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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like?

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?

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We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

Throughout the 10K years from now on, hazardous atmospheres probably won't be an issue, because of robotics - which wasn't even an imaginable option for the most part of the last two millenia (and now we're rapidly getting good at this stuff, so I somehow doubt Qin Shi Huang's tomb would remain unexplored for long).

If you assume we'll have robotics, then this whole question is simplified - they'll probably have some easy way to lookup standard iconography of this era.

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.

From my understanding, the reason it hasn't been opened yet is to preserve whatever's inside, not so much out of fear for mercury poisoning. For instance, the terracotta army was actually painted before it was excavated [1], but the paint curled and flaked off within minutes of opening the mausoleum, leaving us with a sea of drab stone statues. I think they're just waiting until they have the tech to properly preserve the interior.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-09/09/content_112783...

Even if we could enter the Qin emperor's tomb unharmed, we should leave it untouched out of respect for the dead.

I don't agree with this. My respect for the dead says we should unearth the remains with care and treat the body with respect, but I certainly have no allegiance to having my body remain in the ground indefinitely if future scientists could gain value from it.

I would enter it. (And he wasn't the first emperor. He was the first emperor of the Qin dynasty)

I would enter it.

> even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years?

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?

Nobody is going to die from radiation poisoning off the 10,000-year water unless they ingest it, and the hot stuff will be too cool in a couple hundred years at most.

The entire premise is that this waste is going to be toxic for 10,000 years. So we're not allowed to posit 'cool in a couple hundred years'.

"Toxic for 10,000 years" does not mean "get radiation exposure for standing next to unshielded waste", not does "cool" mean "non-toxic". The ionizing radiation danger of materials is inversely proportional to their half-life. Stuff that requires inches of lead generally has half-lives in the years or tens of years. Stuff with half-lives in the thousands of years can generally be "shielded" by a thick glass jar.

This, if something's emitting a lot of energy it won't be doing so for long.

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