Ten Thousand Years | Hacker News Reader

Ten Thousand Years

99percentinvisible.org

125 pointsprogram128 comments

It's a fun exercise to think about every time this comes up, but it always strikes me as very much perfect being the enemy of the good.

It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years, and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong. The more defences you add, the more someone can say "yes, but it's insecure against a hunter gatherer society that somehow has dynamite and plasma lances, and a religion that requires them to seek out, excavate, cut open, grind and feed to babies anything in gigantic, obviously artificial steel containers deep in solid rock and they also think that any warning or sickness is a test from God."

Sure, you saved an extremely hypothetical group of future humans from death. But to be honest, any human society that hasn't figured out radiation will lose more people to cutting down thousands of meters into the rock then they would to the radiation.

In fact, if we take it to the extreme, should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

In addition, this society has to fail to identify what the resulting health problems were caused by. If only the people who ate the excavated material or live in its vicinity get sick, that should eventually be obvious before they spread it to the whole human population through their weird global religion.

The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.

Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.

Plus add the fact that — if society collapses so dramatically that we forget about radiation and where we stored it, then humans wouldn’t be capable of finding the waste anyways.

We’ve already extracted just about all of the “easy” energy reserves, in terms of oil and coal. Now, you need major machinery to access it. That means, a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.

Based on our current extractions of resources, we’re in too deep and no future society will be able to have an Industrial Revolution again for millions of years, if we fail completely. And by then, the radioactive waste doesn’t matter.

>a future society that is rebuilding itself wouldn’t have energy be able to advance far enough for it to matter.

even Ancient Greeks could have put some copper windings and iron together to produce electricity from wind. Add mirrors concentrated on a boiler and you can generate from solar. Availability of fossil fuels may as well be a damnation of our current civilization.

Wind power, yes. But anything that requires boiling water is tough without high-quality metalworking, which is tough without easy availability to energy. The ancient Greeks has toy machines driven by boilers, but there's a reason the steam engine didn't arise until the industrial revolution.

It's not even the perfect, it's the pointless. A new society that completely lost touch with ours is about as knowable as what's on the outside of the universe.

How does that even happen, by the way? Humans survived but somehow lost all knowledge/language and all artifacts they could have used to bootstrap? I've never really understood a realistic sequence of events that leads to that.

Earth's path through the universe slaloms through asteroids. It is not a question of if humanity gets reset, it is a question of when.

broadly Jupiter is sheltering Earth from asteroids, to such great extent that it may be a prerequisite to life that habitable water planets share the system with a gas giant. Certainly you’re right that this solution is not perfect.

Bit of a nitpick - Jupiter tends to shield the inner solar system from comets that originate far out, but not necessarily asteroids. For bodies in the asteroid belt, there's some thought that Jupiter perturbs as many to a perihelion near Earth's orbit as it diverts away. And without Jupiter, the asteroid belt itself would have accreted into a terrestrial planet instead of remaining loose. Jupiter's overall effect on shielding Earth is uncertain.

A reset requires enough people to survive the event for humanity to bounce back, while also forgetting everything they know about science and technology.

Huge asteroid impact could kill us all, but it doesn’t seem obvious how it could cause a reset to zero.

Plenty of hypothetical scenarios in our modern age which could certainly send us to a new "dark age": global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war, space phenomena that wipes out electronics on Earth. Once you break the chain of knowledge from generation to generation and place to place each remaining group has to get back with what's left.

I do agree though, that if they could do this in the Dark Ages, we've left considerably more artifacts around to do it with today. Any moderately large town has a library with enough information to get things going.

> global pandemic with high mortality rate, nuclear war,

As we have seen in the last couple years, just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so. Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war and we are in for major chaotic transformation whose results can't be easily predicted.

> just a couple poorly timed pandemics can set us back 50 years or so

On what metric? I can't think of anything. Medical outcomes, crime, wealth, none of that stuff has regressed nearly that far. Some social issues might have regressed to the early 90s if you take a pessimistic view of the situation.

Agreed, and even "setting us back" any amount of time is still insanely far from the complete collapse and loss of society and language and it's all totally unrecoverable and we have to start over .... are people really this pessimistic that this just seems like a thing that could happen anytime?

> Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war

If either of those happens, radioactive waste will be the least of anyone's worries.

Immediately, yes. 10 thousand years later, probably not.

It's also worth keeping in mind just how many humans there are today compared to historical figures. If 90% of the population were to drop dead tomorrow for one reason or another - say, a combination of pandemic and side effects from the economic disruption that it would cause, like starvation - Earth would still have 800 million people alive. Last time there were that many was less than 300 years ago.

Now consider how fast it would rebound given that those remaining 800 million would rebound, given that they'd have vastly more knowledge and resources (even just having access to pre-mined materials alone is a massive boost!).

It's extremely unlikely but at least conceivable that some kind of heretofore unseen global war kills off literally everyone except a few extremely remote uncontacted tribes and humanity eventually spreads back to the rest of the world from them.

It doesn't need to be humanity, I guess. It took humans what? 4 million years roughly to diverge from something like the great apes of today to anatomically modern humanity. Does nuclear waste stay dangerous for that long?

For certain definitions of "conceivable" that all involve massive amounts of handwaving to get from big disaster to literally every human that speaks language died somehow and the handful left just can't put any of the pieces together from the bazillions of artifacts left over.

Sorry, I don't think there's any point in spending any time designing anything for that scenario (except as art or philosophy, but nothing practical). I feel like people are underestimating how resilient and embedded and redundant our society is at this point, and how very specific the scenario would have to be to lose everything yet humanity survives.

Yeah, good point :) Fully agree with this. The site will be very hard to reach anyway.

But for the case of industrial society at the tech level of 1800s and no knowledge there are things you can do too. Like make some of the bad stuff reachable with a bit less of an effort and allow people to figure it out by themselves. Our ancestors didn't all die due to bad mushrooms did they? So smart people will still be able to figure it out. Just give em a little help.

Mm, radium water. They'll figure it out alright. After they explored the commercial opportunities. :)

If we wanted to help the hypothetical future humans not die, we should make sure there is no lead available, so they can't use it for pipes, sweetener or fuel additives.

Mine all the galena and store it safely with the nuclear waste. Would save millions and millions of hypothetical lives.

It seems like bad ROI unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later.

If it’s merely possible but not inevitable, then some basic precautions make sense, but after that your effort is probably better expended in trying to avoid the collapse rather than trying to save some lives after it happens.

Well the obvious way to unsure that these waste are not going to threat human lives in whatever long period of time is to not create them in the first place.

And not doing it is even easier than saying we could not produce them.

Note that I'm not antinuclear or collapsist. Maybe in 10000 years there will be so much progresses in ways we don't expect that this material could be turned easily into safe or even useful material for human beings.

> unless you assume that it’s inevitable that society will collapse so hard that there’s not even a memory of “nuclear waste dangerous” even though we’re still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants thousands of years later.

There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us. We can read Sumerian texts because we excavated a library that included various texts meant to instruct Akkadian-speaking students in Sumerian.* We didn't know it was there before we found it.

We didn't know how to read Akkadian either - that would count as cultural continuity from Sumer, since those two cultures were deeply enmeshed. We had to figure it out based on our knowledge of Old Persian, which used a writing system adapted from Akkadian cuneiform and which was also completely lost. We figured that out by comparing an undeciphered inscription to a list of Persian kings given in another language (Greek). Akkadian is not related to Persian, except in the adaptation of the writing system, but we got lucky in that it is a Semitic language and Semitic languages still exist today. Sumerian is related to no other language we know of and required the instructional curriculum to decipher.

There has been cultural continuity from classical Greece to us, but there's a long gap between them and Sumer. We're not still making fun of Sumerian copper merchants; we're making fun of them again.

* The same texts have been found elsewhere since then - Mesopotamian documents are not in short supply - but it's always nice to have a full curriculum outlined in one place.

> There is zero cultural continuity from Sumerian merchants to us.

Our sexagesimal division of angles and time are products of Sumerian culture. So strictly speaking greater than zero.

That's fair, but it's kind of on the same level as the "cultural continuity" represented by the Japanese using the Greek week. It's a real transmission, but it goes through multiple intermediaries, the source is generally not recognized, no contact ever occurred between source and destination, and, being adopted only indirectly, it's part of a cultural suite related to the intermediate culture that had contact with the destination, not one related to the source culture.

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years

Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry.

It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years.

It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it.

Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona.

There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind.

I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron.

I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease.

We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility").

edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference.

Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place.

> I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that.

> Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.

Why are we making fun of the Sumerian copper merchant though? Because his customer wrote his complaint in clay in a climate that -- even 5,000 years ago -- was pretty dry.

We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.

So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.

What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.

So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.

But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.

>We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years.

There are over 3,000 towns with a population over 10,000 people in the US. Any random Middle school or Highschool library in those towns would be more than enough to give a future society an excellent grasp of modern science and engineering. There are also over 3,000 colleges in the US, whose libraries would expect to give advanced understanding.

Just because we now have unfathomably more information digitally than Sumerians ever had doesn’t mean we also don’t have unfathomably more information printed as well. If one set of encyclopedias in one grandma’s basement is found, that is more condensed knowledge than was produced by thousands of years of early societies.

Cool. Now they just have to last 10k years. I'll add that the last person I know to be in Colorado State University's library observed almost no books, Just computer stations.

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

It’s worth noting, however, that Sumerian was forgotten for nearly 2000 years: from ~200CE until the 1900s.

I agree it seems unlikely for a language to be completely forgotten again, we can’t be sure.

You hit the nail on the head. It's from that era of anti-nuclear hysteria and overpopulation doomers. Collapse stories are an expression of vanity. "Après moi, le déluge."

They just don't understand the arrogance they exude.

"We are on the path to ruin. I have foreseen it. You are all blind sheep."

Bitch, humanity is fine. Get over yourself.

Why not just put more information there, not just a short warning sign?

Well above the nuclear waste, bury a tablet that teaches a language in a few different ways, like the Rosetta stone but designed for teaching from scratch. Add some easy texts for study. Add more complex texts to study after the easy texts. Add an elementary, qualitative intro into the ideas of nuclear physics. Now explain the danger of the buried substances in a sensible way!

(Better yet, build a breeder reactor, burn the "waste" as the nuclear fuel it is. Stop being deathly afraid of reprocessing plutonium, at least in the nations that already handle it and have nuclear weapons for last 60-70 years anyway.)

We know what modern humans do when they find something really interesting buried under the ground like massive tablets which appear to be an attempt to explain a civilization to posterity.

They dig deeper.

Digging is easier than translating texts in an unknown language, especially if that unknown language is about nuclear physics.

I just don’t feel like it would be hard to put a picture on the thing of a guy like getting close to it then dying. The basic idea that it’s hazardous wouldn’t be too hard to communicate.

That would certainly stand a higher chance of conveying the right message than overengineered solutions like monumental spikes or attempts to impart taboos against certain colours of cats or tablets that combine an English dictionary and a nuclear physics lecture

But still, I think the natural response to a picture of a person grabbing an ancient container and dying is the stuff inside must have been valuable for them to have attached all these threats to it. At least that's the conclusion drawn by Egyptologists translating inscriptions like "the great lords of the west will reproach him [who breaks the seal] very very very very very very very very much". (I'm not joking about the number of instances of the word translated as "very"...)

I think at the end of the day, the best we can hopefully for is that only one or two people grab the valuables inside, then everyone else realizes the curse is no joke and tosses the crate back into the ground.

So, the solution is to bury a small piece of unshielded highly radioactive material at the entrance, just enough to lethally irradiate the first party that breaks in? ~

If I were really trying to do a good job of it, I’d try to come up with the way to mix the waste into a hard brick too large and heavy for one person to carry, but cart-able for two or three. Perhaps i’d even use a mold to make it look deliberately manufactured to discourage breaking it apart. This way, hopefully, the waste wouldn’t be scattered in small pieces before the community realized what was happening. Hopefully, then, whatever party came into possession of the brick would #1 very visibly possess it and #2 very quickly show signs of illness. Alongside all the other safety measures, I’d hope this would very quickly tell the community that obtained it how dangerous it was while minimizing the scope of harm it ended up causing. I don’t personally see how anything better can be achieved here if we’re assuming this culture has lost all traces of nuclear physics and can’t understand any languages we have, and disregards any pictographic warnings we put on it.

Yeah. The only lesson that would be learned from a bunch of tablets depicting agonizing death to those who approach would be "I'll make sure to send the low-paid workers in first before I go in".

Yeah, that’s true unfortunately, but it would also give people a very quick answer if they asked why x person was growing sick: because they brought the curse upon themselves etc. My hope would be that very few people would have to “demonstrate” the curse’s veracity before the culture tossed it back where they found it. It would especially help if the pictures depicted how to deal with the waste once it was realized, eg show some people putting all the material back into the crate then burying it deep in the ground, or in its original location.

“An awesome great weapon is buried there. We must dig it out and use it on our enemies”.

I feel like if at the point we lost knowledge or technology and the ability to understand what is buried there, does the effort matter that much? Or to put it another way, if we are back in the stone age, some nuclear waste that is buried is the not biggest problem.

The "multiple messages of increasing complexity" concept was one of the proposals. The simpler stages are usually written out in as many languages as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

Another proposal was to leave no marker at all. (Or to bury the first marker.) There's an argument that anything special on the surface will only make people curious about the site.

This whole thing brings to mind stuff like Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, where people dig into a Cretaceous-era ruin that should best be left alone.

There's lots of stories about buried evil. In Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company, we have The Barrowland, which is basically undone by assisted climate change.

There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.

> There's also a bunch of brownfields in Western Europe, where buried WWI gas munitions are still causing havoc.

When I was considering land for a new-build near Berlin, some of the advice was specifically "don't bother with Oranienburg, there's a high chance the builder will find an unexploded WW2 bomb in the ground". It wasn't this specific article, but close enough: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/unexploded-wwii...

Yeah, too much overthinking. The comic panels are great actually. The problem with specifying order can be solved pretty simply by adding one panel with the person as a baby. Or show a seed, then a small tree, then the tree fully grown, then the person enters.

You can also add arrows. I think arrows are probably understandable across cultures.

They did add a growing tree! Presumably the future autoobscurantist civilisation might simply interpret that to mean that the fountain of youth is so powerful that it has an effect on its surroundings, reversing time for plant life as well as people.

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years

I beg to differ, there’s already one that will last 10,000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...

> and is inpenetrable to an hypothetical worst case society: one that forgot literally everything about the concept of radiation and all current languages and semiotics but does have the ability and motivation to find and excavate though deep rock and concrete, for no practical reason like mining some ore, and then get into the armoured casks and spread the material around their society before realising something is wrong.

Where is this hypothetical future society going to get their energy from? We have extracted the coal and oil fields that are easy to access already.

Just to note, dumping the waste in the ocean makes it considerably more inaccessible than burying it deep in solid rock, and it's easier to do.

> should we proactively mine out all natural radioactive material on Earth and rebury in proper containment? Just in case someone starts mining uranium in the year 15000 and doesn't know what it is, they could be hurt by that.

This isn't even something to be concerned about. It already happened, to us. We got over it.

I think the best solution would be to keep samples around in somewhat reachable parts. Occassionally, people will get sick, and learn that the signs mean danger, without causing an accident of catastrophic proportions, and recognize the huge radiation signs that label the actual storage as ominous signs.

It's not just an exercise, there is a 10,000 year plus nuclear waste storage facility being built in Finland set to be operational in a couple of years, there's the book written about it, Deep Time Reckoning and if one doesn't want to read a book, here's a short podcast episode about it. https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=21-P13-00030&s...

Also a very good documentary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

People are curious and adventurous. And greedy, power-hungry, and short-sighted. It doesn't even work today to warn people of something dangerous.

As has been said many times, any warning sign, particularly pompous ones, may always be interpreted as a sign of worship instead. So just pile a few hundred thousand skelettons on top -- a literal sign of death. We probably cannot do better. If anyone in the future does not understand this when digging it up, then a few people will need to die until they do. I don't think there's a solution.

Except maybe not to produce dangerous material that lasts longer than human memory. But that's, well, you can read the first paragraph again.

Had a similar thought, but apparently skeletons decompose after just 20 years in fertile soil, or a few hundred in sand. I was thinking some kind of artificial replica of cadavers in the most gruesome state we can conjure, made from materials as durable as what you're storing. Or somehow fossilize your thousands of skeletons.

The article mentions culture as the most enduring thing humans have created, in cases having lasted millenia, but I think instinct is even more basic and has been around about as long as we have. Cater to that.

We have a literal profession whose sole purpose is to carefully dig dirt over extended periods of time to excavate skeletons and attempt to understand their lives and deaths.

I don't think skeletons is a deterrent, quite the opposite.

Sounds like there are only two real strategies:

- Put a lock on it (make it hard to get to. Probably by just burying it very deep and destroying access to it)

- Make it boring to future people. Put household garbage on top of it.

People have to not want to get into it and any parent can tell you that saying 'no' to a toddler isn't nearly as effective as putting brussel sprouts in their path.

One man’s household garbage is a future man’s degree in archeology…

Consider how serious you take the curses that are on the outside of tombs and sarcophagi in Egypt. No matter what kind of things they said, even if we perfectly understood them, would we believe. Every single kind of imagery which might imagine might frighten or scare or inform future civilizations would probably just be viewed as a quaint relic of a forgotten era.

I do remember a sci fi short story with this plot but can't remember the name. It poked fun at a lot of sci fi tropes.

An away team discovers a big glowing orb that attempts communication and soon after this communication members of the team die due to an unknown cause. They then go to huge efforts and great risk to interact with the big glowing orb (the bulk of the story). Then after many deaths when they finally study the retrieved big glowing orb under controlled conditions back at base they realise it's a fairly simple machine trying to communicate the equivalent of 'stay away'. It was a warning sign, the same as a skull and crossbones. The real danger was the area around it.

The sounds a bit like the book Sphere by Michael Crichton.

Egyptian tombs and sarcophagi are a apposite example, considering the fate of huge numbers of mummies - we dug them up, ground them down to make paint or medicine, shipped them across the world to unwrap as curiosities at dinner parties.

It is tempting to think that human civilisation shows basically the same characteristics as human babies - it will literally put anything it finds in its mouth unless you stop it!

Ken Liu's chilling short story "The Message" [0] explores what this might look like on the receiving end.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-1...

Single bit errors = radiation. If the voltage log is fine, there's nothing else that could impact that many chips at once. These characters are morons.

The entropy arrow definition would have worked here.

So they have a operable spaceship, they know what radiation is because they talk about cosmic radiation and shielding, but they don't have any way to measure radiation or awareness of what exposure looks like or even an inkling that it could exist on a planet, even after visiting several defunct technological civilisations. It's a fun story, but it goes to show the lengths you have to go to to contrive a story where there's a possibility of harm to even a couple of people.

If nothing else they appear to have microelectronics (e.g. video playback and displays). Manufacture of that requires knowledge of radiation because you need to keep the encapsulation material low-activity. Plus the general ideas behind semiconductors and microlithography are based on physics very close to the physics of ionising radiation (e.g. photoelectric effect) and you probably use D/EUV, X-rays and ion/electron beams somewhere in the process too.

If you read on the news that a sealed cave with ancient symbols of death and destruction had been discovered in the New Mexico desert, what's the first thing you'd expect us to do?

There is no defense against human curiosity :)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on

It seems like a related phenomenon to "there's an XKCD about that"

And of course there is an XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/3003/

If I were to give them a suggestion, I'd try to build the place not only as a warning, but also as a tool to try to preserve language (or encircle the dangerous site with language-learning sites). If language is preserved enough, complex information can be conveyed about the site. We don't need to assume that our language (or language) will be a lost skill (although, if we can make the site human-proof at that level, good on us).

There is a beautiful, somewhat depressing Danish documentary about this issue called Into Eternity (2010) [1] (it's also on YouTube [2]), about the Finnish nuclear reactions at Onkalo.

They faced the exact same problem as in the U.S. about how to store the waste safely and warn future generations about the dangers of accessing the waste.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

[2] https://youtu.be/ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA

We still have remote tribes who have very little interaction with nuclear technology. We could test some of these communication methods and see how they interpret them.

The British tried that already in '56 and '57

https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cl...

They needed to do much better.

I don't think a series of nuclear explosions of 10, 8, 1, 6 and 25 kilotonnes should be considered "communication methods".

It's more about visual markings.

How about the warning signs about posted about the sites of the intended tests and the signs posted about the tests sites after the explosions.

Do you consider those signs to be "communication methods"? They used visual markings.

Sorry, it's hard for me to understand your sentence, but are you refering to the fact there were actual physical signs placed, but unreadable to natives?

Didn't realize it. The wikipedia page doesn't seem to cover that and youtube link is broken.

They put out signs before and after - the challenge was to convey a message to people with rich oral language skills but no written lnaguage traditions at all - so yes, they used pictures | graphics to convey danger - not with any real success.

That challenge aside some would say it was a cursory and very much token effort as at that time in history indigenous Australians were considered to be part of the fauna of the unihabited Terra Nullus with no rights other than some use as test subjects for the effects of the new toy.

Probably worth mentioning they also dusted Adelaide with fallout including a young Tony Blair, a future UK Prime Minister.

But very much worse near ground zero.

Re: youtube link - that's just to a 1986 song about the testing from Gossip by Paul Kelly - I dare say it's "broken" due to geo-locking (it works fine here in AU) - https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/maralinga-rainy-land/

Thanks, nice background to the whole event. I wonder why so little of it is part of wiki.

Yes, song is likely geo-locked, but youtube just gives vague "video not available". Weird, it's usually more generous on error messages.

I think it would be better to leave these tribes alone instead of interacting with them.

Those tribes also have no idea how to dig hundreds of meters down into those hard rocks in the first place.

So pretty useless overall.

There's no reason to think any of this gobbledygook is necessary. Sure put up a warning sign and explain, in English, what's going on here. What's more interesting to me is that in 100 years, our descendants will still remember us, and have to maintain this thing, that they had no hand in making.

Which would put it roughly in line with railways, in my head? I.e. sort of mundane pieces of infrastructure still serving a purpose?

Actually, go a step further, put the warning in X modern languages, and mention that you get a free rosetta stone with every purchase.

The issue of communicating something in a universal language to an unknown audience reminds me of the cover diagrams on NASA’s Voyager golden records. In that case, the challenge is the density of information that needs to be packed, as opposed to the simplicity and clarity of a radioactive sign (“here’s precisely how to read the contents of this record” vs. “you will die if you come close”)

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Eart...

Nature around Chernobyl seems to be doing well.[1] Maybe we have the wrong goal here. Why not use this stuff to protect sensitive areas from the most dangerous and destructive force on the planet, people. Find a few endangered habitats, post some signs, bury it shallow and then walk away.

[1] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...

I find all of the geeking-out about how we might warn people not to mess with such a facility kinda irrelevant relative to this little sentence:

"in fact, the jury’s still out on whether WIPP has solved the basics of the storage problem at all. In February of 2014, a leak was detected at WIPP which exposed several workers to radiation and WIPP has been closed since"

If you follow the link, you find gems such as

"The report states that it took 10 hours to respond to the initial emergency alarm, then a bypass in the filtration system allowed the radiation to escape above ground. “They failed to believe initial indications of the release,” said board chairman Ted Wyka. It also found that much of the operation failed to meet standards for a nuclear facility; a lack of proper safety training and emergency planning; lagging maintenance; and a lack of strategy for things like the placement of air monitors."

Given that we can't even keep such facilities safe while they're staffed and operated with the sole goal of providing safe storage, it seems pretty clear that waste storage is not, as nuclear power proponents like to claim, a "solved problem", and is in fact most likely unsolveable.

Nuclear technology is not, never was, and never will be safe. Because people are fallible, stupid and greedy.

High level nuclear waste gets less radioactive pretty quick. It gets easier further out, not harder.

I'm not sure that's a entirely fair description of the accident.

> CEMRC's independent monitoring data shows that except for the brief detection of americium and plutonium in the nearby ambient air samplers, there is no persistent contamination and no lasting increase in radiological contaminants near WIPP that can be attributed to the 2014 radiation release.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02659...

Specifically, vastly more radiation is released by coal plants and yet more is included via ash into civil building materials.

It also reopened in 2017 and the "bypass" was a leak around a filter, not deliberate misconfiguration like it sounds in the article, and exposure was within limits and on the scale of chest x-rays at the maximum.

Also it's only possible for the currently open "panels" to be connected to the ventilation system. Once they're sealed they're no longer able to vent to the surface at all, so it's a failure mode that is mostly irrelevant to long term storage. A additional deliberate feature of the site is that the salt is self-sealing.

For any "mission zero" system, there will be scathing reports about process flaws afterwards, because any mistake at all is unacceptable. But this doesn't actually translate into a major harm. In this case, there was a vehicle fire that damaged equipment, a breached barrel due to a mistake in filling it with the wrong cat litter, and a filter leak, and an entire "comedy" of other poor processes in place and yet the effect was undetectable outside within months (and that's really saying something for radiation detection). Sounds like it worked pretty well to me, to be honest. It's pretty much the worst possible case, short of actually setting off a bomb in there. The really high level material isn't packed into these kinds of barrels or is dispersible either - it's in solid form.

There'd be similar reports about "never events" when a plane wheel falls off and the plane crash lands with no injuries. Should it ever have happened? No. We there bad processes at play? Presumably. Can we learn and improve? Yes. Should we conclude air travel is a non-starter? No. And a plane crash would easily kill hundreds, far more than any nuclear waste release from such a site ever could even in the absolute worst of the worst cases.

> And a plane crash would easily kill hundreds, far more than any nuclear waste release from such a site ever could even in the absolute worst of the worst cases.

I think you're lacking imagination here. The Asse II mine in Germany[1] is in danger of getting flooded, which could release large amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater.

> I think you're lacking imagination here. The Asse II mine in Germany[1] is in danger of getting flooded, which could release large amounts of radioactive material into the groundwater.

Wrong. It was a political decision by the GREEN party to make a lot of fuss and try to dig it up again for extra political points

Check this recommendation out by the actual experts of the radiation protection commission:

https://www.ssk.de/SharedDocs/Beratungsergebnisse/DE/2016/20...

> Four of the five assessment fields (safety during the operating phase, environmental effects in the event of an uncontrollable inflow of solution, feasibility and time requirements) indicated that there was a clear benefit to retaining the radioactive waste in the Asse II mine rather than retrieving it.

And only anti-nuclear NGOs with flawed estimates think it there would be enough radiactive material released to be of danger

> Both estimates assume, for example, that after an uncontrollable inflow of solution, the radionuclides present in the waste will fully dissolve in the inflow water and then be squeezed out into the hydrosphere and biosphere as a result of convergence and gas formation in the mine. However, the estimates fail to take into account the solubility limits in the saline solution and drinking water, both of which have a significant effect on the result, and also omit the sorption effects that occur when passing through the overburden. They also fail to consider the fact that only a very small proportion of the uranium and thorium is soluble; otherwise the solubility limit of uranium and thorium would be exceeded in the saline solution.

...

> As a result, the SSK holds the view that an uncontrollable inflow of solution does not represent a hazard to the public

The green party is just trying to try to get the country to stay in fear of nuclear energy, so their favorite policy (i.e. shutting down nuclear power plants) can stay.

Are you sure the sole goal really is providing safe storage? Or is it providing the safest possible storage within a certain minimal cost envelope, or even providing it at a profit?

People get lazy and complacent even if well-compensated, even if well-rested thanks to proper staffing, and even if everyone involved fully believes in their mission. But each of those can mitigate against that risk.

On the other hand, if it’s a (typical) underpaid understaffed project to which people are assigned, you’re in for a world of hurt.

Have enough of such sites and you have prevented establishing a civilization that doesn't care about radiation.

And fill them with what? How much nuclear waste are you expecting? At most you would need a few Yucca Mountain size facilities per century, because you need to reprocess at some point. There would probably be a few other facilities in other countries.

Bad idea anyway, you want geological stability and either low moisture or clay sealing. There are several good places, that are more than big enough, but putting waste everywhere would be stupid. At that point just store in dry casks like we do now.

Some of the actual reports that the Human Interference Task Force produced are available online, and they're super interesting:

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0400/ML040080812.pdf

Ray Cats isn't a good idea. I never figured out why the comic strip with arrows wouldn't work.

Have panels that define arrows using increasing entropy. It's really is almost universal.

What would be an universal depiction of increasing entropy?

Two connected boxes, one with tightly packed dots in it. In the next two panels, a door is shown opening. Dots progress in a few panels to equilibrium, spread out more. Make the dynamics pretty accurate for a gas, but make sure all the details are big enough to survive the thousands of years.

You could make a stylized arrow in addition to that, made of dots. The base of the arrow would be smaller with tighter packed dots, and as you progress along to the tip they'd be more spread out. The tip end would be larger than the base.

Then you'd use that stylized arrow for everything in the message. Make sure it's used the same way in all the comics, including the entropy one.

The concepts of gas and entropy are pretty young, I am not sure we can rely on humans knowing about those in 5000 years or so. The other uncertainty is the correct interpretation of your depiction. Do future civilisations map the same concepts to "our" visualisations?

It's still arrows though. Put some illustrations of (actual) arrows and spears along with the stylized arrow, all pointing in the same direction. That should cover the less advanced civilizations, and provide a good bridge to the thermodynamic depiction to others.

I'm 100% certain if you showed panels with stylised representations of entropy, arrows and spears to a random assortment of modern people with good general knowledge and access to every part of the internet apart from this subthread, you would get an extremely wide range of explanations about what the panels conveyed about an artefact and its surrounding location (absolutely none of which would be the correct response of "absolutely nothing, these panels are simply an illustration of which direction to read panels in")

Multiple visualizations. A seed, a sprout, a tree. A baby, a child, an adult, an elder. And so on.

I am still a fan of vitrification and dumping the end results along the subduction zone of a tectonic plate, myself.

> In the next two panels

Has a very different meaning it drawn left-to-right and they read it right-to-left.

No it doesn't. We're defining the arrows here. Sure, we'll keep left-to-right to avoid confusing them, but as long as the usage of the arrows is consistent the message would still be correct if it was right-to-left.

That's the entire point of defining the arrows using entropy.

Honestly, this whole "how we warn other people in 100000 years" is nonsense.

Just bury the materials several hundred meters below the ground and then pour concrete down the shaft. Then just landscape the area to look normal. If a civilization is savvy enough to dig thorough hundreds of meters of concrete, then they are going to be savvy enough to know what the radioactivity is.

There's a great documentary called "Into Eternity" from 2010 about the Norwegian solution for the nuclear waste problem.

Would someone who knows more than me please weigh in on why we even bother with storing these waste products? Can't we build other things to use the waste products in series until the material is much easier to deal with?

Today the radiation can even be detected by image sensor in smartphone. The tomorrow's civilization with drones/robots everywhere (and probably not much of pure meat people) would definitely not be caught off-guard by a pile of radioactive material.

A tomorrow like that will probably exist, but I think many people also expect a tomorrow to exist where people have no electricity at all and no memory of ever living in a world with something like the internet. It's especially those people that would require protection.

so, those primitive people see a sign (made by gods?), and the ones who dare to disrespect the sign are misteriosly falling ill and dying. That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society.

> the ones who dare to disrespect the sign

The idea discussed in the article is how do we make a sign which can even be understood in 10,000 years? They need to understand we are saying "bad, stay away" in order for them to even know if they disrespect it. There is a risk they think we're saying "this is great, come and see!"

> That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society.

Sure, it could start something harmful to society. But what if there is no warning at all? They're just as likely to start their own religion which says they should spread this stuff everywhere, far across the planet. Which could render much of Earth uninhabitable. Seems worth the risk of creating a "fear of radiation" religion, to save the Earth and life itself.

> But what if there is no warning at all?

Sounds like the situation when the aquatic apes uncovered Shinkolobwe and Oklo.

They seem to consider the possibility of societal collapse is real. The target audience may be a super futuristic society, or in the worst case, primitive hunter-gatherers.

Anyone want to humor why we can't launch it into space (sun).

Assuming the payload is well protected even if a rocket blew up in space/fell back to Earth. Too much weight to carry?

- no way to access it if we develop technology to get clean energy from material that's currently seen as waste

- the sun is one of the most expensive destinations in the solar system, in terms of energy budget

- underground, on the moon, even Pluto or interstellar space, would be cheaper

- very extensive & well engineered shielding would be needed to protect against release in case of a launch mishap, but once you've encapsulated it that thoroughly, it's actually safe to keep basically anywhere, & there's little point actually launching it

That almost seems counterintuitive about the sun, since I would think as a heavy thing, objects would want to fall into it... But I understand orbits are faster near it. Gotta read up on that

Moon is an idea far away from unadvanced people

Fair point on the last bit

(2014)

this episode also ended up in video[1] form in partnership with Vox

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM

This debate is so tiresome. Just reprocess nuclear "waste" which is really just dirty nuclear fuel and then vitrify the actual waste and then bury it very deep underground in geologically stable and impermeable areas sealed in copper or lead canisters.

Pretty sweet. I wonder if there is a way to store a less harmful dose of radiation close to the surface so that everyone who goes there gets a bit sick and the longer they spend there the more sick they get, and then progressively make the exposure worse the deeper you go until you get to full exposure and die.

I am not an expert, but I would expect on the order of thousands of years, stuff moves around and you will likely not keep the distribution you created in the first place. And it needs to be kind of close for anyone to notice at all, which would possibly be close enough to leak out if unattended for a couple hundred years.

Hmmm. But if it is part of the same structure that is containing all the radiation in the first place, then discovery of one of the "radioactive tendrils" that gradually increases in intensity the deeper you go should be enough. Like at the surface you should feel ill, and there is a plate. Maybe on the plate, it has a symbol indicating intensity, like a wifi intensity indicator.

If you go deeper you get sicker, and you find there is an intensity indicator with the next level filled in.

Like if the structure itself will be there in 10,000 years, then making part of that structure protrude to the surface with some sort of intensity indicator that changes along its depth, as graduated exposure to radiation increases, should be pretty clear.

It's way to late once you start to feel ill from radiation

People undergo radiation therapy as a cancer treatment and they feel nausea but it's not a lethal dose. ChatGPT seems to think that:

Recovery from Mild Symptoms

At a dose of 0.5–1 Sv, symptoms such as nausea, fatigue, and possibly mild skin reddening may appear within a few hours to a day after exposure.

Recovery is likely within days to weeks as long as there is no further radiation exposure and the total dose does not exceed the body's capacity to repair cellular damage.

----

But then it's just a machine so obviously one should consult a nuclear physicist before actually implementing this in a multi-millenia nuclear waste containment site

When it comes to old nuclear material, it's more the danger of getting radiactive particles on and in you than it's about pure radiation. You can walk away from a machine but you can't walk away from that fine powder you just inhaled.

For a real life example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident It was finally clocked as harmful 15 days after they got a hold of it, plenty of time for lots of people to get a lethal dose. And these people probably had at least some pop culture knowledge of nuclear radiation, compared to a distant primitive civilization who would have nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com