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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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