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Comment by gaustin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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