Q: Why not just bury it deep enough so that no one can dig it up?
A tl:dr; Earthquakes and rain.
A: If you bury drums of radioactive material you want to make sure that they stay sealed. However, on a 10,000 year time span, you cannot assume much. A very strong drum right now could be very weak in 5,000 years. Or, with one strong earthquake 2,000 years from now, it could crush the drums you've buried deep in the desert. As rainfall seems from the surface and into the water table, it will pull the radioactive material with it, then making the water supply unsafe.
Yucca Mountain was a popular site for a long time because it's a deep salt mine. Salt mines are interesting because it means that it's been impossible for water to flow thru them for millennia, which is the time scale you're concerned about here. From an engineering stand point, Yucca Mountain was just about the perfect solution, but it got killed politically because being 100 miles away from Las Vegas was "too close" for elected officials to stomach.
Although the design questions are fascinating, the bigger issue that we need somewhere to store all of the nuclear waste. It's actually sitting in a variety of temporary facilities right now that aren't as safe as WIPP or Yucca mountain simply because it's very hard to get politicians to agree whose backyard gets to be the forever home for our spent fuel rods.
Source: My father has spent the last 20 years of his career with the Department of Transportation and Department of Energy working with transportation of hazardous and nuclear waste and took trips out to Yucca Mountain and WIPP.
It's actually sitting in a variety of temporary facilities right now that aren't as safe...
My favorite kind of result. Much like how "tree huggers" celebrate blocking a nuclear reactor or bird-killing wind farm, and as a result the old sooty coal plant keeps running instead. Some victory. Some progress.
Sidenote, I'm sometimes a little befuddled that we would be afraid of putting radioactive material in the ground. The ground is already full of the stuff, and we don't spend much time worrying about an earthquake spitting up a boulder of yellow cake in our backyards. Ok, the concentration is different, but sometimes it seems like worrying about putting salt in the oceans.
The case of 'salt in the oceans' is poor choice of something we don't need to worry about. The macro mechanics of the oceans depend intimately on salinity.
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/conveyor.html
Messing that up would be catastrophic. It is also the sort of dynamical system susceptible to bifurcation. The conveyor could potentially invert due to a threshold change in temperature or salinity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_theory
> Sidenote, I'm sometimes a little befuddled that we would be afraid of putting radioactive material in the ground. The ground is already full of the stuff, and we don't spend much time worrying about an earthquake spitting up a boulder of yellow cake in our backyards. Ok, the concentration is different, but sometimes it seems like worrying about putting salt in the oceans.
Not only is the concentration different, but also the composition. I haven't heard of plutonium occurring in nature.
The public perception of the dangers of anything radioactive is quite exaggerated, the politicians in these cases are only representing the views of their constituents. Having said that, I don't think you can reduce the argument to something as simple as salt in an ocean. Like you (almost) said, the concentrations are extremely different, particularly if something goes wrong with the containers in the millennia they are buried for.
"The public perception of the dangers of anything radioactive is quite exaggerated."
Not when you bring the timescales into account, recognize that you'd have to scale operations up massively from present levels (15,000 or so plants vs. the 436 presently operating in the world). This would mean commissioning and decommissioning about a plant per day.
Add to this questions over fuel availability (known reserves are good for about 80 years at present levels of use, 6 if used for all human energy needs), and the need to find some way for creating transport and storage fuels, and nuclear is at best a small part of a much larger energy solution.
> Although the design questions are fascinating, the bigger issue that we need somewhere to store all of the nuclear waste. It's actually sitting in a variety of temporary facilities right now that aren't as safe as WIPP or Yucca mountain simply because it's very hard to get politicians to agree whose backyard gets to be the forever home for our spent fuel rods.
An other direction would be to store it more safely but still accessible and work on techniques to reprocess the waste, especially that with long half-live. Of course that would mean we'd have to admit that nuclear energy is far more expensive than regenerative energy sources in the long run and nobody would want that...
[Edit: Please excuse the polemics. The topic is the source for a lot of heated debates in my social surroundings.]
Salt mines also can have lots of problems like the Asse in Germany. As soon as you begin drilling holes into the salt mine it's possible for water to flow in again
I actually read the paper this article is summarizing, and it's incredibly interesting. I can't find it anymore, but I did find this excerpt:
>The panel roughly defined the intended message with the following:
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
I read it some years ago, too. It's an intriguing task, as the comments in this thread show.
The considered the whole "people will think it is treasure" thing. From memory the solution was to make it an open but unpleasant place to try to avoid people thinking there was something hidden.
One idea that stuck in my mind was black concrete pillars on a black concrete surface, in a hot environment to make it extremely hot and oppressive for anyone to enter.
That’s why that is the message, not the actual implementation of the message …
This message was never supposed to be written anywhere, in any language. That message is the content. It’s the goal, it’s what is supposed to be delivered. It’s the payload and the panel came together to find a way to transport that payload across time.
The goal is not that someone in the future reads exactly that message, the goal is that someone in the future sees the markers and they convey (at least parts of) the message to them so that they honestly believe it.
As you can see, just describing the intended message right now, today, can be highly misleading and confusing, even when you are straightforward in describing it. People are quick in assuming fraud and deception, for example. That’s the challenge.
But no, no one wanted to put signs with that message up. That would not do. That was always clear. Even if people in 10,000 years would understand English.
or a weapon. Just think of what a Genghis or Cesar would have done with such a thing, especially if he had no idea of what the long term effects were. I think labeling the stuff is too dangerous as well, politicians can get their hands on the stuff. It's better to just bury it, as safely as possible, and then remove all outside traces of existence.
I side with curtis here[0]. If you burry this stuff deep enough in sealed containers, using best tech available, then (barring any massive geological changes) the only way for someone to stumble over it is if they have technological capabilities comparable to ours.
Yes and as a person in a culture with technology comparable to ours it seems like, miners for instance would be pretty ticked off if they were falling into old pits of unmarked radioactive waste all the time.
yeah you know what I would do if I read that? Open the damn tomb - I don't care about ancient superstitions.
instead of those statements, a few simple scientific demonstrations should be more than sufficient.
it should simply show large photographs of what happens with radiation exposure, as well as enough scientific equipment that even a simpleton can realize that this isn't some superstitious gobledegook.
seriously. what do you think the egyptians would have said about their tombs?
Best left undisturbed, right? Or Ra will come smite your ass.
> it should simply show large photographs of what happens with radiation exposure, as well as enough scientific equipment that even a simpleton can realize that this isn't some superstitious gobledegook
Well, we don't know how to build required scientific equipment that will remain operational for more than few decades. Actually, the genetically-modified glowcats mentioned in the article is the closest thing I can imagine that could work over the timespan of many millenia.
Also, I don't see how future archaeologist would not assume anything they find is a "superstitious gobledegook" in need of verifying, if today we do exactly that.
> the genetically-modified glowcats mentioned in the article is the closest thing I can imagine that could work
Except that the proponents seem to have forgotten the small fact of evolution. Species evolve. All the time.
Over the course of a 100 century timescale I would expect the glowcats to evolve into quite different species, possibly several such species, or perhaps going extinct. It's anybody's guess, really, and whether they would retain the colour-change genetics is at best nothing more than a rather long-shot hope. Or those genes might evolve to cause the organism respond to other stimuli than radiation.
The only certainty, here, is that such creatures will evolve into something different from what they start out as, so, almost certainly, defeating the original objective.
10k years isn't a huge amount of time for evolution. If the gene isn't detrimental it will definitely persist in the population that long. It takes a long time for DNA to completely degrade from accumulated random mutations. We still have genes from our prehuman ancestors that are mostly intact.
The tomb of the first Chinese emperor has not been opened because they are concerned it's filled with mercury gas.
It's not "superstitious gobledegook", it's how you convey a message without using words only people from our culture and time period would know. Or indeed, without any words at all.
Photographs, diagrams, technological equipment, and everything else, were all proposed in the paper as methods of conveying that information. But there are serious issues with all of them. Very few things will last that long, especially in good shape. And symbols we understand in our culture will have no meaning to them. Even photographs can easily mislead, and as you said, encourage people to explore.
This is great -- I'm planning on burying most of my substantial fortune deep underground in the New Mexico desert, and this looks like just the thing to signpost around the site so people don't mess with it.
It seems to me that if you're going to bury nuclear waste then you just need to bury it deep enough. The idea is that any future humans even capable of digging the material up wouldn't need any signs to tell them the material was dangerous. Instead, they be sufficiently technologically advanced that they could figure this out for themselves.
Find a place where there's nothing of value under the surface (that we can think of), bury it really friggin' deep, and then put the warnings in a layer of, I don't know, engraved gravel about 100M above it, just in case anyone ever does dig there. In case the warning might help.
And don't put anything on the surface that'll outlast the people who can understand what's down there.
All of these signs, finding clear ways to say "bad stuff below" -- they're only helpful if the future people are inclined to assume the immensely-powerful, immensely wealthy, long-dead writer is being honest. Why in the world would they assume that?
Just imagine future-Indiana-Jones finding those signs, left by a long-dead civilization, and deciphering them. Does he say "oh, wait -- this looks dangerous; never mind then"? Of course not; instead he rounds up a digging party of locals, dodging future-Nazis, and after a harrowing adventure the Ark of the Covenant is finally unearthed -- but when the future-Nazis open it up the cavern, nothing seems to happen (but they oddly feel a bit warm), and then lots & lots of people die slow deaths (including future-Indy, sorry) as they trundle out the valuable "junk of the ancients" to be sold and traded far & wide.
If you want to see the futility of external marking schemes consider the case of Gobekli Tepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe) dating to 10th-8th millennium BCE. This place has inteersting structures and reliefs of mostly animals that are not currently understood. What's more:
"The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BCE: the buildings were buried under debris, mostly flint gravel, stone tools, and animal bones that must have been imported from elsewhere."
The reason for filling it up, which probably took enormous resources at the time, is unknown. Why would they bury the site? Maybe something "bad" is buried there. But we know that anything that can harm us now wouldn't be technologically possible 10k years ago. Still ...
Good examples of the futility of such a project are the tsunami stones of Japan. There are hundreds of them dating back centuries, some of which quite literally say "Do not build your homes below this line. Giant waves occasionally destroy everything closer to the sea." We even knew the meaning of these markers, and still chose to ignore them.
It's intriguing just how many ancient relics are associated with death. Some, like the pyramids, were obvious demonstrations of wealth and power to commemorate the dead, but I wonder how many of the more primitive "monuments" in the form of mounds of earth covered in stones were intended less for veneration and more as simple, pragmatic indications "dead people lie here; not a good place to farm".
We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice.
Even assuming there is some sort of civilization ending event, and specific knowledge of nuclear technology disappears.
People are certainly smart enough to recognize a pattern of distinctive symbolism and learn to associate it with danger over time.
A good example is cargo cults that sprung up in the Pacific Islands in WW2. Groups of people without much previous contact with modern civilization learnt to associated 'airplanes' dropping aid supplies with food. Despite having no previous knowledge of what planes are and how they function.
I imagine future primitive cultures would learn to associate the nuclear hazard symbol with illness in a similar manner. And would probably end up constructing their own mythical narratives around the symbols.
> We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice.
Symbols are far, far less translatable than words. We were unable to translate hieroglyphs with any real success until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and the pictograms used could be matched back with known writing systems.
There are symbols today that you and I would instantly recognize but will be meaningless to a child born tomorrow (the floppy disk icon, for example). Symbols and pictograms can be repurposed and reused: indeed, the article gives the example of the skull and crossbones, which has significantly changed meaning over four hundred years.
The cargo cults you're talking about have come about in years and decades, not millennia. The timescales being talked about here are far, far different. If anything, you're not giving humanity enough credit for its ability to evolve over the next 10,000 years.
Once some individual humans get sick or die. Even very primitive human cultures in the vicinity of nuclear sites would very quickly notice a pattern. Any symbol that was used consistently near nuclear sites would be come to be associated with danger.
In a very primitive cultures with no knowledge of science, visiting the sites with these symbols would end up becoming some sort of religious taboo.
The argument isn't the the meanings of symbols can't change. But rather that humans are smart enough to notice patterns and communicate them with others.
And symbols in regular use for millennia can change meaning utterly in a few years. The swastika, for example, first used over 10,000 years BC, whose meaning changed utterly over 12 years in the first half of the 20th century.
It also raises the interesting question of if humanity is all but wiped out, how ethically responsible are we to warn the next race of Whoevers that roam the Earth? Should we even care about beings whose society has no knowledge of the universal symbol for radiation from our time? We treat other species differently than ourselves, what about future descendants of ours who are not-quite-human? What if they are alien visitors? You can really go down a rabbit hole if you throw out the assumptions about who or what creatures may come across the place. I think we should just assume these future humans will have technology at least as good as ours and hence will have instantly searchable archives of information to determine the meaning of our symbols. If not, there are bigger issues for them then some radiation in the ground.
This feels like overkill. What warning signs do naturally occuring underground deposits of radioactive or highly poisonous minerals have?
Any hypothetical future large-scale miner would have the technological capacity to detect danger and avoid an ecological catastrophe - it's not like that you suddenly go from soil to stores of uranium, the existane of a facility is rather obvious.
A hypothetical future band of explorers w/o capacity to detect radiation might die, but not cause an ecological catastrophe. Death risk for such far-future explorers exists in any abandoned facility, and is acceptable - deserves no more attention than such risks caused by abandoned firearms/munitions, structural integrity of those buildings, or risks of falling in concealed holes there. A hundred thousand abandoned apartmentment buildings will kill more explorers than such a buried waste storage facility.
No, you are think about this the wrong way. You think that people will obviously stay away from it, much as you would stay away from a rotting corpse. Yes, mines may kill a lot of people, but you know that walking in. You mention that any adequate miner will have a Geiger counter. You need electricity for that, and an idea of not only atomic or chemical theory, but sub-atomic theory. I'll remind that the Great Wall of China was built with much much less and is much less than 10k years old.
Also, you think that once people figured out that the metal cans buried deep (in what may or may not be a desert in 10k years) cause death quickly, that they would run away. History has proven this many times not to be the case. Disease is a similar threat to people like radiation. It moves unseen, until recently, it's dynamics were a mystery. The cause is death or sever scarring and discomfort in extreme cases, it is debilitating and painful and very confusing. Often times, the cures were random attempts that may have made things worse.
What did we do with this threat? Well, the Indians may have a word with you about infected blankets. Or besieged castles that had rotting bodies thrown into them via catapult. Disease has been used as a weapon for nearly forever.
What make anyone think that in 7k years another Genghis or Alexander wont use the magic death barrels to invade Nuevo Houston? The issue is that with disease, your crops were still fine, you water was not glowing, your cows would still eat. With radiation, you don't get those things. The disease parallel break down into a plague of Moses type scenario, only it won't go away.
And that's if we just devolve into medieval savages again. Imagine what a person with some atomic theory could do with this stuff. The horror is unimaginable. At the end of the day, this stuff has to be very well taken care of/totally forgotten. There are no go betweens really. And since life and history rarely if ever forget about a potential weapon, I got bad news.
There is another possibility we should consider: a society that has retained the capacity to operate and maintain technology, but not create or understand it. We seem to be increasingly moving toward such an era -- I don't have numbers, but I think the ratio of people who understand technology versus those who use them has been gradually dropping over the past fifty years, mainly because more and more people are using technology and the technology is becoming automated. A scientifically illiterate society with giant mining machines is not entirely outside the realm of possibility.
I've been working with a Kiwi for a bit now. He grew up on the only 'computer' in NZ back in the 70's, a punch card machine that he had to actually fight (with real fists he says) to use time on. This guy has seen the digital revolution up close.
There was an article on HN a while back that mentioned the #1 programming language being taught today was Python. I told the Kiwi this and he just sighed. Python is a 'batteries included' type language. You don't have to really worry about any memory issues, any special loops that will go to infinity, none of the real stuff. Yes, it teaches you the 'idea' of programming, but programming is much more than an idea, it is a set of instructions you send to an electrical machine to preform a task. If you take away the entirety of the actual physical world, you have done the kids a disservice. Programming, real programming, is not supposed to be easy.
I'll mention the Kiwi was here in the US on a work holiday. I was trying to get a chip working (yes, with actual registers) and spent ~6 months on it. The Kiwi, I kid you not, spent about 3 hours. The guy really did know his stuff.
It's really good to know how things works underneath, but insisting that constantly messing with low-level details is "real" programming (and implying high-level details aren't "real") is weird. Both aspects - high and low-level - are important.
Beginners are taught high-level languages because it's easy to start with - one could create something useful without learning lots of things. If they care about their craft, eventually they will learn all the gory details of the stack underneath down to bare metal - an occasions (bugs, weird behaviors or just curiosity) where, say, Python programmer is invited to go and peek under the hood of their interpreter or libc or kernel or even hardware happens every now and then.
Unless all that pythonista's doing is bashing some boring CRUDs with Django. Then, a knowledge of low-level stuff seems almost unnecessary. But, hey, someone has to do that kind of programming, too.
I very much doubt that people are less sophisticated about science and technology than any time before. Quite a contrary, the education system has given us laymen discussions in which scientific literature is referred regularly (HN, many popular subreddits, even discussion threads in my Facebook stream)
Due to a lack of man hours available to teachers, we make up for breadth instead of depth. This is a good thing, as we do not know going forward what we should teach in depth to children. Teaching kids about cam shafts and carburators would be a fools errand, but you only knew that about 5 years ago. However, depth is needed in many areas, we just have to trust people to figure that out on their own, as they are more mobile than an educational system. An example is bit wise operations in computers. Many don't have a clue as to how to use a register in a chip, and we thought we'd never have to again. But encrypting, securely, relies entirely on this and trying to poke holes in it. Now, again, we need the depth there to maintain encryption as a viable idea.
I don't have numbers either, but I think that we are continuing to specialize. We have an ever increasing portion of the population understand technology, but any given technology can be used by many and understood by few.
You're extremely close to the correct answer there. This topic suffers from the same fixation as digital archivists, how do we abandon something for 10K years yet find it "working" in 10K years? Oh that's easy, don't abandon it.
So you need a way to maintain the site, with some level of continuity. Well, I'm guessing in the middle of a desert, watermelon farms and recreational waterparks and aquaculture aren't going to work. How about the worlds largest solar power plant?
That would provide a reason for staffing and monitoring the site and a reason not to dig it up, or at least not to dig far enough down to get the bad stuff. If you build it "tough" and "reliable" there's no reason to think it would ever be decommissioned. You don't even technically need to run a profit, just need to generate enough KWh that it'll always be able to support, however minimally, some kind of onsite staff to keep it under control and keep things "civil".
Perhaps put a giant military base on it. With the idea that when civilizations collapse, the army seems to be the last entity to go. Of course that makes it a strategic target, but if the bad stuff is buried 3 miles down, or maybe nearby but not underneath, its still OK.
The other fixation is the 10K years. Trust me, if you run the math, its not magically turned into organic applesauce at year 10001... Much as the radiation exponentially decays, so does the need to "protect" and "document" the site. Somebody cracking it open in 500 years is a lot bigger problem than 5000 years or 50000 years, so we need to focus on 500 yrs problems a lot more than 50000000 years.
By far, the biggest danger the site poses is 500 yrs from now someone with a bit of ambition is going to point out that with centuries of "used" fuel with burnup ratios like 1%, that means 99% is unburned and with a bit of refining, we could run the worlds reactors for 99% of a couple centuries. Of course refining has some environmental risks, and the only thing worse than a local getting the bright idea, is someone "far away and upwind" being owed a favor and not particularly caring what happens downwind. The most likely environmental disaster failure mode isn't ignorant savages from the intro scene of the 2001 movie trying to make a hammer out of nuke waste, but some kind of economic collapse in a couple decades and Saudi Arabia is willing to trade U235 for their atomic powered desal plants in exchange for crude oil. Or maybe trading with Canada to get food, whatever.
Finally it doesn't really matter anyway. The fixation on nuke waste is its only dangerous for "awhile". We have much larger stockpiles of ore refining waste, coal ash waste, organic chemical waste, all of which lasts forever, and no one cares about that, although in practice its a much bigger problem.
We may eventually need to burry something nasty and difficult to destroy, but I would assume that long before nuclear waste storage becomes a cultural problem, we will have figured out how to build an MSR that can burn most of that stuff. And, when that happens, whatever's left can be safely kept for a much shorter time.
Instead of thinking about the interesting problem of keeping the next civilization safe, could we direct some more effort to the boring problem of spent fuel reprocessing?
I agree with this. The current problem with nuclear waste is mostly political. We don't actually want to bury that stuff to far away, because it's a valuable source of fuel once we have the political will to use it. Current plants extract only a tiny fraction of the usable energy from their fuel.
I imagine future tech may turn nuclear waste into a treasure chest of energy. We dig up oil today to extract energy and a waste dump would provide highly concentrated, long lasting material to mine. Unsafe for today's tech but highly valuable in years to come.
A tangential nitpick, but perhaps interesting from a history-of-symbols perspective:
...the skull and crossbones permeated culture as a symbol of danger. By the late 1800s, it was starting to be used as a symbol for poison. Then in the 1940s, the Nazis adopted it for their SS death head divisions.
The chronology here is a bit off: The death's head was not introduced into the German military by the Nazis, but by the Prussians, in the early 1800s. It was then used periodically by both the Prussians and later Imperial Germany. Following the fall of the Kaiser, it was used by the Freikorps (right-wing paramilitaries) during the Weimar Republic. And finally by the SS. The Nazis did introduce some new symbols (especially some runic and pagan stuff that the SS liked), but the totenkopf is a classic symbol of German militarism that they merely continued, as part of their glorification of Imperial Germany and especially the Freikorps.
There's almost no message you could put there that would stop humans from wanting to take a look. If there were warning signs on the pyramids, would we have stayed out?
"They kept their greatest treasures here and left these warnings so their enemies would stay out".
"How bad could it be? Surely we're advanced enough to open it! We have spears, nothing could harm us".
"This stuff is great. Put it on your arrows. Put it under the bed of your enemy".
There's a documentary called Into Eternity[1] following the construction of the Onkalo waste repository in Finland which is designed to last 100000 years.
If the symbols are the problem, why not discard them entirely and demonstrate the actual danger in increments? What if we create concentric rings of gradually lower levels of radiation around the site? The closer you approach, the more you notice the effects of radiation -- lack of bio-matter in the soil, radiation sickness, etc. Of course, it won't be a zero-casualty solution. A few people might become sick or die by the time they figure out the danger. But for a 10,000 period, (high probability * low exposure) seems better than (low probability * catastrophic exposure).
The "sequence of events" seemed pretty solid. I like how the tree grows between the 2nd and 3rd panel, and actually makes the order you read them in unambiguous.
It passes the alien test: if humans were exploring an alien world, and came across those pictures, but they were in circles instead of boxes and showed aliens instead of humans, and the trees were instead some plant that grew there, and the panels were shown right-to-left instead of top-to-bottom, and the radioactive symbol was replaced with some other symbol, I think a thoughtful human would still understand.
It could be a different tree, or the person might just have moved closer to it (the radioactive stuff isn't there anymore, which supports this reading). But I think you could create some more unambiguously unidirectional sequence; perhaps something falling or breaking?
> It could be a different tree, or the person might just have moved closer to it
I think the flowers are there to address these two problems -- though that's an odd choice, because normally the flowers would change much faster than the tree.
I suppose you'd have to know a bit about the aliens, and about their plants. But humans in the future ought to know at least a little about humans and about trees :-).
If we're talking about a 10,000 year span then yes. But if we're moving to a 100,000 year span, I wonder if we should also be asking ourselves if humans will still be the dominant species...
Since it's Saturday night as I write, I'll bite: 'alien test'?
If humans or our near relations were to land on a planet in a distant galaxy and come across any symbols they could even take a wild guess at, their reaction should be: 'We've been here before.'
Correspondingly, taking aliens into consideration is the epitome of misdirected 'inclusiveness.' Puts me in mind of recent dispute in the feminist community, in which use of the word 'vagina' in a non-reproductive sense has become an issue becauese transgender women are excluded. (No cite, not going to google 'transgender vagina.' Thinking it was an Utne reader story.)
Gist, I assume: Even a human idiot should be able to figure out these symbols. Fair enough, and much discussed above/below. (And a fun design problem.)
But, other than an alien landing first in the 'forbidden zone' and accidently unleashing population-ending poison on whatever was left of life on Earth (and it's a stretch to even suggest credencene here), no proposal with 'aliens' in its text should be taken seriously.
Less than seriously, but I didn't open this can of sandworms, suppose aliens consider our radioactive material:
Tasty?
A sexual aid?
Unimaginably beautiful in some audio/visual/X-sensory spectrum we can't even imagine?
Don't bury it, advertise it!
An Earth rich in gamma radiation and alpha particles might be the celestial promised land, and certain aliens might gratefully resurrect our dead and take them through the pearly gates to their planet of toxic gold, frankincense and myrrh.
But, yeah, nuclear electricity could save the day for the next generation, so we need to figure out these niggling details.
It might not be an accurate comparison to consider how language has been lost in the past 10,000 years to predict how much will be lost in the next 10,000. Surely nowadays we leave behind many more artifacts than before, and our literacy rate is much higher. Of course there is always the possibility of a catastrophic event, but even in that case it seems unlikely that future humans won't be able to reconstruct most of the English language, unless the event is so catastrophic that digging up nuclear waste is the least of your worries.
We seem to have this huge fear of humanity collectively forgetting things, this idea that has seeped into so much fiction as well, but is it really founded?
Even before digital storage and the like, is there really any relevant information that has been lost in the past 150 years? And as to the whole "language barrier" thing, we figured out hieroglyphs with a much smaller corpus.
Hell, we know about the meaning of loads of sites from over a thousand years ago.
I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.
I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.
Consider Herodot's account (he lived in the 5th Century BC) about the circumnavigation of the African continent by a Phoenician expedition under Pharao Necho II, about 150 years earlier. The fleet set out in the Red Sea and returned three years later through the Strait of Gibraltar.
Herodot, who clearly had access to the original records, which have since been lost, like so much of Classical material, says that as they rounded the continent the sailors had the Sun to their right, but he, Herodot, cannot believe this because everyone knows that at noon the Sun is in the South. A more complete account of the matter is here: http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/hist01.htm
Knowledge is fragile, much more fragile than I like.
An incredible amount of knowledge was 'lost' in the period between the Golden Age of Greece and the Dark Ages, including the ideas of spherical Earth and heliocentricity.
Also, if Earth were to take a direct hit from a large coronal mass ejection like the Carrington event of 1859, there is no telling how much data might be lost. "Forever" is never a good assumption to make about anything.
One problem with modern digital storage is the lifespan of the storage medium. Compact discs only last about 10 years, and the "longer-term" magnetic tapes are not much better at about 20-30 years [1].
It seems like we've made the tradeoff towards increased convenience of access vs. reliability, not the other way around. Hopefully new tech is developed that reverses this at some point, without relying on higher-level systems built on top of unreliable media (e.g. Amazon Glacier, Archive.org, etc.)
Maybe, maybe not. The civilization we enjoy today could be gone in a few hundred years, the Internet and it's semblance of informational permanence notwithstanding. I'm sure ancient Romans thought the Empire would last forever too.
> I'm sure ancient Romans thought the Empire would last forever too.
The Empire itself doesn't exist anymore sure, but I don't think the GP was talking about political structures.
Ancient Romans' culture never disappeared, we can still easily understand their language (some people can speak it, I learned it in school, and there's even a latin Wikipedia! and we still use it for creating new words in our modern languages) and their culture. Their culture has evolved into our modern European culture (mixed with others, to some degree), our modern democratic republican political systems are a mix of two systems both older than the Roman Empire, and there are no mysteries about aspects of their culture or infrastructure.
If the Romans had written a warning on a building in plain Latin about how entering it would unleash the wrath of the gods, we would have absolutely no problem to understand it.
We would still enter it, though, but not out of ignorance, we would enter it because we know we can today handle anything the Romans might have feared.
All in all, I think Romans are a pretty good example of how a powerful culture can stay understandable for several millenia.
> If the Romans had written a warning on a building in plain Latin about how entering it would unleash the wrath of the gods, we would have absolutely no problem to understand it.
Today we can, the privileged few in our current golden age of technology and widespread literacy. Take the non-privileged masses in the US and elsewhere, they wouldn't know what to do with Latin script written on a building, even now. They wouldn't know how to translate it on the web, they wouldn't even know it was a warning.
>>Hell, we know about the meaning of loads of sites from over a thousand years ago. I feel like we'll have ways of knowing what the site contains forever.
It's not about knowing the meaning of the site. It's about knowing the meaning of the site with little or no loss of critical information.
This may not seem like a big deal, but it actually is. Technology didn't improve that much between ten thousand years ago and 150 years ago. This is why we're able to examine ancient sites and kinda sorta make something out. But the rate of technological progress has been increasing, and this acceleration has no end in sight so far. What that means is that ten thousand years from now, our descendants may have no way of relating to the way we do things now. That's why we need to think really, really hard about how to make the information survive in a way that is still digestable to a hyper-advanced civilization.
> in a way that is still digestable to a hyper-advanced civilization
I don't think hyper-advanced civilization would have a problem with this - they would either have not lost the knowledge or be able to figure out the danger themselves by using their hyper-advanced sensors and stuff.
The problem is that if our civilization collapses and the Earth goes back to 2000 B.C., those folks will need some warning not to mess with a deadly force that is beyond their comprehention before they reach sufficient level of advancement to know what they're dealing with.
In fairness, if the earth goes back to 2000BC then after the billions of premature deaths resulting from the causes of the collapse of civilization and the resulting loss of food and healthcare, the high death rates suffered by certain tribes locating themselves in the vicinity of certain ruins would be a footnote in history.
We've had the good fortune of not destroying our civilization in the last 150 years (we have tired very hard to do so), so that proposition doesn't hold much value.
Consider how we figure out what sites meant 1000+ years ago... We dig them up.
Doing that to a waste disposal site would be phenomenally bad.
Why don't we launch the nuclear waste into deep space? Seems like that would avoid the burial problem described here, and since space is mostly, well, empty space, wouldn't inflict much harm to other bodies.
The risks associated with a launch accident are far too high.
I googled a little to find a reliable set of launch success statistics but found nothing I was willing to include herein (it's Sunday morning, I got up late and am lazy right now), but overall success rates are in the high 80% to mid 90%. Failing to launch a satellite is one thing, having radioactive material spread atmospherically by a launch failure is quite another.
Then there's the cost. Yeah, that would be high. Especially with adding containers to protect against the risk described above.
A rocket carrying nuclear waste exploding 50 miles above the surface of the earth would rain nuclear waste on a very large area. Given how much of the earth's surface is water, some would probably land in the water of the world's ocean, possibly dispersing it around the globe at all levels of the ocean food chain, maybe not.
If we had a more reliable means of getting the waste into space, I'd be all for this.
This endeavor misses the whole point. There are two possibilities for 10,000 years from now.
1. Humanity is extinct.
2. Humanity is extant.
The first possibility means we can ignore any need for markers, let's focus on the second.
If people are still around, there are two possibilities.
1. They still understand radioactivity enough to detect it beforehand, or to recognize it after it has made people sick.
2. People have no sophisticated culture that can understand radioactivity.
Only if the latter is true, would any warnings be necessary.
If this is the case, what obligation do we have to those people? Literally any action we perform right now could lead to the eventual death of some arbitrary person thousands of years in the future. Butterfly effect and all that.
Is this place going to make the human race extinct? Possible, but unlikely. So we're talking about killing a few hundred people in the next few million years, supposing there is some sort of Hollywood-esque unfolding of history with its apocalypse and long-haired swordsmen going on quests in the aftermath.
We already do our nuclear (and other) engineering knowing that people are going to get killed. Hell, when we build bridges, we know that statistically one or two will be killed. And when a nuclear power plant is built, it's even bigger... someone will likely be killed. Over so many years of operation, someone will be killed (and not necessarily from some Three Mile Island thing, a person will be stressed out in the office and have a heart attack).
So if in the span of 10,000 years some savage dumbasses who fucked up and wrecked civilization die of radiation poisoning, what's the big fucking deal? Refusing to deal with our need for nuclear power, refusing to build the waste disposal facilities that such needs because we can't come up with some universal symbology to mark it as a dangerous place... that might be the reason that technological civilization does drop dead.
I wonder if we can apply the same lines to map English as we do other languages. English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de facto language of technology and science, much as Latin was in its heyday. But we know Latin was exclusionary as the Christian clergy and the erudite were the most fluent in it. English, by contrast has democratised access to the common folk.
It was even in use in the Star Trek universe aboard Federation ships, but that may not be too unrealistic. English, I mean, not the aliens or warp drive.
>English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de facto language of technology and science
250 years ago you could have said similar things about French. These things are fleeting at geological timescales.
I'm not really sure we could do anything that would stop humans from trying to bust in and honestly the more elaborate our warnings the more people will want to see what we were trying to hide. I mean consider the (false but useful) Curse of King Tut. Big letters say "Sickness and death will come to all who try to enter this place" what's your first reaction? To try and get in there and see what the ancient people were hiding.
Anyway all this does give some excellent ideas for a sort of D&D-esque game where everyone dies at the end of the dungeon because all the warnings were true and it was just a really old toxic waste dump.
Some people might be too curious to leave it alone, as in a few determined explorers won't be deterred, but maybe they'll avoid settling right on top of it at least?
Personally my first reaction to the Curse of King Tut would be "well, better safe than sorry" as I turn right around :)
I read a different news article along these lines a few years ago, and ran a game based on the premise of a dump like this being cracked open thousands of years in the future by a massive earthquake and contaminating the water supply to a town, which they, in a "standard" medieval-ish technology culture, had to investigate.
Was fun trying to figure out who'd get sick first (shrimp fishermen, I figured, as their catch would concentrate the contaminants the fastest) and the timescale for water to start leaching out of the site and cause an effect (a few months, so I had to put in a bunch of other stuff for them to do between the earthquake happening and the "real" plot beginning), having clues that the players wouldn't immediately recognise on-sight when they got down there (like a non-standard periodic table[0] - I used the Janet Left Step), figuring out which elements they'd be able to translate with "speak any language" spells, and which they couldn't because they didn't have the words to translate into (basically, they got any element known before we started recording discoveries[1], and I threw in bonus partial tranlations for Hydrogen (water-ish), Oxygen (fire-ish), Nitrogen (air-ish) and Silicon (sand-ish)), and a whole bunch of other details too.
It was fun watching the players' "eureka" moments occur, and then even more fun watching them try really hard not to use their player knowledge in-character!
Edit: Just remembered, I also put a Rosetta Disc[2] into the chamber, as I didn't know when I designed the game that they'd have a magic user capable of translating anything. Even though they didn't need it, it was a nice touch to leave in.
That's a very bleak and, unfortunately, accurate observation. Our curiosity that has given rise to such greatness may well be the double-edged sword of our undoing.
As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that didn't.
>As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that didn't.
Oh man so this crazy ancient tomb has this magical force that kills everyone that goes in. I heard the last team made it further than everyone else before it and the last guy stumbled out with all these ancient artifacts!
It just amazes me how most comments and even the project itself is based on the idea that in 10000 years civilization will be much inferior than current ones. I know you have to prepare for the worst case scenario, and that's how it must be planed, but still seems that our imagination runs wild.
Some comments talk about it, but I think the reason is missing. ANY kind of sign, text, symbol, phenomenon, structure, will only draw attention. No matter how dangerous it seems, people will be attracted to the mystery. The more dangerous it seems the more they'll get attracted to it. It´s about attention and the lack of it.
The best option is to make it seem like nothing it's there, no buildings, no signs, anything. Just bury it deep, restore the natural environment, create a natural park (restricted if you want while the memory stands) and if possible remove all economic incentives close to the park, so the population is reduced overtime, ideally till 0.
Another option I haven't seen mentioned could be to bury it in a geological subduction zone (at considerable deeps of course), so over time all the radiation gets dragged deep inside the earth by the tectonic movement. This would cover the 200000 years problem I guess. I don't know if there is such a zone that could be useful or safe enough for this, or if the geological tempo is fast enough to be of any use.
I actually live about 100 miles north of the WIPP site. I'm fairly unconcerned about danger.
This area was an inland sea ~250 million years ago (the continents were gathered together in Pangaea at the time). The salt deposits in the mine that WIPP occupies are precipitate from this sea drying down and are very deep.
If the site were collapsed (which I understand it will be at some point) people with primitive tools won't be digging it back up. It is simply too deep. It isn't going to erode down to the level they can either in any reasonable period of time....i.e. millions of years. A society technologically advanced to dig this stuff up presumably will be aware of some history and/or be able to decipher what is written on the marker. Unless civilization disappears in which case it will take a long time to re-develop the technology needed to dig that deep starting from ground zero.
Also... people need a reason to go to great effort. I just don't see future people digging that far in the earth out of curiosity and with no immediate economic benefit.
But just in case.... if you need a marker to discourage them, how about instead of abstract symbols we put some pictures of the effects of radiation on humans with the material containers notably present in the picture?
The one thing I guess that could become an issue is the amount of oil well activity in the area. It is geologically stable, there are no earthquakes, but maybe fracking could change that. I hope they are taking future fracking into account in their equations.
I just remembered that there's an excellent Star Trek that deals with essentially this problem. [1]
Data gets amnesia and exposes a whole society to nuclear material, and as the audience you watch helplessly as the villagers fail to recognize the terror associated with the nuclear hazard symbol.
Physical effects could be used in combination with symbols.
The current trefoil is enough to warn the people of today, so that should continue to be used.
If knowledge of the trefoil is lost, however, the actual radiation would serve as a warning. Much smaller, but still dangerous quantities of waste could be stored around the world, with just enough of a barrier around it to remain confined while curious individuals exploring around it would contract radiation sickness, but survive for long enough to warn others about the danger and the associated trefoil symbol.
The main storage area should have much bigger versions of the trefoil, but not so big that a person would lose perspective and not know what they're looking at. The size should convey to anybody who knows the meaning of the symbol that this is serious business.
If the smaller quantities of waste are abundant and accessible enough, and the main storage area inaccessible enough, then it would be unlikely for anyone to come across the main storage area before learning the meaning of the symbol.
It took decades for the very direct and tangible links between deliberate, sustained exposure to asbestos and tobacco and subsequent terminal illness to be widely understood. I see little reason for greater confidence in the ability of future explorers to deduce and communicate the link between their mystery ailment and a particular abstract decoration found on one of the sites they visited.
If the smaller quantities of waste are abundant and accessible enough, many more people will die unnecessarily.
We learned the hard way: by people dying. They're trying to avoid a future people, who may have forgotten what we learned, from learning it the hard way. Again.
> Any life form advanced enough to be bothered by the effects of nuclear waste will presumably be capable of learning.
Lol what? Pick any mammal, they'll get destroyed by radiation poisoning but that doesn't mean they have the mental capacity to know why they're dying painful.
1) Reprocess high-level nuclear waste. Potentially build a storage facility for 100-300 years (about the limit of what we can do using totally normal techniques in technology and business/government, with minimal risk) to store what we can't immediately use.
(Low level would still need to be dealt with, but for that you can go for extreme dispersion or geologic storage or whatever, since the cost of things going wrong is a lot lower.)
2) Subduction-zone storage; generally this requires putting waste under the sea in an area like the zone off Vancouver, and having it slip into the mantle.
Honestly I would go for the "man impaled on spike" idea. If they sacrifice like that to the gods in the future then they deserve what's coming to them.
Combine that with things that we have deep evolved fears of: Snakes, spiders, scorpions and others and I can't see why they would enter a site containing statues of all things associated with death. Sure, an Indiana Jones or a couple of hundred would die, but as long as the shielding is thin enough to inflict a quick death I doubt many would try to copy them.
Of course we always want things to be as safe as possible, but the longer lived an isotope is the less radioactive it is. At some point this waste is going to be less dangerous than naturally occurring uranium deposits. Maybe that is the 10,000 year mark they're shooting for and I'm just ignorant but if it's only 100 or 1,000 years then it's possible we're being more paranoid about this than is reasonable, especially since all of this material is sitting in temporary storage now.
The problem with the comic strip drawing is that it could be interpreted as meaning things associated with the trefoil take away sickness and sadness if you read the pictures in the wrong order. I don't think a growing tree is strong enough to convey the correct order of the drawings. Inhabitants of the future could just assume the trefoil-material has some negative effect on trees as it heals the sick.
I didn't interpret those trees as growing myself. It looked to me like the trees were far in the background and he moved towards them before collapsing.
What about numbering each panel in unary? While our current number systems didn't exist 10,000 years ago, humans could presumably count and will retain that capability in the future.
James Lovelock, author of the "Gaia hypothesis", suggested dispersing radioactive material over a large wilderness area. The effects in any location would be lessened, animals can quickly adapt, and (for the wilderness preservationists out there) few humans would want to develop that wilderness area.
Despite all the shift in cultural significance attached to skull&crossbones, etc. that the article discussed, I don't see how any culture could interpret a human skull by itself as anything other than a symbol of death.
The human skull does seem like a solid symbol of death, but that doesn't prevent us from turning something like the Catacombs of Paris into a tourist ground (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris). The intent here seems to require more than just a symbol of death.
Why don't we create a rosetta stone variant ourselves? Put up the same text in the world's current major languages, I'd be curious to see if it would be really undecryptable. Plus, we might be doing future historians a big favour.
As mentioned in the comments, people should watch 'onkalo into eternity'. This is IRL science fiction (if that makes sense). Scifi-esque questions we're dealing with now.
Languages can evolve rapidly and unpredictably though, based on factors which can't necessarily be predicted or controlled. What would people ten thousand years in the future make of the word "radioactive" if modern technology and scientific thought had been lost for millennia due to plague or a global energy crisis, for instance? Bear in mind how much of our current store of knowledge and culture is tied up in a relatively fragile, energy hungry digital infrastructure and a constant supply of fossil fuels. In a few centuries much of what we consider modern history might be a mostly blank page to those who come after us.
Some people talk about "dropping it into the sun", but the energy required is approximately more like "lifting it all the way up there". It takes a lot of kW to push a dump truck full of nuclear waste up to six or seven miles a second, and if something goes wrong, all that energy tends to go into spreading everything around the landscape.
The explosion of a Delta II rocket in 1997 shows the amount of energy released:
A tl:dr; Earthquakes and rain.
A: If you bury drums of radioactive material you want to make sure that they stay sealed. However, on a 10,000 year time span, you cannot assume much. A very strong drum right now could be very weak in 5,000 years. Or, with one strong earthquake 2,000 years from now, it could crush the drums you've buried deep in the desert. As rainfall seems from the surface and into the water table, it will pull the radioactive material with it, then making the water supply unsafe.
Yucca Mountain was a popular site for a long time because it's a deep salt mine. Salt mines are interesting because it means that it's been impossible for water to flow thru them for millennia, which is the time scale you're concerned about here. From an engineering stand point, Yucca Mountain was just about the perfect solution, but it got killed politically because being 100 miles away from Las Vegas was "too close" for elected officials to stomach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_re...
Although the design questions are fascinating, the bigger issue that we need somewhere to store all of the nuclear waste. It's actually sitting in a variety of temporary facilities right now that aren't as safe as WIPP or Yucca mountain simply because it's very hard to get politicians to agree whose backyard gets to be the forever home for our spent fuel rods.
Source: My father has spent the last 20 years of his career with the Department of Transportation and Department of Energy working with transportation of hazardous and nuclear waste and took trips out to Yucca Mountain and WIPP.