and that avoiding the circulation of information about it is wiser than publicizing it and risk it becoming a legend that some may someday seek.
While it's difficult to design a message that transcends time, culture, and biology, and conveys the authority of the writers and the gravity of the warning, violence against intruders conveys the danger to those who value their existence. It won't necessarily protect against malevolence of someone seeking to unearth a weapon, or the arrogance of individuals willing to compel or force others to put themselves in danger in their stead, but the properties of nuclear waste in particular may enable a design that proves fatal to anyone who may enter the protected chamber, such that once they're through, they can never leave. Technology and telecommunications could still be used to extract material from the site, but only the most dedicated adversaries would be able to proceed.
Thinking on this, the obscurity argument is compelling. It relies on the vastness of the planet to approximate random chance, and force dedicated adversaries to devote time and resources in spacetime (in an analogue to cryptography and keyspace), while clearly marking a location aids those are intrigued by it and lets them skip to planning on how to exploit it. In times when a trustworthy defense force may protect the site from adversaries, the public location is hard to exploit, but in times when no such force exists, the obscurity forces an adversary to expend more work than if the location were known.
I don't like these messages. They are really patronized for the ones who are likely to be our future selves.
Radioactive "waste" is rare material, full of energy. It is dangerous and we may not know what to do with it now but it may turn out valuable in the future.
This whole thing is an offshoot of antinuclear FUD. If civilization collapses to the point where people no longer realize that radiation is dangerous, then so many people have already died that a few more people dying early from radiation is just background noise.
In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to scare people from digging for it.
> In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to scare people from digging for it.
I have to agree with this. What if in 1955 America we had discovered the equivalent of these warnings, and hints of a huge artificially constructed underground tunnel complex in the same location as Yucca Mountain, and we thought it was buried artifacts from some more technologically advanced precursor or alien civilization?
Dozens of billions of dollars would have been made available to excavate the site, damn the cost and damn the consequences.
And, ironically, the discovery of high-energy rock would probably be a celebrated scientific (or at least religious) advance for such a civilisation. Marie Curie's exploits aren't remembered as foolish. She likely died of radiation overexposure and is remembered as one of the heros of science. And many in her lab if I recall correctly.
The 10,000 year warning is an interesting thought experiment, but if there is anyone who claims it is relevant to the acceptance of nuclear power they are simply not very imaginative about all the things that can go wrong over 10,000 years. A civilisation-level mind blank on where the garbage dump is doesn't rate at any meaningful level.
The half life of lead is 1.53×10^7 years. It is a nasty toxic substance; it has killed people. We still use it. It is objectively a bigger threat on a longer time scale than nuclear waste. As usual, nuclear power is special because we could conceivably manage the damage. Most industrial processes cause damage at a scale so large the cost of a no-harm policy would be prohibitive. With nuclear the cost is simply a bit high.
I mean, humans dug up radioactive substances that were buried much less accessibly, in the form of low-grade ores, and processed it into highly radioactive concentrations.
> In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to scare people from digging for it.
This precisely had me thinking about a science fiction plot, along those lines: human colonists discover a massively booby trapped monument left behind by some long extinct alien civilization, and make great sacrifice to penetrate into its depths, only to realize in the end that nothing was hidden underneath except radioactive waste.
The people studying this have generally advocated a layered defense. First, people dig up the strange stuff on the surface if they have a use for it (although it should be designed to make this difficult, expensive and not especially useful). They don't have to be especially advanced to do this, maybe. Second, perhaps they develop the ability to dig deeper and they discover more elaborate warnings. Eventually, they get to the equivalent of a vault where they've received plenty of warnings and, one hopes, are savvy enough to interpret them and make an educated choice as to whether they should proceed. (there's an assumption that wisdom, caution and linguistic ability might grow in a future society alongside the ability to prospect and dig, which might or might not work out)
The strange spikes and so on are just one possible approach. Simply hiding the stuff a mile under some salt can work and at least one site does that. I think you're going to see a ton of stuff hidden that way just because it's the path of least resistance once the regulatory permissions are secured (which is hard enough). I think this approach has been written about in the NY Times and so on.
It is a bit strange to worry about the safety of (a small subset of) people several hundred generations down while at the same time ignoring the possibility that Earth may not be hospitable to humans within two generations.
from the "Personal thoughts" section of the document:
> 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.
i'm curious re: where you're coming from with "ignoring the possibility that Earth may not be hospitable to humans within two generations" – I feel like that's outside the scope of this document. also, couldn't the same be said about any plan with a long enough timeline?
Right, I wasn't clear - my thought was in fact outside the scope of the document. I meant that it is strange to devote a large amount of resources to this document (which may prevent a few deaths in 10k years), while we might have already exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth (global climate change being the most imminent threat, but not necessarily the only one) and thus not have anyone to be around in 10k years.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best? I don't think the people planning for nuclear waste containment are ignoring the possibility of an inhospitable Earth in storing nuclear waste- it just makes good sense (to me at least) to make sure that a radioactive substance be as well-marked and stored as possible for whatever comes next.
