1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.
2. You just build a house on the ground (without digging). Nothing bad happens.
3. Civilization collapses, nobody cares about the abandoned casks.
The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.
Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not be obvious in 100 years, 1000 years, 10000 years, much less in 100000 years.
These are time spans that aren't imaginable to us. Creating a symbol that's intelligible throughout that time is a task we dont know we can do.
Can you decipher the symbols in G枚bleki Tepe reliably? There are some hypotheses around these. But if they're warning you about something that warning is hard to decipher, much less obvious. And this is only 10000 years ago.
Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it.
>Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years.
[Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption.
Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years from now, how reasonable is it that he somehow understand the language or goes through the effort to translate it? I would wager pretty slim, I can barely understand text in my own language from 100 years ago.
The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.
(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)
We might have disassembled every planet within a few thousand light years to englobe each corresponding star within a Dyson swarm.
We might have suffered a cataclysm that almost wiped us out, and have only just returned to the equivalent of the early industrial age, and the occasional remaining patch of carved rock writing from our time is as unreadable to those living in that new world as 饜槂饜槄饜槇饜槉 饜槍 饜槏饜槑饜槕 饜槚 饜槜饜槀饜槅饜構饜槓 饜槆饜槅 饜槉 饜槕饜槈饜槀饜槅饜槉 饜槆饜槅饜構 饜槓 饜槆饜槅饜槕饜槓饜槄饜構 饜槓 饜槒饜槒饜槇饜槉饜槕 饜槈饜槀 饜槒饜槒饜槇 饜槉饜槒 饜槒饜槓 饜槓饜槄饜槉饜槏饜槇 饜槆 饜槅饜槕 饜槓饜槄饜槉 饜槏饜槇饜槆饜槅饜槕饜槓 is to us.
ISO 21482:
> On February 15, 2007, two groups鈥攖he International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)鈥攋ointly announced the adoption of a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.[12] It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene. The radiating trefoil suggests the presence of radiation, while the red background and the skull and crossbones warn of danger. The figure running away from the scene is meant to suggest taking action to avoid the labeled material. The new symbol is not intended to be generally visible, but rather to appear on internal components of devices that house radiation sources so that if anybody attempts to disassemble such devices they will see an explicit warning not to proceed any further.[13][14]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...
Sure, every random Zakjsnd, Joe and Yelaldto won't know English, but archeologists certainly will. And they'll be able to read it.
But even if we suppose that a nearby supernova explosion resulted in a burst of magic rays that somehow wiped all memories, people will either:
1. Know what radiation is, and they'll test casks for it.
2. They won't be doing digging down for at least tens of meters.
You really need a very unlikely confluence of factors: a very developed, but still pre-technological civilization, that is somehow interested in digging way down (why?) in that particular spot.
If that knowledge somehow gets lost, which over such a long timeline seems almost likely, people will die from radiation poisoning without knowing what hit them.
In pre-industrial era? Not really. There was more digging after the steam engine invention, as suddenly people started looking for coal and ore. But that's what, 400 years out of 10000+ years of European culture?
So in the analogy it would be as if we left a stockpile of guns and ammo. I don鈥檛 think leaving a bunch of loaded guns around is a responsible way to hand the future to our children, especially since we can鈥檛 know what the future political situations will be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_bomb_disposal_i...
So let me reframe the question. Do you think it would be a good idea to store spent nuclear waste in present day Iraq or Syria?
The best way is to burn up these actinides in a suitable reactor.
Again, we do have big stockpiles of guns and ammo. We have bunkers full of artillery shells, missiles, and weapons. Where's the outrage over the dozens (hundreds?) of munitions stockpiles militaries have strewn across the globe? Again the question is, what risk does nuclear pose that we don't already navigate with other more mundane materials?
The nuclear material in casks is not _that_ dangerous because of its long half-life. So dirty bombs made from it would not result in a significant loss of life. They'll just result in a very expensive cleanup of the affected areas.
And if it's a pre-historic society, then why would you be digging 30 meters below ground anyway?
Mankind has gone to great lengths to admire the death, and digging a 30 meter hole is definitely achievable given other prehistoric monuments.
For this to happen, such monuments have to be commonplace. Which would require a technological civilization. Then see above.