Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendlydog | Hacker News Reader

Judging from the current historical record is this feasible? Most civilizations don't have enough time behind them to prove this out.

View on HN

There's a documentary that explores this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

They deal with exactly the problems you're imagining. How do you convey danger to a civilization 100,000 years in the future? How do you get them to take your warnings seriously? (We'd ignore any warning in the Egyptian pyramids created only ~5,000 years ago) How do you handle earthquakes and other natural disasters?

I found it interesting and you might too.

> We'd ignore any warning in the Egyptian pyramids created only ~5,000 years ago

Worse, the 'mummys curse' became a part of popular culture!

The key is probably do explain honestly what the warning is about. Then the grave robbers can make their own decisions.

We'd ignore any warnings in the Egyptian pyramids, because they'd warn us that the gods would get us, and we don't believe in the gods. We warn future people that the radiation will get them, and if they're more advanced than us, they still believe in radiation. (And if they're not more advanced than us, maybe they think that radiation is a spell from the gods?)

The problem is to communicate "radiation danger" to someone 10,000 years from now who doesn't use our language, alphabet, or iconography. That's not easy. Not impossible, but not easy.

The other problem is devising warning signs that will survive 100,000 years...

Unlike Egyptian Gods, which I'm pretty sure have never had any supernatural effects on grave robbers/archeologists who have studied tombs, I'm pretty sure at some point, radiation poisoning will become somewhat obvious.

In the same way that the dangers of radiation were found fairly quickly from usage of radium in paints, anyone in the future will probably figure out pretty quickly something is wrong.

>How do you convey danger to a civilization 100,000 years in the future?

Hopefully the skin of the first group of people to dig up our waste sliding right off their bodies will send a strong message.

What sort of time interval between attempts are you presuming.

At 100k years, there could be generations between such attempts, and accounts could likely themselves take on the form of incredible (in the literal sense of "non-credible") legends.

Effects from lower-level contamination might be less pronounced, e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Here are my thoughts: If we assume civilization doesn't collapse, the concept of radiation is likely to remain poignant enough to keep people from futzing around in a radioactive waste repository.

However, if we do assume civilization collapses and people forget about what radiation is, we can also safely assume that the future civilization will not be industrialized. If the waste is stored in some place extremely remote, inhospitable, or miles underground, the sheer cost of trying to reach the material would bankrupt any future civilization. We do have some precedence for this, one of the Great Pyramids was meant to be dismantled but it just proved too expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure

Don't change color, kitty. Keep your color, kitty. Stay that pretty gray.

Look at it this way: so far, our ability to communicate to the future and understand evidence from the past has only increased over time. So, while we have no precedent, we also have no reason to doubt the humans of future.

In addition, if our civilization lasts that long and technological advancement continues, there's a good chance some use will be found for the nuclear waste and it'll be mined out again

That's the source of the "This is not a place of honor" meme - it's a study about designing a site that is foreboding across vast time scales, so our remote ancestors^Wdescendants won't be tempted to dig it up.

Sweden is going to rely on good old record-keeping though...

> so our remote ancestors won't be tempted

To nit-pick, I think you mean descendants.

D'oh, thanks. Fixed.

The No Place of Honor came from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant report out of Sandia National Lab back in 1993. It is good read about long time and how to deal with communicating messages through the ages. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/m2/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com