This Place is Not a Place of Honor (2006) | Hacker News Reader

This Place is Not a Place of Honor (2006)

damninteresting.com

31 pointssdfx21 comments

Come on, have modern humans actively shunned any archeological site? Have we even shunned hostile environments? I think it's the contrary, we're drawn to them.

A plaque with all the UN languages is a rosetta stone, something of obvious intrinsic value. The Periodic table too - to any potential future civilization that hasn't already rediscovered those things, it may be a sought after source of knowledge.

The site is also attractive to those who would wish to use what's there to their advantage - as a weapon against their enemies, likely w/o really understanding the consequences.

Too expensive to launch it into the sun, no other solution (if we're not going to derive the value of reprocessing and actually use it up).

I've been kind of obsessed with WIPP for years. Even if you don't buy the reasoning, it's just... I used to work on science in this area: colleagues were working on Synroc, and I was working on theoretical techniques which you could apply to predicting how well it'd work. So it was on my mind anyway. But there's so much in the WIPP report, the richness and depth of it, that who cares if it actually happens? Seriously, the report's worth your time anyway.

I really couldn't get away from this. I used to do a lot of music. Here's a track I made in '05/'06 off my record: (http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/releases/symbolic/, free download);

http://www.last.fm/music/Covert/_/A+Place+of+Honour

Like I said; obsessed...

Ooh, I like it. I have a design exercise that involves listening to a song for inspiration. This will be perfect! Thank you for sharing. I agree that this is a fascinating idea.

Cool! I'd love to see what you come up with.

Here you go!

http://i920.photobucket.com/albums/ad42/BucketPebble/NoHonor...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794205

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773137

And more recently: http://www.slate.com/id/2235504/

During my work at a utility with lots of nuclear power plants, my boss talked about this very issue. He described the problem and the proposed solution being the tall objects sticking out of the ground.

One of the young people on the team quickly thought out loud, "Sounds like Stone Henge!"

This is a very hard problem to solve, as the very act of marking something signals "Hey, there's something important here!" The natural curiosity of whoever finds it is likely to override any respect they might have for the warnings of a long dead civilization.

Yes, this is the same problem that the Pharaos tried to solve, and look how well that turned out.

If we're using the pharaohs as a guide, then perhaps we should make a massive monument, mark it with the most creative signage we can think of, and then bury the nuclear waste somewhere else.

I think the right thing to do is to make the site look as boring and indistinct as possible until you've dug down to only a little bit above the danger area.

And then you still have to solve the problem.

Seems like saying, "x000 tons of nuclear waste below" would work a little better than being mysterious and vague. Fairly warned, if they want to dig it up, it's their own fault.

The point is to have multiple levels of messages for different potential future recipients. The site will be clearly identified as a nuclear waste dump... to people who know what nuclear waste is. The vague lower-level messages are for people who don't know anything about nuclear science.

They could have concentric circles of increasingly deadly threats: start with tripwires, end with landmines. If every time you get closer to the nuclear waste, you're more likely to die, you will probably get the idea.

If you can make tripwires and landmines that still work in 10,000 years, you can probably do better things with nuclear waste than just put it in a cave.

Remember: the earliest known writings are less than 6,000 years old. We're talking about planning for almost twice that. This is an incredibly long period of time, in human terms (though not in geological terms, which is what created the problem in the first place).

But that looks like someone's trying to protect something valuable, which could make it more tempting.

It seems to me that you can't cover all the cases, you just have to figure out how often throughout history they have occured and cover the major fraction of them. In any case, here are some of the ideas I liked:

Some of the ideas in the original comment thread from 2006 were nice. Make the area inconspicuous, make it extremely expensive to dig up. Why not make it look like a giant concrete dumping ground?

To thwart geological surveys, maybe you could figure out a way to stealth the tunnels or arrange the tunnels in the shape of a warning message.

Perhaps you should make the area extremely inconspicuous and just trecherous to get to for the technologically unenabled (build rivers, hills etc). That way you ensure that mostly only hikers get there and hopefully don't notice the concealed enterance. Of course, that plan could be thwarted if a group of people seek shelter there because of wartime persecution.

How about a skull? Pictures of people dying of radiation?

I can't see giant monuments doing anything other than enticing people to dig. However, reliefs and images of people dying of radiation poisoning might be less ambiguous.

Good sci fi. Silly for the government to care about this. I mean, really, 10000 years?

If future civilizations are technologically advanced, detecting radiation won't be a problem.

If future civilizations have fallen back to the stone age, spatially localized buried nuclear waste is going to be the least of their problems. It would be a rounding error in the annual death rates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com