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Comment by felipeerias | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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