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Comment by zdkl | Hacker News Reader

It reminds of a (somewhat recent) article and discussion here on the design parameters for long-term nuclear waste storage facilities. One of the points was that to deter interference from pesky curious humans across the time scales considered, pictographic or lexical warnings may get degraded or lose meaning: the structure and area itself must convey a message of menace, drabness or inhospitability.

I'd have bet this was a test site for such a project. Which given the name of the installation might be the goal. If anyone remembers the paper in question, my algolia-fu is failing me.

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> “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”

> The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.

— https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-n...

"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

― Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett

Good summary on Wikipedia - Long-term nuclear waste warning messages

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...

Notably missing from the page: any special landscape feature is likely to attract observation and achieve the opposite effect.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Better to make it highly deadly or entirely hidden (with the warnings to be uncovered if you start excavating).

Yeah; I'd want to visit every one of these proposals on vacation.

The only exception is the one from Emil Kowalski. That proposal would make it so difficult to excavate the site that the civilization performing the excavation would likely have radiation detectors.

Step one in that is probably burying it sufficiently deep that it can't be found without advanced seismology.

You might be interested in the Michael Madsen documentary "Into eternity" about the Onkalo waste repository in Finland, that should supposedly last 100 thousands years. It's mostly about the difficulties of conveying a message of danger to future generations (or civilizations)

A very interesting topic is that they hope that the repo is forgotten, nobody will remember about it and nobody will go looking for it or become curious about it and what's inside of it, as it is described "a place we have to remember to forget".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

"This place is not a place of honor"

If the “not” somehow got effaced, that message would suddenly have the opposite effect, so… This kind of thing is difficult. Hopefully, there would be some redundancy to the message.

This was considered in the heavily-studied design. Redundancy is a core component.

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