This is not a place of honor
wipp.energy.gov
wipp.energy.gov
To those who haven't read the article yet, the real title is Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Prof Ast was the material scientist on one of the multidisciplinary teams tasked to design warning symbols for 10,000 year nuclear waste storage sites. He used to go around collecting old lab computers that were going to be thrown out and resurrect them with Windows 2000 or Puppy Linux installs.
… did you enter?
>No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
>Nothing valued is here.
"But I just need to use the laundry machines."
>...Fine.
I was one of his last tenants in 2013. I always enjoyed conversing with him.
The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up.
Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate will think they have hit rock bottom... like Pharoahs' tombs or a multi-level pirate cache.
Or even better, put something horrible and poisonous twenty feet down. It might be better to obviously poison a couple people if they start digging this up. That would be easily understood and eventually avoided.
Remember the radioactive sign in the Star Trek episode where Data gets shishkabobed? They made jewelery...
Safes often include rubber pellets in the concrete pour between steel casing layers. Cutting into the safe with a torch or plasma cutter will cause these rubber pellets to burn and fill the room with noxious odors and thick smoke.
It doesn't necessarily increase the physical resistance to entry, but it makes the environment extraordinarily unpleasant.
I also like the breakdown they have of the different levels of communication. I can easily see it being mapped to product design- easy to digest information at the top of the funnel, more detailed/important information as you approach the bottom of the funnel.
Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly is? And what would the message be for those who defeat the poison to find the treasure that's obviously hidden by such a potent weapon?
This question is hard because you can't assume we'll be a technologically advanced society; for all we know, we'll be living with stone age technology.
[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-09/09/content_112783...
Leave a fraction of the radioactive unshielded and buried less deeply, to ensure that wannabe grave-robbers die of radiation poisoning before they uncover much of the cache?
The problem is that this was during the Cold War, and the site needed to operate on an ongoing basis, not just be used once and then hidden. They had to prepare for the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack killing everyone responsible for the site, thus had to design a site which would still serve even if its operators disappeared.
I immediately think of Oak Island, Nova Scotia, where a pirate's stash has resisted recovery for an incredible 221 years but has yielded taunting clues:
There are layers of wood, etc, but they're probably just laid down by natural causes over the millennia instead of being a constructed building.
Flagstones, layers of heavy timbers every 10 feet, a stone with carved glyphs at 90 feet, oak chests with coins, a sideways booby-trap well, Layers of blue clay at 130 and 160 feet, a cofferdam, and artifacts dating back 200+ years.
This strikes me as far, far more than an elaborate prank; it is a significant defense system meant to protect _something_
The flooding tunnel is likely just a normal geological feature, not some super-clever drift tunneling technique.
The stone is likely a fraud. Who would place a cryptic sign 90 feet down, telling themselves (in secret writing) to keep digging? Wouldn't they presumably know that they hadn't reached their treasure yet? Wouldn't they be more likely to place an innocuous sign on the surface, such as a gravestone? It's more likely a way to con investors out of further funds.
It's probably nothing but a rumor.
(a) We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste? In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.
Additionally, I don't think the "no marker, anonymous patch of ground" plan is sound. 10000 years is a long time, which will hopefully be inhabited by peoples more advanced than us, and they could do a lot of digging in that time.
That said, the approach I'd suggest would just be a big plain monument that's physically obnoxious to get around. Although the insides of the pyramids have been robbed, the pyramids themselves will last another 10000 years, and I doubt anyone will try to mine under them during that time. And experience has shown that the best way to preserve a language is to make sure there's a large enough sample for someone to brute-force it, so these pyramids could contain chambers full of detailed explanations with pictures.
If these people are more advanced, there's no point to teach them the dangers of radiation as they will be well aware of that already.
Consider the dark ages: much knowledge from greek and roman antiquity was lost, only to be rediscovered at the renaissance. It's entirely conceivable that knowledge of ionising radiation could be lost for a similar period of time if, say, a solar flare were to destroy all telecom infrastructure and subsequent wars were to destroy printed works.
Unlikely? Maybe, but certainly possible.
Nobody will be continuing studies in the field of nuclear. Knowledge will be lost.
Heck, 5,000 after the pyramids were built we still don't know how.
Unless they are interested in powering things that aren't tethered to the surface of the earth. Which, you know, is something humans have been interested in...
Unless you want to drive a car or fly a plane, then gas will still be important.
Wow, so maybe the Egyptian pyramids were indeed built (or at least - planned) by aliens, so to cover a dangerous site... let's dig under then to see if it's true!
99pi did an awesome about this. I thought the most interesting idea was that culture permeated much deeper than anything else. So seed our world with these stories of cats that changed color near radiation or something like that would do best. Since symbols meaning change but oral tradition or old wives tales last much longer.
For example, people would have to be cleared from an area in order for janitors to vacuum an area, so that no one would trip on the power cord.
I did get to go down into the salt shaft which was incredibly cool (also literally cool, which was a relief because it was the summer in New Mexico).
For the most part I upgraded some software systems and helped with some hardware upgrades.
The engineers were all characters. Several of them were preppers convinced that I was silly for going into computer science and not stocking up on gold.
That's an excellent point. It does seem to have been a component of the overall exaggeration of the cost of nuclear power.
"This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines. To put their size into perspective, a simple berm, say 35-m wide and 15-m high, surrounding the proposed land-withdrawal boundary, would involve excavation, transport, and placement of around 12 million cubic meters of earth. What is proposed, of course, is on a much greater scale than that. By contrast, in the construction of the Panama Canal, 72.6 million cubic meters were excavated, and the Great Pyramid occupies 2.4 million cubic meters. In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history."
Plus, as interesting as this project is, I can't imagine coming across a gargantuan spike field in the middle of the desert that I would not want to explore.
With the geology, you want a place where you can firmly reason about what's going to happen over a long period of time. Maybe there would be sites where you can do the thing of putting it into mountains. But mountain geology is not necessarily stable. Consider how mountains are formed.
Your limited choice of sites is more likely to be flat country. (And it'll be desert, in order for the politics to work.)
As a hacker, I'm used to the thought of "what is the worst possible way I can make this UI", but it's cool to see it applied in an entirely different field.
Not that uncommon. I have known 2 architects who used architecture against probably what they learned in school or dreamed of building.
One was designing casinos. Apparently they did "dark patterns" before computer UI people did it. Think about open places, to inspire and generate positive emotions and so on, well their guidelines was to entrap, confuse, isolate and promote whatever kept people playing longer. She eventually quit and became a housewife.
The other one, lost their job where they designed office buildings, and the only job they found in their town was building prisons. Talk about soul crushing. Well, they said they didn't care it was just a job. But, I know it would bring me down if I was building that.
I do not really know much about architecture personally, so I appreciate the input. I do feel sorry for the people who do the soul crushing work like that, making the world just a little worse in order to survive. We all have a choice, even if we can't see it now.
> She eventually quit and became a housewife.
I think she ended up working for IKEA.
I'm not quite sure about that.
Lots of architecture is used to intimidate, to signal power and that you should be afraid.
Speer's plans for Germania, the world capital that was supposed to be built on top of Berlin, were pretty impressive and pretty insane.
If a child draws like a child, that's probably not worth mentioning.
If a brilliant artist draws like a child, that's pretty damn impressive.
I dunno, I can think of a modern architect or two who could design a dystopic hellscape intended to deter humans from entering for 10,000 years in his sleep …
> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify.
I certainly wouldn't attribute those purposes to, say, the Brutalists.
These researchers are talking the long path .. how do we warn people who make not have any knowledge our civilization exists in its current form?
Too many people today think this will last forever; that we're in a golden age that we cannot easily return from.
Is anyone actually following these suggestions? My cynical assumption is that they'd be laughed out of the house by the people who actually hold the construction purse-strings.
Politicians probably care about this a lot much than they are given credit for; while plenty are actually short-sighted and narrowly selfish (just like plenty of non-politicians), no doubt a lot of the perception of that comes from people who disagree with them on what is best for the future portraying the politicians disagreement as disinterest. (This frequently happens when the disagreeing parties are not politicians, as well.)
> Jo climbed down and walked over, the sand squeaking beneath her boots. She followed Steve’s head around the shape, only to find another shape behind it. The sand had shifted in between the two, but the writing was still clear. She stood next to Steve and looked. There were faces, two of them. And there was writing, in many different forms. “Hey, I think that’s Chinese -- I saw something like it in my ancient history class,” said Steve as he knelt to get a closer look.
> “So send a picture to Cindy in Remote -- you know she likes that old stuff,” shrugged Jo. “What did they want around here? Those faces aren’t scary. That one looks scared and that one looks sick, I’m not impressed. ” She stepped out between the pillars and looked around. They had stopped just before the center. There was nothing there but sand and scrub. She squinted and saw that every passage way was blocked by these little shapes sticking up in the middle. She sighed. All this stuff for... nothing?
[1] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
If I were watching a movie where the protagonist goes in to get some ancient artifact and this comic showed up on the wall, I would be like "yeah fucking right, some spooooky spirit kills the tomb raider? suspension of disbelief fail!" But of course this is real and is actually what would happen. If the society in 10,000 years is as cynical as me (and has forgotten about radioactivity), this comic will just egg them on!
Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?
That was my thinking too. The decision to label it as "waste" for the next 10'000 years seems so narrow-minded to me!
So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)
>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.
Alright! I'm getting close to the superweapon!
I did notice that "video game designer" was not part of the multidisciplinary team.
Advantage: tomb robbers who steal the statues will receive radiation poisoning.
Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it.
You could even tier the messages, and use words that would likely be common and thus more likely to have been recognised based on discovering whatever other shit we've left around.
DEATH.
THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.
THIS MATERIAL WILL KILL YOU.
And progressively more complex and complete messages, etc translated into Chinese, Spanish, Braille, French, pictograms, what the fuck ever.
And if they're too lazy/careless to try and decrypt any of the fucking obvious messages, fuck 'em.
The pyramids were known for their entire duration of their existence, and investigated and/or plundered regularly. But we lost all knowledge of hieroglyphs for a time period of almost two thousand years (until we found the rosetta stone).
And at the same time we were using Uranium to give glass a wonderfully green sheen. And it glowed in the dark, too! Awesome!
If there is an event cataclysmic enough to wipe out all knowledge of nuclear repositories, it will likely wipe out human civilization at large. We can't make really useful predictions how much knowledge will be kept, and at what pace it will be rediscovered.
Really, there is nothing to worry about.
We're not talking about a bunch of dudes with shovels here, we're talking about colossal industrial machinery or advanced explosives.
I wouldn't be sure what that meant. They make death what? Great again?
"Look, if we sacrifice a virgin in this spot, we will have abundant crops. See how the tree is getting bigger as the person dies"
It has always seemed a waste of effort to me. If some primitive post-dystopian human were to dig hundreds of meters through salt (!) and come into contact with the waste they would be rapidly educated as to the hazard and go find something better to do. Anyone less primitive should have no trouble interpreting some straightforward pictographs preserved on a few strategically placed brass plaques embedded in granite. In the meantime surround the site in stainless barbed wire and perform routine inspections.
I guess it was kinda fun thinking about this `problem.' Once. Long ago. But since then it seems to have just devolved into a boondoggle attracting an ever greater circle of paper writers. Meanwhile, with all of these great minds sweating 10,000 year hypotheticals, the actual handling of waste is down to yahoo contractors mixing high level waste with randomly procured cat litter, producing nitrate fueled nuclear waste explosions...
Priorities. In order. Not.
Mesopotamian Ziggurat, Teppe Sialk, dates from around 2900BC (~5000 yo). Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years old?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinct...
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/stateme...
In the very least, we are the only creatures to inhabit Earth, that if we become extinct, it is somewhat likely that we are both the victim and the perpetrator.
The first oxygen-excreting algae may have a prior claim...
Well, their descendants are pretty much everywhere you see something greenish, so it seems to have worked out.
> We build skyscrapers and Howitzers for intentional purposes, not because we excrete them.
We also emit pollution for intentional purposes. They might not be particularly noble purposes, but they're 100% intentional by each of humanity's individual parts.
I think you're confusing "the tools we use" versus "the ways we change the globe". Most of the worldwide changes we cause are not explicitly planned or built, but side-effects of the "metabolism" of our civilization.
Perhaps we somehow contaminate it all with nuclear waste. Even then, there'll be safety underground for long term living, relative safety even in contaminated areas for short term work, and radioactive water can be cleaned by distillation, mechanical or chemical means. We might have to set up a lot of infrastructure to do all that, but we've done a good job of setting up far more complex infrastructure already. It took only a couple of hundred years since the beginning of powered machines to get to where we are now. We could do it all again many times over in the next 10,000 years.
Even pessimistically over one human lifetime I bet that "15 people" turns into at least 30.
You get gene pool and interbreeding issues with too small of a pool, then again you'd be amazed what you can store in liq nitrogen for a long time.
Also looking at the temporary and limited mineral and energy requirements, the earth isn't going to support 7B or 9B or even 1B for much longer, on a geologic / radiation timescale.
For awhile you can turn mined petrochemicals and chemical fertilizers into lots of human biomass. The key is for awhile, temporarily.
Also, cost must be a factor. Turning materials back into ore is extremely expensive.
If you still don't see it, maybe picture yourself standing near a burning warehouse full of water versus standing near a burning warehouse full of cinnabar?
Has a worst case half life of 50 years.
Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects.
But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.
There were two problems. The use of breeder reactors had some proliferation concerns: they can be used to make warheads. Not a big deal in the US, as the US can already make warheads, but harder if you want to export nuclear waste reprocessing to other countries.
Transporting the waste was deemed risky. More so after 9/11, as fresh waste is so radioactively hot, it needs to be kept in water, or it will overheat. If you crash a plane into a transport vehicle, or a re-processing plant, it will create quite a mess.
So there is no way the nuclear waste will stay in the ground for 10,000 years. I suspect it will be less than a hundred years before someone digs it up, and reprocesses it.
Burying nuclear waste is itself waste.
Nuclear fuel recycling seems totally viable, and I imagine nuclear "waste" could be reprocessed and used for as long as there are fissionable products left in it. At which point it would pose minimal danger and save us a boatload on 10,000 year warning signs.
People are scared by the phrase 'breeder reactor'; which is poor marketing, calling it a 'waste reduction reactor' is slightly longer, but also more accurately describes what it does and sounds a LOT better.
I think it may have been a result of Fukushima, but I gained an interest in the topic and spent a few tens of hours researching. A proper waste reduction reactor produces three categories of radioactive material.
* Stuff that is so crazy hot it'll cool off in a 'short' period of time.
* Stuff that is good for use in reactors (a subset of the above).
* Stuff that will take a LONG time to decay; which means that it is active, but very very slowly emitting.
Wow. reminds me of the ford pinto case: http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Legg...
The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, carbon fiber, or a material that wouldn't degrade in 10,000 years. Then inside the monument would have to feature even more information. WOW!
Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.
On a related note, wouldn't it make more sense to turn the radioactive waste into powder and dump it over a large area of sea or desert (Sahara is HUGE)? Given a large enough area it wouldn't even be detectable.
Largely because the project requirements said "we should warn people away from this dangerous site".
Assuming the standard (very generous) EPA figure of $4 million as the break-even point to save one statistical human life, and an unrealistically generous discount rate of 0%, there's essentially no way a project of the scope of the proposed earthworks would be worth it.
Probably a better approach is to accept the fact that nuclear waste will either be cleaned up or destroy humanity long before ten thousand years comes to pass, and spend the money they spent on this exercise in speculative fiction instead on working toward a real solution.
There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.
It had been a while since I read it, and on rereading it, I'm not convinced the narrator was ignorant of who built the ruins he is looking at. Nevertheless, it's a pretty amazing artifact of someone looking at the ruins of collapsed culture, imagining how grand it must have been in comparison to the bleak present.
Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.
Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of natural uranium. It has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. By the "long half-life = ZOMG! DANGERRRRR!" standard it must be really, really bad, no?
Nope. It's just not very radioactive. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and even get free shipping (no hazmat or anything).
Uranium was also used to color glass in the early 20th century. While it's not used for that purpose any more (and I probably would not routinely drink out of a uranium glass vessel), it's not considered hazardous. There's a lot of it for sale on eBay.
The really dangerous stuff tends to have a short half-life (= intensely radioactive, again by definition) and an affinity for body tissues. For example, iodine-131 -- half-live 8 days, and gets absorbed by your thyroid gland, or strontium-90 -- half-life about 29 years, and gets absorbed into your bones (it mimics calcium).
The people who convinced you that isotopes with long half-lives are somehow more dangerous? They either didn't know what they were talking about, or they were lying to you.
> Radioactivity declines exponentially with time. By 10,000 years after the waste was buried here, the waste will be no more hazardous than the ore from which the radioactive material was taken [see 50 FR 38071a].
It could become the 'intellectual' version of a 'predator trap'. Like the LaBrea Tar Pits attracted more apex predators than most any other ancient formation (because of all the grazers trapped and dying, predators were captured in greater numbers than anywhere else in the fossile record).
Its almost a mechanism for ensuring that Idiocracy comes to pass - a trap that kills or reproductively damages smart/curious people only, draining the gene pool and leaving an ever-duller population of humans stuck in some post-apocalyptic dark age with no hope of getting themselves out.
So yeah I'm against it.
10K years is a really long time to keep a computer running. Who's going to do that, other than more computers?
But even if you cut out any electronics and use something as basic as a rock with a whistle carved into it for the wind to blow through, it will still be susceptible to getting clogged up/eroded.
Assuming we are around at all, we'll likely have mastered fusion power (thus no longer creating nuclear waste) or have mastered space flight (thus we can chuck it into the Sun) or have discovered that concentrations of radioactive materials are incredibly useful and not waste at all. A few hundred years ago crude petroleum was a waste product as well.
I do think worrying about radioactive waste given how much carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere is a bit like bandaging a stubbed toe on an amputated leg.
Carbon dioxide is certainly a concern, but most of its problems will never produce a place that people shouldn't stumble or explore because of unseeable danger.
I often think of the story of the Goiânia accident to be applicable. Four people ended up dead because two people stole something they thought might have value but was radioactive.[1]
It is prudent to assume that dangerous waste should be disposed of in a way that assumes there won't always be guards.
Actually it has value to our civilization, because much of the low-grade uranium "waste" could be put into breeder reactors and turned into plutonium - and reused as nuclear fuel.
Read about it here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_163.shtml
(edit: made it more clear what I meant)
I think it's possible that a similar effect would happen with attempting the same thing to the knowledge of nuclear fission...
It both serves as a very valuable source of rare energy and at the same time gets rid of the "waste" of old redundant processes, what's not to like ?
Say there is a biological weapons attack and humanity is wiped out aside from some remote communities like Alert, Canada. Some tech survives like gears, but obviously computers go away for a while. In 3000 years people are aware that humanity was once great, but then destroyed itself with hubris. They may even have a fairly developed understanding of science based on what they could save (university text books would _certainly_ be hoarded and copied 10 years after the bio-attack).
Now the society enters an age that is kinda like a more advanced renaissance. No more easy coal or oil, so they use electricity from wind turbines.
What happens when they figure out what is at that site? They weaponize it. It's so obvious to me. If we want to stop people from getting killed by it we should hide it as best as possible. Or make it as hard as obtaining enriched uranium. Humans have always had a "Do whatever it takes" approach to war and there is no way a emanating death object is going to be avoided once they understand what it does.
"We decided against simple "Keep Out" messages with scary faces. Museums and private collections abound with such guardian figures removed from burial sites. These earlier warning messages did not work because the intruder knew that the burial goods were valuable. We did decide to include faces portraying horror and sickness (see Sections 3.3 and 4.5.1). Such faces would relate to the potential intruder wishing to protect himself or herself, rather than to protect a valued resource from thievery."
"We must inform potential intruders what lies below and the consequences of disturbing the waste. If they decide that the value of the metal component of the waste far outweighs the risks of recovering the metal, the decision is their responsibility, not ours."
Interesting how much stock they put in both the rationality and irrationality of any future individuals. Appeal to their emotional side and appeal to their logical side.
Somewhat counter intuitively, it's actually a bit more difficult to crash into the sun than to leave the solar system.
There's also the small problem that an explosion on launch could result in a massive area being exposed to highly concentrated radioactive fallout.
edit: found a mirror http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
In modern civilization memorials and/or historically significant places are continuously safeguarded and most importantly remembered.
Yes they can be targets of attacks but they get rebuilt. That is their significance is remembered and protected. It seems like a bad idea to make a dangerous place forgettable.
So instead of hiding I propose a solution might be an extremely conspicuous stone like edifice built on top of the land with information about what is underneath etched in stone (I am assuming the land above is tolerable). Maybe even make it look nice so you know it gets protected. It could even become a cultural landmark.
Choosing huge, ugly, low-value materials for construction avoids those dangers.
The first written message a visitor to the site would encounter reads:
DANGER
POISONOUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE BURRIED HERE
DO NOT DIG OR DRILL HERE BEFORE 12000 AD.
[0] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
No warning works (even if an explicit one), when met with a curious being. See: Eve and the Tree of Knowledge (from Genesis) or Pandora and her box.
And when the beings are not curious, it is unlikely that they would develop technology, or be tempted to new, alien places.
What's a few poisoned people in 12,000 years?
How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now?
Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground.
2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later.
3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the more accessible areas of the site. Ideally, it should not leak out and should not be easily removable by human means. However, the main goal is to have people getting sick by repeated exposure. Nothing that kills right away, but something that leads to reduced life span and/or quality of life.
> Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
The point is not to issue any overt warning. People will be smart enough to create a story that fits the scenario. Instead of a fortress made to guard unfathomable riches with ancient evils, you want them to think of us like a bunch of idiots that messed with stuff they did not quite grasp and got Darwinized in the process. There will always be 3Ds jobs: dumb, dirty and dangerous. You masquarade as one of such places and people will not give it a second thought.
What exactly is the benefit of that?
If you're willing to poison people, just go ahead and poison them.
Alternatively, you may want to fetch a dictionary and look up the meaning of word "tradeoff".
(it's not, in my opinion, a good book.)
There are others where division by zero is used as a warning of a dangerous place.
I'm not sure if there are any where it's humans doing the warning; or where they're warning about nuclear waste.
What if 5000 years from now the Mormons and the Scientologists are fighting over the Yucca Mountain site in search of materials to build nuclear weapons?
If that happens, some major catastrophe has undoubtedly already occurred which makes the possible death of a bunch of future-cavemen who happen to start digging in the wrong patch of desert pale in comparison.
If we're really worried about this scenario we should worry less about marking specific sites, and more about trying to come up with a way to store all our existing scientific and cultural knowledge in a non-perishable manner, in many places, that can be dug up and hopefully eventually decoded by people of the future. Purely from an avoid-human-suffering point of view, telling people "don't dig here" isn't nearly as valuable as telling them about infectious diseases, and vaccination, and...
That initial text was not intended to be written, but communicated through the design of the message system. Interesting.
I expected more skulls and crossbones.
"Sweet, it's like some secret pirate tomb! Maybe they buried some treasure here!"
They wonder if this really worth it, since in the end coming into contact with the waste is a bit of a self-limiting problem, in that people exploring will become sick and die. It will ergo, become a "Place to avoid" anyway. If the cost is bound to be a few explorer's lives every few millennia in any case, and that's what will send the real message, then... well... you see?
Finally though, they just wonder how to construct something massive, durable, and yet not likely to be cannibalized for parts or scrap! They even raise the issue of what 400+ generations of unknowable humanity might do to the marker structure, without disturbing the rest of the site.
But also isn't it a treasure trove? Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into fresh fuel. The waste has a large amount of useful energy left.
It seems incredibly stupid.
Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?
Supposedly it "encourages people to vote thoughtfully," which would be somewhat less silly if the buttons weren't tiny and about a millimeter apart.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 and marked it off-topic.