Warning signs for the year 10,000 | Hacker News Reader

Warning signs for the year 10,000

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Sigh. This is a political issue dating back to shortsighted decisions in the 1970s, not a technical one. Reuse this stuff in breeder reactors, the waste from which has a substantially shorter half life. Then you don't have to build toxic monuments.

Or toss the stuff just in front of a subduction zone.

It's also a product of the 1950s/1960s OMGRadiation!!1! mentality where instead of treating radioactivity scientifically, it's a boogeyman that will reach out and consume your delicious delicious brains, then increase their size 100-fold and reanimate them so they can go cruising through Manhattan shooting radiation death rays at the hapless public.

It's dangerous stuff. It isn't that dangerous.

Or toss the stuff just in front of a subduction zone.

For quite a while I've wondered whether it would be possible to put all our truly unrecyclable waste, nuclear and otherwise, into the mantle for very-long-term recycling. I'm glad someone else is thinking about geological solutions too.

It's been talked about for a while in places where you can find people who understand nuclear waste isn't magical, and that given where these zones are even if the waste dissolves and floats away it will have no impact on the ocean whatsoever. As you might imagine, there aren't many places where this gets talked about.

One fun number to tell people is that there are 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater [1]. Does it really matter if we toss a few tons of waste in to somewhere that is hundreds of miles from any significant life anyhow? (The ocean is not uniformly alive, the deeps are not very alive at all.) We can pack it up in ways that won't leak anyhow, like the well-known technique of embedding it in glass.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_depletion#Seawater

It is a horrible meme, that just won't die. By the time we actually want to get rid of the "waste" from reactors (note we haven't done anything or the sort so far) the waste will be seriously less dangerous than this article concerns itself with. Todays waste is tomorrow energy.

I am a leftie and a bit of a greenie and there are a couple of minor political parties I feel represent my views in Australia where I live. However on a couple of points I greatly disagree with them and that is on nuclear energy and GMOs.

Both these technologies are controversial and have risks associated with them. However both of these technologies promise to solve the two major (and interwoven) problems of the early 21st century, food and energy. I feel it is extremely short sighted to discount these technologies that will solve these problems just because of the dangers that may happen if they are misused/mismanaged.

Making the spot stand out in a spectacular way is pretty much guaranteed to attract visitors. Why not just make it as plain as possible above the ground? Then you can bury warnings at various depths, just in case someone decides to dig there by pure accident. (10,000 years is too short of a time for significant tectonic activity.) If they have the technology to dig 1,000 feet deep, they'll probably be smart enough to decipher something like the Voyager Golden Record.

I think you're right, placing things above ground will only attract attention.

Skull and Crossbones has been a symbol associated with death at least since Danse Macabre in the 1400's. By the late 1600's it began being a flag used by pirates when they were raiding. By the 1880's the skull and crossbones was the ubiquitous warning of poison.

It would be best to bury multiple warning symbols as these are likely to outlast our languages. If you see a skull and cross bone symbol then you're going to at least pause for thought. Bury radiological, biohazard, etc. warnings just in case one has survived in some form of recognition, at least someone might stop and think "hey are these symbols in our archives anywhere?"

Then I would ensure writing is buried at a deeper level. Place warnings in every major language. Lexicologists(?) are anal retentive, they've managed to keep Latin and Ancient Greek around despite not a single native speaker. It's safe to assume that languages can last a long time, it's just a question of which one.

If the human race has persisted steadily enough over those 10000 years to have retained knoledge of our current languages, I doubt they would have let slide the knowledge of where the nuclear waste is buried.

I think the whole idea here is that a lot can happen in ten thousand years. Whoever is trying to go in there could be human or non human, could be advanced or primitive. Symbols are the best way to communicate in any of these events.

The dark ages happened between us and the Roman Empire, but we still have their language, creative works, etc. However we don't know where their military caches were. Some things survive for longer simply because people care about some things more than others.

Yes symbols are the best way to communicate and a giant skull and crossbones is going to get most people to think "hey that's probably not good", but then the curse of the Pharaoh didn't stop everyone.

I personally prefer booby traps for keeping people out, but I don't think rigging a shotgun to a door handle would stay dangerous for 10,000 years with that whole rusting problem.

A really good warning would be "Death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a pharaoh." That should keep out the curious.

This is true, all our warnings might only encourage people. Perhaps the best thing would be just to leave it unmarked, let the curious spelunkers die of radiation poisoning and that'll probably serve to keep more people out than building monoliths... or especially buried monoliths.

I mean burrying monoliths may only serve to get people to dig deep and reduce the natural shield we wanted to protect people from the radiological materials.

Burying them in a place where no one will go, meaning they'll have to have a more concerted effort to dig in say the middle of a salt flat. Meaning some level of organization and technology to dig 1,000ft deep in the middle of a dry salt water lake bed a hundred miles from drinkable water.

Many of the salt flats in the Western USA used to be great lakes as recently as a few thousand years ago. What is now "a dry salt water lake bed a hundred miles from drinkable water" could very well become abundant land in 10,000 years.

This is a really good point. Going back a mere 20,000 years there was an ice age, glaciers covered much of north america, and you could walk on land from China to Australia. Burying stuff with a half life of 25,000 years means that in 25,000 years there's going to be 1/2 as much, not none. After 150,000 years there will be 1.5% left. For super radioactive stuff that you have piles and piles of that's still a huge threat! It is absolutely impossible to build something that can protect this waste as long as it is dangerous because we are talking about time scales over which a lot of geological change occurs. There might even be comet strikes. The only responsible thing to do is to process it into waste with shorter half lifes, which is something we know how to do. Building a monument and pretending it is safe is just a fantasy we tell ourselves to sleep at night while we are poisoning the future.

"Researchers have recently uncovered what appears to be a site of significant religious importance in the region of the ancient Mojave Desert. Human remains were found scattered around a central monument believed to have been used for sacrifices along with a series of yet undeciphered pictograms that are theorized to indicate something of great importance buried below. Scientists hope to get clearance for a neutrino scan of the area by the end of next year."

Believe it or not I was actually working for these people at the time they were thinking about this. It was kind of mind-bending to have all these stolid DoE types talking about such a sci-fiish problem.

I remember reading an article in Technology Review a few years back that the real problem is inefficient processing of the waste. Most of low hazard that decays to harmlessness in a few years or decades. Much of the dangerous stuff can be recycled as fuel or has other uses. The remaining residue has considerably less volume and can be made into ceramic pellets that can be more easily buried. Or dropped into the Marianas trench.

OTOH those that disturb our sacred burial grounds deserve what they get.

"those that disturb our sacred burial grounds deserve what they get."

There's an almost universal cultural belief that blood is what sanctifies something, e.g. what Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address. So I think the real message should be: don't be the moron who sanctifies and/or hallows this ground.

That reminded me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211205

Seems like a good message to future generations would be long half-life radioactive material. Enough to detect but not to harm near the boundaries, and then a little bit more at the center so that there's a clearly indicated "this gets strong" idea. If civilization fails and they forget how to build a geiger counter, they aren't likely to be doing much tunneling 1000 feet down.

Also, the mutant sickly plants will be a good indicator.

> Also, the mutant sickly plants will be a good indicator.

The plants won't necessarily be sickly in 10,000 years. Tobacco shows substantial resistance to radioactivity, especially considering virtually all tobacco contains Po-210. It also survives with isotopes of Plutonium, Polonium 209 and Americanium... amongst many other radioactive elements it can pick up and thrive despite.

What makes you think understanding of radiation is necessary to dig?

Even if they had that understanding, why would they bother using a geiger counter on an archaeological dig?

And plants can adapt - chernobyl is quite hazardous, but plant life still grows there, and there's no guarentee that any effects on their growth will be understood (and any level of radiation enough to _really_ effect them will effect people standing on the surface too)

It seems odd, that with our current level of technology we are considering how best to erect a warning using symbols. It seems to me that we should build monuments that utilize pictures and videos--warning by observation. One set of animation should be that of the nature of radiation. Something like you would see in an 8th grade science video. An illustration of the energy that irradiates from waste. The second set of animation should show two humans standing side by side-away depicted away from the monument. The animation proceeds with one human venturing towards the monument and as he gets closer, the human displays the sign of radiation sickness, and dies.

Obviously, it isn't practical to try to sustain a working media player for 10,000 years--but thats not the only way to show animation. Instead, lets embed a series of image cells of an animation into a permanent medium like concrete.

We don't have the technology to build a video player that'll last 10,000 years, nor a power source that will last that long either. Leaving data media is fine, but anyone with the technology to play such media will probably understand the danger quite quickly if explained to them in words.

Can we compare this to the warnings of being cursed on Egyptian tombs? I know 4,000 years later when we read that something is cursed it pretty much falls on death ears, how are we going to convince people 10,000 years later that we have their best interests in mind and they should just let it be?

But those tombs weren't actually cursed.

That was a case of relatively modern, scientifically enlightened people encountering a message from relatively primitive and superstitious people and - correctly - dismissing it. This is a case of potentially very primitive people encountering a message from us, advanced scientists who know what we're talking about. It's a decent comparison, if only to highlight the differences in the two problems.

This is why "Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture." is part of the message. If we can't convince the future that we have authority in this matter, the message will be ignored.

I have to echo some of the comments from TFA. If you mark it, no matter how, the curious are going to explore it. Even if they understand the danger they may unearth.

The exception is if you have an advanced culture that stumbles upon it. They'll know what it is and perhaps how to deal with it better than we do.

I have to admit that I find it hard to imagine an alien mind not having curiosity or the urge to explore.

This is so true. It would probably be safer to just leave it completely devoid of any human artefact and cross our fingers nobody goes there. I can't really imagine any situation where our current civilization wouldn't go down there. A bunch of pictures of dying people and something buried in the earth? Sounds pretty tempting.

The more dire the warning, the more likely it is that it will be slaves who are forced to give their lives to recover the treasure.

It's fine if some people dig it up and get sick; the lives of a dozen people in 10000 years really aren't that much of our concern. What they're trying to avoid is people building a city on top of the waste, drilling down for water or other resources, then contaminating a large metropolis.

The curiosity problem is the whole problem. The only solution that I can see is to simply provide as much unambiguous information as possible, so that anybody encountering the buried waste knows exactly what it is that is buried and has all the information they need to decide for themselves that it is dangerous to proceed further.

Of course, then we have the problem of explaining nuclear physics to post-apocalyptic cave people.

Is the slight possibility of some people being killed in the event of total collapse of civilization (with presumably billions already dead) really worth spending time on?

Yes, if you are being paid.

Or if this is your pet project.

Why not just put a bunch of spikes 50 feet below the ground, with a lot of scattered stones cut into the shapes of skulls. Most people will get that, and it will avoid having a prominent above ground landmark.

Although on the other hand, if there are above ground landmarks, then knowledge about what the place signifies is less likely to vanish.

Anything you create above ground will have to survive the equivalent of being sand-blasted for many weeks.

No sculptural details are going to survive. You can write symbols though, by mixing different colored concretes.

Every Indiana jones movie has thought us that, when there are signs of warning, a large treasure is to be found. I wonder if these signs will deter or attract future visitors.

Well, so bury a treasure next to it, in a relatively safe place. Then it might be psychologically easier for the treasure hunters to avoid the danger.

This reminds me of these designs:

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2006/10/warning_signs_fo...

Nanoparticle Hazard, Nonstandard Spacetime, Macroscale Quantum System...

this topic is called

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_semiotics

Sounds like the Onkalo nuclear waste repository in Finland. There's a documentary about it where they talk a bit about the difficulties of marking the site in a way that won't just pique someone's curiosity after it's been forgotten.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk

Unfortunately it's not a very good, or enlightening, documentary. Has its moments though.

Pablos Holman is working on a design for a nuclear reactor that can take as fuel what's currently discarded as waste.

There are lots of such reactor designs. Liquid metal fast reactors, and thorium breeders for two.

There's a great discussion of this project in Deep Time by Gregory Benford, which is where I first learned about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-Millen...

I miss this site. I remember checking it daily. Too bad they stopped updating it.

Just show in a long series pictures inscribed in granite a happy productive group of humans and animals, having offspring, eating/drinking/being merry, then show them digging and investigating the radioactive symbol. Then show a picture of the entire tribe being sick, showing the radioactive symptoms to humans/animals in pictures. Then show every life form obviously dead. Put that radioactive symbol all around, in the ground and at the entrance of the waste.

If an alien culture comes to investigate, it will probably be much more highly advanced so they will treat our warnings as "cute and endearing", as we treat a mouse warning us about an oncoming cat.

The only creatures who could be helped by this warning is humans (if we decline back into the stone age) or some other form of life that takes root on earth long after our ecosystem goes away. I think the whole issue is irrelevant. Just keep it contained and add pictures describing biological decay in the presence of this area.

> someone unfamiliar with the symbol probably wouldn’t guess that it means “Danger! These rocks shoot death rays!”

Funny, I never realized that's what the symbol denotes.

Neither did I, so I looked it up:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_symbol#Radioactive_si...

In fact, the symbol is so completely unintuitive that ISO came up with a new version:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/10/New_radiation_...

... which to me certainly does connote "these rocks shoot death rays!" as well as the sage advice "RUN!"

The new version could also be interpreted as saying 'the breeze from ceiling fans can reanimate the dead'...

Agreed. It would make much more sense rearranged like this http://oi51.tinypic.com/15hzdcj.jpg

You know, that makes me think - arrows seem totally obvious to us, but would they be obvious to someone from a completely different culture? <- could be 'go this way'; it could also mean 'avoid as if it's the mouth of a crocodile'.

Well as they said above, to dig that deep the civilization needs a non trivial technology, so I would think any human with an index finger would get it (but the problem remains for those who don't have fingers).

Considering that the English language is quickly de-evolving into a hybrid form of SMS and inner city slang we need to solve this problem within the next 10 years let alone 10 thousand years from now.

This is a ridiculous waste of money. What happens when there is a major continental fracture/disaster in the next 10000 years putting the sites possibly thousands of miles in any direction... I know it isn't likely to happen but putting this refuse inside the planet probably isn't a good idea.

The site's chosen because of its relative geological stability, and anyway, geology doesn't work that way. An example of a "major continental fracture" would be the Great Rift Valley, one of the few places on earth where you can watch a new divergent plate boundary being formed. It started about 65 million years ago, and has resulted in one major sea that is about 250 miles wide, and a few big lakes.

10,000 years is a blink in geologic time. Even on an active plate boundary, you might see the earth move maybe a couple hundred meters in that time period.

    I know it isn't likely to happen 
    but putting this refuse inside 
    the planet probably isn't a good 
    idea.

Where do you think Uranium comes from?

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