Hacker News Reader

Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this something they write on nuclear waste sites?

It's an example message proposed in a 1993 report from Sadina National Laboratories[1]. I doubt it's actually been legitimately written or used anywhere, but it's one of many such long-term messages intended to communicate danger thousands of years into the future, when the dangers of radioactive waste or even the prevailing language of the time may not be known.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...

More than that.

Nuclear waste that stays radioactive for ten thousand years has an interesting design problem: how do you create a warning that people will understand after that much time has passed? A committee was created to study this problem, and one of the outcomes was formulating what message should be communicated. The above is that message.

The next step is figuring how to communicate that message in a language-agnostic and culture-agonistic medium.

The future will bring technology to harvest more energy or otherwise neutralize the waste.

I believe that future will come long before warnings in today's languages become unintelligible.

If there's some kind of apocalypse where science gets a hard reset, then sealed up nuclear waste is probably very low on the list of realistic and dangerous threats.

> The future will bring technology to harvest more energy or otherwise neutralize the waste.

Optimistic. My turn: The future will bring technology to make spiders talk to cats. Prove me wrong!

> If there's some kind of apocalypse where science gets a hard reset, then sealed up nuclear waste is probably very low on the list of realistic and dangerous threats.

Nuclear waste might be relatively low in the immediate time frame after a science-resetting apocalypse, but the societies emerging afterwards will probably appreciate having a warning before they build their new settlements and water wells on a nuclear waste site. Especially if that nominally sealed site seeps out radioactive sludge due to critical containment failure only long after the settlement was established.

This. What we currently call “nuclear waste” is just a fuel for a type of nuclear reactor that we could build, but haven’t yet built due to over–regulation of the nuclear industry. If we had extracted all of the energy from it then it wouldn’t be radioactive any more, and if we had reactors for doing that then we wouldn’t need to store anything.

People get unreasonably jumpy about plutonium burning reactors and reprosessing nuclear waste to separate that plutonium for making reactor fuel.

97% of the energy in nuclear fuel is currently wasted.

Yea, folks are pretty “jumpy” about nuclear power in general.

There's a certain amount of contradiction in that fact that

1. We have one group of people looking to how to protect the people of the far distant future from a localized, deadly problem

2. Society, as a whole, seems against even caring if people 50 years from now have a habitable plant.

It’s almost like there is no collective we, just loosely associated individuals carrying out their desires to the best of their abilities.

The 99 Percent Invisible has an episode on this, one of my favorites, for anyone interested:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

Not sure what is hard about this? its a solved problem. Mounting a human skull has been an effectve sign for stay away for 10k years already. It wont change in 10k years.

Or it is a sign that something of great value - something worth protecting - is hidden there.

It implies danger of another human, who is likely now dead.

The people that ignore the skulls would ignore anything anyway. Robbers, raiders and treasure hunters by definition risk their lives to gain money or power. Any warning must be assumed to be a trick if you are in that life.

It's more nuanced than that. Mounting a human skull could also mean: here's a graveyard where people have been burried with their most prized possessions. There's a really interesting documentary about Onkalo, a Finnish nuclear waste repository where they talk a bit about this. I think the conclusion they came to was make it look as boring as possible. Or at least more boring than the hassle to get in :-)

Perhaps boring and desolate, Though IDK how you could guarantee desolation over such a period of time. Hassle to get in by definition makes it interesting. It would probably only deter the same people that a skull would with muchless effort than razing the area though why not combine both?

Robbers, raiders, and treasure hunters would still go in.

As humans, we've opened more sinister stuff than that, way before having any clue about nuclear energy. No reason why our post-apocalyptic brethren won't do the same

Tell the local native tribe that already has a proven history of being there for the past five thousand years, and let them remember it for you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com