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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

They were tasked with making signs that would be deciferable for the entire time the site was hot-something like 10000 then later 100000 years. Let's see you do better.

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I think his proposal was to do nothing, since if the signs were ever needed we'd have bigger problems. Whether that's better is arguable.

One possible scenario where it's forgotten about does not mean there aren't others. Maybe the files for the site die a beurocratic death and 9000 years later there aren't any records available regarding the site.

Now, one possible alternative would be to incorporate some of the waste into a monolith. People may not be able to decipher or heed warnings but they will probably avoid the thing that kills them. (Probably wouldn't make it past the ERB though)

I think the premise is that Geiger counters would be ubiquitous in pretty much every scenario except the catastrophic destruction of civilization. Radiation itself is its own warning sign if you are sufficiently advanced technologically.

As far as I am aware, we don't routinely check archeological sites with a Geiger counter before digging.

You would be surprised at how closely the US is monitored with radiation detectors. There's been more than a few false alarms with pets undergoing cancer treatment for example [1].

I wouldn't be surprised if nearly every square mile of the US was closely monitored now, let alone in a thousand years.

> “Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour,” Giuliano told the crowd. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car].”

> “Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier,” Giuliano said.

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/watch-out-youre-bei...

I had no idea. I wonder if they've ever actually stopped a nuclear threat. On the one hand, it's reassuring to know things are that closely monitored that could kill millions. On the other, who knows what other forms of monitoring are in-use.

Not many of today's archealogical sites come from civilizations that used nuclear power.

That we know of.

More seriously, the danger is that we move beyond nuclear fission power and eventually forget it was ever used.

That monolith, the remarkable and striking "Monstrance for a Gray Horse"[0], was built in the 1990s by the artist/nuclear engineer James Acord [1]. He and his work got quite a bit of press attention then [2], including a long story in the New Yorker.

0. https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5002/5348845141_a13a254968.jpg

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Acord

2. http://o.seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2001/0114/cover...

I'd just draw something in similar vein to this and call it a day:

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/2/2d/Gho...

after 10k years in the sun and elements those images might be etched and indecipherable. Or maybe they see it and think it'll make the sick well again. We are still plagued by homeopathy, after all.

I don't know why they didn't do that exactly. I'm imaging there was some reason though.

>Or maybe they see it and think it'll make the sick well again.

I actually thought about that possibility. Figuring civilization will have collapsed several times, there's a good chance most people could look quite disfigured. I mean, post-apocalyptic wastelands can be harsh. At a minimum nobody will be exfoliating on a regular basis.

Then, if the meaning of certain common symbology happens to be reversed (e.g. arrows pointing away from the subject of interest), that's all it would take to mistake that image as marking the location of a miracle cure—a radioactive fountain of youth.

One possible solution is to show a longer timeline in the pictograms establishing what order to read them in. E.g show a child growing into an adult, approaching the site, and then falling down in agony and dying.

Regardless of how you read things you'd put those in the correct order since I'm fairly certain that the direction of time won't have reversed by then. It also avoids flipped meanings of glyphs like arrows.

Exactly, you need to rely on universal truths rather than symbols. The article has an example very similar to yours. They picture a man next to a small tree when he is exposed to the radiation, and then collapsed in agony next to a larger version of the same tree.

They additionally convey a "contamination" of radioactivity that stays with the man over time.

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/WIPP%20Exhibit%...

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