Long-Term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
This post is an attempt not to argue either side of that debate but to look at the deeper intentions of the message.
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I’ve always found this message chilling and effective at communicating the dangers of radioactivity but I have always been very skeptical that it was truly designed to sound that way to some future post-apocalyptic society.
Instead I believe that this is a “political” message specifically intended for the current day reader.
While the message has a form that is simple and repetitive as though intended to be easy to understand or translate for some future post-knowledge society, I’m also skeptical that it actually serves that function well.
There’s no evidence ever given beyond “experts came up with this” that the message would work. (Could there ever be evidence of something so unknowable as the capabilities of some far future society?)
I’m left to conclude that the message is a combination of conscience salving and propaganda.
To the people that want to feel as though a framework has been created that guards future generations against the danger of a waste facility they can plausibly claim they have it figured out.
To the people that are horrified by the specter of nuclear waste they have a chilling message they can point to that communicates their modern day fears and prescriptions, cleverly hidden in something supposedly intended for future generations.
In short, it’s a brilliantly written piece of poetry/prose that, in my opinion, has almost nothing to do with its stated purpose.
Accordingly, I feel your "no evidence ever given beyond “experts came up with this” that the message would work" is too dismissive.
I mean, is it even possible to produce "evidence" of the type you are looking for? How could we convincingly show that a message is able to travel 10ka without trying it out?
To me it seems the only thing we can do is argue about whether it might work, and discuss what our options are and which of them has better chances, and then try the thing that seemed most plausible and promising during the discussion. Saying "this is propaganda" might be correct, but we still need to have some kind of discussion like this (or we just say "screw future generations", which to cynic me is the most likely outcome).
I argued above (top comment) for the spikes and thorns. Do you disagree?
I think it’s very likely that modern designers could come up with some really good ideas that would better convey the danger than anything presented on the wiki page.
I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to come up with a good approach…I’m arguing that the approaches presented seem unserious about achieving the stated purpose.
Take the “forbidding blocks” concept. It honestly reads like something from a low budget sci-fi horror movie: “A space crew lands on planet, finds the crumbling remains of forbidding blocks. One crew member warns that the blocks look forbidding. The warning is ignored and bad things happen.”
And what I just described is strikingly similar to the plot of the Alien series movie Prometheus :) [0]
The space crew disturbs the Alien bio weapon facility and unleashes a proto-Alien.
So again, my “complaint” (so to speak) is that the wiki article makes it sound like the amount of effort spent here was comparable to the effort spent on a mediocre sci-fi film script. It just doesn’t seem to me like a truly studious attempt at a framework to warn future generations.
I think I would probably say that it’s a serious attempt at making the case for the need for such a framework though. The people who did the work are clearly very intelligent people but some of the ideas presented just seem so fantastical.
For instance “The plans included a suggestion that the building be designed so as to create a ‘dissonant and mournful’ whistling sound when wind blew through it, acting as a Level I message.”
Would this whistling still even work right after 1000 years of weather and crumbling? Would a future culture have the same sense of dissonance and mournfulness that we have?
Much of it seems so rooted in the present for something intended to be so timeless.
(1) You write "effort spent was comparable to a mediocre sci-fi film script". I hink it might possible have been significantly less. Prometheus had a budget of $120M, so hiring a dozen writers to come up with ideas, then hiring another dozen writers to re-write and clean it up is probably not how it's done, but possible given the budget. What do you think the budget for the Human Interference Task Force was? So in a way it's even worse than you state. Such things are just not a priority. (Cough... climate.. cough)
(2) I agree that some are really fantastical and most likely useless at the stated purpose. The way out, to me, seems something like creating a "hierarchy of abstraction", and keeping your message as low as possible on that hierarchy. The lowest level of warning you of some action is making it impossible for you to do it. If you want to keep someone from digging, make it harder for them to dig. (There was an idea of a very large basalt plate or a concrete slab poured over the site) If you want to keep someone from doing agriculture here, make it harder for them to do agriculture. (Salting the earth, irregular terrain, soil is full of large rocks, ...) - Don't just do scary stuff, do stuff that is extremely inconvenient.
(Edit: stupid typo, thanks autocorrect)
Here are some artists impressions of how that might look:
https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/NuclearWa...
https://ratical.org/radiation/IntoEternity/spikes02.jpg
https://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/20...
(Edit: better formatting)
Understanding disasters like Chernobyl really puts into perspective how quickly things can go wrong with radioactive material. I found the following lecture does a great job outlining the Chernobyl disaster and potential impact of similar disasters, both from a meltdown perspective and understanding the impact of radiation.
The warnings of curses on the pyramids didn't stop us!