Holy shit. Dieter Ast was my landlord in college. This explains so much about my basement.
To those who haven't read the article yet, the real title is Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Prof Ast was the material scientist on one of the multidisciplinary teams tasked to design warning symbols for 10,000 year nuclear waste storage sites. He used to go around collecting old lab computers that were going to be thrown out and resurrect them with Windows 2000 or Puppy Linux installs.
If their goal was to create a hokey-sounding quasi-spiritual ward that future generations will consider naive and ignore, they've certainly hit the nail on the head.
Probably a better approach is to accept the fact that nuclear waste will either be cleaned up or destroy humanity long before ten thousand years comes to pass, and spend the money they spent on this exercise in speculative fiction instead on working toward a real solution.
Admittedly, I haven't read the article, but the tone of the message suggests that it's not meant for future generations of our civilization, but for future generations of whatever cultures come after our civilization is gone.
There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.
...and as such, any large monumental works are more likely to attract attention than to repel it. May even become a cult place of worship. More effective to bury and obfuscate the site entirely?
If it becomes a "cult place of worship", then that's probably Mission Accomplished; the faithful have a tendency to defend holy places against those seeking to defile them (read: dig into them and expose the world to nuclear waste). If they can be convinced that such sites are "God's Temples" and that defiling them will unleash all sorts of plagues (which they very likely will), then the current generation's job is done.
Maybe. On the other hand if the place is visibly menacing, and anyone who visits it gets sick and/or dies, then wouldn't a culture otherwise ignorant of the dangers of nuclear waste quickly put two and two together and stay away from the haunted, evil place? Shrug I don't have the expertise to judge whether this will be effective or not so it's all just supposition on my part.
It had been a while since I read it, and on rereading it, I'm not convinced the narrator was ignorant of who built the ruins he is looking at. Nevertheless, it's a pretty amazing artifact of someone looking at the ruins of collapsed culture, imagining how grand it must have been in comparison to the bleak present.
To be fair, the odds that our ancestors will have figured out how to "solve" radioactive waste seems much slimmer than that our ancestors will be digging in the remains of our civilization for scraps to survive. In that case, this is really about taking the bare minimum responsibility to our distant progeny by warning them of the danger.
I would have thought that to an advanced civilization that a nuclear radioactive waste dump may well be of value.
I do think worrying about radioactive waste given how much carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere is a bit like bandaging a stubbed toe on an amputated leg.
They're worried about people in the future who may not know about radioactive waste. This location will be dangerous for a very long time in a way that's invisible.
Carbon dioxide is certainly a concern, but most of its problems will never produce a place that people shouldn't stumble or explore because of unseeable danger.
I often think of the story of the Goiânia accident to be applicable. Four people ended up dead because two people stole something they thought might have value but was radioactive.[1]
It is prudent to assume that dangerous waste should be disposed of in a way that assumes there won't always be guards.
Understand the reason for the worry, but given the climate change that has been kicked off by the CO2 released to date I don’t think people are going to be worrying too much about tripping over a radioactive waste dump.
>to an advanced civilization that a nuclear radioactive waste dump may well be of value.
Actually it has value to our civilization, because much of the low-grade uranium "waste" could be put into breeder reactors and turned into plutonium - and reused as nuclear fuel.
How do you know this? We know almost nothing about anyone or anything that happened during Roman times - the fact that a few scraps have survived is hardly an indication that most knowledge deliberately destroyed managed to escape.
Well, there's this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domitian
re: damnatio memoriae
"Yet the order of the Senate was only partially executed in Rome, and wholly disregarded in most of the provinces outside Italy."
I think it's possible that a similar effect would happen with attempting the same thing to the knowledge of nuclear fission...
Those other ways do not get rid of a potentially serious environmental contaminant. Or do you prefer if those "waste dumps" remain unused and potentially dangerous.
It both serves as a very valuable source of rare energy and at the same time gets rid of the "waste" of old redundant processes, what's not to like ?
I see those images, but there are more that are missing. For example: Figure 4.3-18, which is referenced 2 times in text but has no accompanying picture.
The images were published in high-resolution in some sort of art magazine and probably numerous other places, I cut them out to decorate my dormroom. I've only seen these awful photocopy images on the web, but there are far better ones out there.
It is a very good documentary on the subject. For me it really drove home the idea that current nuclear power comes with too expensive externalities in the form of "keep this stuff safe for 100 000 years". We've never come close to doing something like that as a species. I don't think we ever will.
We already live in the orbit of a giant nuclear reactor that puts out so much energy that its waste energy can power our entire world for any foreseeable future. Why build our own?
Actually, after a couple of hundred years it's no more dangerous than the ore from which it came. No one worries about putting up signs around natural uranium ore bodies.
Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.
Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of natural uranium. It has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. By the "long half-life = ZOMG! DANGERRRRR!" standard it must be really, really bad, no?
Nope. It's just not very radioactive. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and even get free shipping (no hazmat or anything).
Uranium was also used to color glass in the early 20th century. While it's not used for that purpose any more (and I probably would not routinely drink out of a uranium glass vessel), it's not considered hazardous. There's a lot of it for sale on eBay.
The really dangerous stuff tends to have a short half-life (= intensely radioactive, again by definition) and an affinity for body tissues. For example, iodine-131 -- half-live 8 days, and gets absorbed by your thyroid gland, or strontium-90 -- half-life about 29 years, and gets absorbed into your bones (it mimics calcium).
The people who convinced you that isotopes with long half-lives are somehow more dangerous? They either didn't know what they were talking about, or they were lying to you.
The full report with the longer message (linked elsewhere in this thread; page 214 or F-125) explicitly notes that the 10,000 year point is when it matches the ore:
> Radioactivity declines exponentially with time. By 10,000 years after the waste was buried here, the waste will be no more hazardous than the ore from which the radioactive material was taken [see 50 FR 38071a].
Funny stuff. A product of the narrative of the day, and in less that 30 years its already changed. Of course there will be no nuclear waste in the future, that stuff is way to valuable as fuel in modern reactors.
We should just assume that nuclear waste lasts forever, like a lot of chemical waste does, and then treat it the same as the equivalent class of chemical waste. When someone says "10,000 years", people start thinking about how to wait it out. When someone says "forever", people give up on waiting it out, and start thinking about more realistic safety measures.
But we've only been relevant for ~7,000 and if we do not make the Earth inhospitable ourselves in the next 10k years then the chances of a cataclysmic event are ever increasing to assist us. 99.9% of all animals ever to exist on the Earth are extinct, we're not that special.
Perhaps they are extinct because we've been erasing them as we reformat the earth to be more congenial to ourselves? Their extinction is not a signal that we may go extinct ourselves; just the opposite.
Mesopotamian Ziggurat, Teppe Sialk, dates from around 2900BC (~5000 yo). Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years old?
Yes, pretty much the result of the 5 major (or 9 major) extinction events. I was using this [1] it's a number frequently used when referring to whats been and whats left. It's really an extraordinary number when thinking about it.
We're pretty special, at least in the context of this planet. Science tells us that we are by far the most intelligent creatures to live on Earth in its observable history, and the only ones to meaningfully modify it.
In the very least, we are the only creatures to inhabit Earth, that if we become extinct, it is somewhat likely that we are both the victim and the perpetrator.
I'm not sure this is relevant. I mean, yes, they most certainly changed the planet itself, but it wasn't really to benefit themselves, was it? We build skyscrapers and Howitzers for intentional purposes, not because we excrete them.
> but it wasn't really to benefit themselves, was it?
Well, their descendants are pretty much everywhere you see something greenish, so it seems to have worked out.
> We build skyscrapers and Howitzers for intentional purposes, not because we excrete them.
We also emit pollution for intentional purposes. They might not be particularly noble purposes, but they're 100% intentional by each of humanity's individual parts.
I think you're confusing "the tools we use" versus "the ways we change the globe". Most of the worldwide changes we cause are not explicitly planned or built, but side-effects of the "metabolism" of our civilization.
Intelligence is not a indicator of survivability, and if it somehow was, we found ourselves on the completely wrong side of the argument. How many other planet-altering intelligent species do you see around you ? Do you think that is a good indicator of survivability ?
This seems fallacious, but I can't put my finger on how. Yes, there is currently a lack of "planet-altering intelligent species," but, as far as we can tell, there has always been a lack of planet-altering intelligent species. We don't have any evidence of a being with human-level capabilities than then died out.
Surely not the only ones to meaningfully modify earth. If you look from space, earth looks green... Also, wasn't the atmosphere changed to be more rich in oxygen by early microbes?
Cyano-bacteria created our current breathable atmosphere and most all iron deposits. Calciferous phytoplankton built England, vast tracks of southern France and literally creates the air we breathe. Those things all meaningfully modified it back in deep time and continue to modify it today.
We're hoping to start a colony on Mars. How could we possibly make Earth even remotely as inhospitable as Mars? Do you expect us to remove all the oceans' water? Remove most of the oxygen from the atmosphere? Kill all plants? I don't think we have much hope of making Earth inhospitable to us even if we tried.
Perhaps we somehow contaminate it all with nuclear waste. Even then, there'll be safety underground for long term living, relative safety even in contaminated areas for short term work, and radioactive water can be cleaned by distillation, mechanical or chemical means. We might have to set up a lot of infrastructure to do all that, but we've done a good job of setting up far more complex infrastructure already. It took only a couple of hundred years since the beginning of powered machines to get to where we are now. We could do it all again many times over in the next 10,000 years.
"Keep Earth hospitable" and "Colonize Mars" have very different goals, though. It would likely be humanity's crowning achievement to put a permanent outpost on another planet, but it would be, what, 15 people maybe? The other planet we're talking about has to support at least 7 billion.
I'm so old I remember we only supported 4 billion people.
Even pessimistically over one human lifetime I bet that "15 people" turns into at least 30.
You get gene pool and interbreeding issues with too small of a pool, then again you'd be amazed what you can store in liq nitrogen for a long time.
Also looking at the temporary and limited mineral and energy requirements, the earth isn't going to support 7B or 9B or even 1B for much longer, on a geologic / radiation timescale.
For awhile you can turn mined petrochemicals and chemical fertilizers into lots of human biomass. The key is for awhile, temporarily.
I'm curious, what chemical waste can you not safely dispose of? All organic compounds can be incinerated at a high enough temperate to destroy them (even nerve agents). The only thing I can think of would be metal poisons, but even those can be turned into a form that is less toxic.
A lot of metals can be converted into insoluble, inert minerals that have low-to-no toxicity. Mercury can be converted to mercury (II) sulfide which is insoluble in water and has no vapor pressure.[1]
It takes some serious equipment to heat water anywhere near that high. For cinnabar you just need fire. This is not an artificial distinction.
If you still don't see it, maybe picture yourself standing near a burning warehouse full of water versus standing near a burning warehouse full of cinnabar?
I went to high school next to a dioxin superfund site [1]. They incinerated it (I could see the smokestack from the school) and supposedly it's all cleaned up now [2]. We'll see how we all turn out.
An incinerator outgassing smoke toxic to surrounding people is something that should not exist. Proximity to a school is irrelevant, except for irrational fearmongering.
I disagree. Developing tissue will have to live for much longer than older folks and any kind of cumulative toxins or hard to break down toxins have a lot more chance to do harm in children than in adults.
Anything organic can be safely destroyed through careful incineration. PCBs (related to dioxins) need a really high temperate to be destroyed, but can be.
I am pretty sure that long before 10 000 years has lapsed, this so called waste is no more considered waste. For example, my understanding is that you can use current waste as a fuel in thorium cycle.
The plan in the US was to enrich waste in breeder reactors, mix in some fresh fuel, and re-use it. It was the nuclear fuel cycle. Lots of resources on the technology.
There were two problems. The use of breeder reactors had some proliferation concerns: they can be used to make warheads. Not a big deal in the US, as the US can already make warheads, but harder if you want to export nuclear waste reprocessing to other countries.
Transporting the waste was deemed risky. More so after 9/11, as fresh waste is so radioactively hot, it needs to be kept in water, or it will overheat. If you crash a plane into a transport vehicle, or a re-processing plant, it will create quite a mess.
So there is no way the nuclear waste will stay in the ground for 10,000 years. I suspect it will be less than a hundred years before someone digs it up, and reprocesses it.
This is something I've always wondered about, especially when confronted by environmentalist camps that oppose nuclear power.
Nuclear fuel recycling seems totally viable, and I imagine nuclear "waste" could be reprocessed and used for as long as there are fissionable products left in it. At which point it would pose minimal danger and save us a boatload on 10,000 year warning signs.
People are scared by the phrase 'breeder reactor'; which is poor marketing, calling it a 'waste reduction reactor' is slightly longer, but also more accurately describes what it does and sounds a LOT better.
I think it may have been a result of Fukushima, but I gained an interest in the topic and spent a few tens of hours researching. A proper waste reduction reactor produces three categories of radioactive material.
* Stuff that is so crazy hot it'll cool off in a 'short' period of time.
* Stuff that is good for use in reactors (a subset of the above).
* Stuff that will take a LONG time to decay; which means that it is active, but very very slowly emitting.
It's a fascinating problem, a way to communicate the concept that this is not a treasure trove, not a historical site, but something dangerous that was meant to be sealed away for many thousands of years due to its hazardous nature. The parting thoughts seem most telling to me thought.
They wonder if this really worth it, since in the end coming into contact with the waste is a bit of a self-limiting problem, in that people exploring will become sick and die. It will ergo, become a "Place to avoid" anyway. If the cost is bound to be a few explorer's lives every few millennia in any case, and that's what will send the real message, then... well... you see?
Finally though, they just wonder how to construct something massive, durable, and yet not likely to be cannibalized for parts or scrap! They even raise the issue of what 400+ generations of unknowable humanity might do to the marker structure, without disturbing the rest of the site.
All I can picture is an Indiana Jones like situation, where everything that would be done to protect the site will just be interpreted as something valuable being stored in the most dangerous section.
Seems like overkill. What's a few poisoned people in 12,000 years? I imagine that people dying around the site will be the most effective ward to keep others away.
...and success is measured in minimizing that number. The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. Not to attract pilgrims for centuries with mysterious messages and monoliths, who go home to die of unknown sores and blood problems.
> How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now?
1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground.
2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later.
3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the more accessible areas of the site. Ideally, it should not leak out and should not be easily removable by human means. However, the main goal is to have people getting sick by repeated exposure. Nothing that kills right away, but something that leads to reduced life span and/or quality of life.
> Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
The point is not to issue any overt warning. People will be smart enough to create a story that fits the scenario. Instead of a fortress made to guard unfathomable riches with ancient evils, you want them to think of us like a bunch of idiots that messed with stuff they did not quite grasp and got Darwinized in the process. There will always be 3Ds jobs: dumb, dirty and dangerous. You masquarade as one of such places and people will not give it a second thought.
The actual dangerous material is going to be securely buried and contained. The threat model is people disturbing the site, breaking the containment, and releasing radioactive material. The resulting deaths are unlikely to fit the "immediate and unambiguous" profile. It might just slowly kill generations of people settling in the area. Or, it might get into the air and rapidly kill many more people than those nearby. Better to convince them to stay away.
It's really interesting to me to see architecture used for its typical antithesis. It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify. Here it is being used to desecrate, to decrease utility, to ward away.
As a hacker, I'm used to the thought of "what is the worst possible way I can make this UI", but it's cool to see it applied in an entirely different field.
> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify. Here it is being used to desecrate, to decrease utility, to ward away.
Not that uncommon. I have known 2 architects who used architecture against probably what they learned in school or dreamed of building.
One was designing casinos. Apparently they did "dark patterns" before computer UI people did it. Think about open places, to inspire and generate positive emotions and so on, well their guidelines was to entrap, confuse, isolate and promote whatever kept people playing longer. She eventually quit and became a housewife.
The other one, lost their job where they designed office buildings, and the only job they found in their town was building prisons. Talk about soul crushing. Well, they said they didn't care it was just a job. But, I know it would bring me down if I was building that.
Dark patterns aren't uncommon, sure. But I feel like in trying to design a nuclear waste site they are using antipatterns, purposely trying to avoid or subvert every common pattern in design. Or in terms of the computing metaphor a dark pattern would be a website that splits content across several pages. An antipattern would loading MBs of webfonts and polyfills to display a single word and a link saying "Click here for the next word." (At least as I'm trying to use the word "antipattern").
I do not really know much about architecture personally, so I appreciate the input. I do feel sorry for the people who do the soul crushing work like that, making the world just a little worse in order to survive. We all have a choice, even if we can't see it now.
> Think about open places, to inspire and generate positive emotions and so on, well their guidelines was to entrap, confuse, isolate and promote whatever kept people playing longer.
You can usually tell whether an airport is state funded or private sector by how confusing it is. Privately funded airports are optimised to get you past the maximum number of shop fronts with other distractions minimised. The tend to be labyrinthine and inward looking. This is because landing fees make up a small percentage of their revenue.
I started my computer services business because the place I worked at doing tech support had good people but bad business practises. It felt like I was given a great opportunity to learn new skills, which I did, but then put them to such diluted use that it did our customers a disservice. I suppose that's a sign that you don't just want a job, but something to work for as part of who you are.
Definitely the Nazi* architecture does that. I remember seeing thee very intimidating military towers in Berlin. It was like the tower wanted to start a war itself. (*Yes I said the magic word, it is now one of THOSE threads!)
Hitler was a fan of gigantic architecture. The military towers are less of an example of that than the civilian structures that were built and planned, often heavily inspired by Roman architecture but scaled up quite a bit, with massive statues and flags.
Speer's plans for Germania, the world capital that was supposed to be built on top of Berlin, were pretty impressive and pretty insane.
> It's really interesting to me to see architecture used for its typical antithesis.
I dunno, I can think of a modern architect or two who could design a dystopic hellscape intended to deter humans from entering for 10,000 years in his sleep …
> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify.
I certainly wouldn't attribute those purposes to, say, the Brutalists.
Interesting. I know that the idea of launching radioactive waste into the sun or out of the solar system is highly criticized for the potential for things to go wrong (and rightly so), but do the critics really think that the earth -- with humans on it -- will be more reliable in 10,000 years than space flight even 100 years from now?
Getting out of the solar system is incredibly difficult. Well, not necessarily difficult, but expensive. So far we've launched a grand total of five spacecraft that will leave our solar system, with a combined mass of just over 2500 kg. That doesn't even put a dent in the amount of nuclear waste we're talking about.
Somewhat counter intuitively, it's actually a bit more difficult to crash into the sun than to leave the solar system.
There's also the small problem that an explosion on launch could result in a massive area being exposed to highly concentrated radioactive fallout.
I've read the report several times (it keeps coming back every 5-7 years or so) since publication, and I've never felt like a reliable solution had wither been found, or was in the offing. There is good thinking, but the problem itself seems very daunting. I think that is the real lesson.
This has been haunting the news since the early '80s and it will go on for several more decades. Then, after whatever they finally come up with is constructed, there will be a creepy spectacle about which to write more tired news stories.
It has always seemed a waste of effort to me. If some primitive post-dystopian human were to dig hundreds of meters through salt (!) and come into contact with the waste they would be rapidly educated as to the hazard and go find something better to do. Anyone less primitive should have no trouble interpreting some straightforward pictographs preserved on a few strategically placed brass plaques embedded in granite. In the meantime surround the site in stainless barbed wire and perform routine inspections.
I guess it was kinda fun thinking about this `problem.' Once. Long ago. But since then it seems to have just devolved into a boondoggle attracting an ever greater circle of paper writers. Meanwhile, with all of these great minds sweating 10,000 year hypotheticals, the actual handling of waste is down to yahoo contractors mixing high level waste with randomly procured cat litter, producing nitrate fueled nuclear waste explosions...
Yeah the artifical constraint of understandable by everyone is quite limiting. I can see two set working best: scary faces and statues for primitives, atom structure of thorium or whatever waste is for educated. Optionally leave some stuff out in a ventilated but inaccesdible area so people die/get sick before releasing the whole toxic dump in the wild. Can be in stages like pyramids: first zone warning, then the second zone trapped. Inhuman, but if your priority is to protect the whole word from releasing the waste a couple curious casualty may be a compromise.
The funny thing about the horrible post-dystopian future scenario is how many far greater nuclear threats could exist. Assuming the cause of said horrible future isn't caused by nuclear war already, what would happen to all the more potent nuclear material and weapons scattered about? These places are comparatively quite accessible, and the sites communicate that the objects are highly valued. You're right, focusing on the wrong things.
To prevent people from entering, they should place statues of soldiers in front of the entrance. Thousands of them. Each should be sculpted individually from terra cotta.
Or discard of the waste on a small island and erect many large stone statues of scary-looking faces. I expect that, over time, the waste's emanations will kill off all of the local trees but it should serve as strong enough warning :-)
Use the heat of the waste's radioactivity to power infrasonic emitters, and induce horror and panic in anyone who comes close. Or maybe set it up so that the wind creates infrasonic vibrations. You'd stand a very good chance of convincing people that the place is literally haunted.
That is indeed the trick, but who said anything about computers? Mechanical sound reproduction, even specifically using electricity, predates computers. I see no reason it couldn't post-date them in this application, as well. You would want to build the system out of simple, indestructible components, something closer in complexity to an electric doorbell than a computer.
I imagine the record for uptime with zero maintenance is held by something like the Voyager probes which are nearing 40 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
But even if you cut out any electronics and use something as basic as a rock with a whistle carved into it for the wind to blow through, it will still be susceptible to getting clogged up/eroded.
Honestly, reading this, I kept thinking to myself, "Man, this is just waiting to be turned into science fiction short story." It could go in different directions, future humans discover such a site, humans discover an alien analogue of such a site on $planet, aliens discover such a site crafted by humans on $planet, etc. Either way, there's potential for a good story there.
I think the most interesting thing about this is the underlying assumption that warnings and containment must survive .. the death of our current civilization and States.
These researchers are talking the long path .. how do we warn people who make not have any knowledge our civilization exists in its current form?
Too many people today think this will last forever; that we're in a golden age that we cannot easily return from.
It's a very sobering but realistic thought. Plenty of past human civilizations that were powerful and dominant in their day are now but decayed ruins of varying levels of mysteriousness. I do very much enjoy and benefit from being part of this civilization in this time and place, but I have no delusions that hundreds or thousands of generations from now, assuming the species survives, the works of here and now will similarly be puzzling ruins.
It's especially interesting to see a government body doing this sort of thing. Politicians don't usually care much about what kind of world they're leaving for their own children, let alone random citizens of the far future.
Is anyone actually following these suggestions? My cynical assumption is that they'd be laughed out of the house by the people who actually hold the construction purse-strings.
> Politicians don't usually care much about what kind of world they're leaving for their own children, let alone random citizens of the far future.
Politicians probably care about this a lot much than they are given credit for; while plenty are actually short-sighted and narrowly selfish (just like plenty of non-politicians), no doubt a lot of the perception of that comes from people who disagree with them on what is best for the future portraying the politicians disagreement as disinterest. (This frequently happens when the disagreeing parties are not politicians, as well.)
In the full report [1], there actually is a sample short story or "scenario" (page F-139, "5.1 Scenario for the marking system (MFK)"). Extract:
> Jo climbed down and walked over, the sand squeaking beneath her boots. She followed Steve’s head around the shape, only to find another shape behind it. The sand had shifted in between the two, but the writing was still clear. She stood next to Steve and looked. There were faces, two of them. And there was writing, in many different forms. “Hey, I think that’s Chinese -- I saw something like it in my ancient history class,” said Steve as he knelt to get a closer look.
> “So send a picture to Cindy in Remote -- you know she likes that old stuff,” shrugged Jo. “What did they want around here? Those faces aren’t scary. That one looks scared and that one looks sick, I’m not impressed. ” She stepped out between the pillars and looked around. They had stopped just before the center. There was nothing there but sand and scrub. She squinted and saw that every passage way was blocked by these little shapes sticking up in the middle. She sighed. All this stuff for... nothing?
Not exactly the same set up, but "the Engines of God" by Jack McDevitt is a great example of that idea of future archaeologists trying to decipher an ancient message.
The only way in which something like this will be useful is if, for some reason, civilisation collapses but humans survive. (If humans don't survive then 10,000 years is far too soon to worry about another intelligent species arising.)
If that happens, some major catastrophe has undoubtedly already occurred which makes the possible death of a bunch of future-cavemen who happen to start digging in the wrong patch of desert pale in comparison.
If we're really worried about this scenario we should worry less about marking specific sites, and more about trying to come up with a way to store all our existing scientific and cultural knowledge in a non-perishable manner, in many places, that can be dug up and hopefully eventually decoded by people of the future. Purely from an avoid-human-suffering point of view, telling people "don't dig here" isn't nearly as valuable as telling them about infectious diseases, and vaccination, and...
99pi did an awesome about this. I thought the most interesting idea was that culture permeated much deeper than anything else. So seed our world with these stories of cats that changed color near radiation or something like that would do best. Since symbols meaning change but oral tradition or old wives tales last much longer.
One of the many discarded methods of solving Dwarf Fortress's cat population problems. We then had to expend many Dwarf-hours and precious resources safely disposing of the irradiated cat remains. The cats were still angry.
Sad that even in 1993 the government was still producing documents on a typewriter with shitty, photocopied black-and-white line art. Photoshop had already been available for three years at this point.
What language(s) did the earth speak 10,000 years ago. The concept is electrifying for will English or any other language written or spoken today even exist?
The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, carbon fiber, or a material that wouldn't degrade in 10,000 years. Then inside the monument would have to feature even more information. WOW!
I'm going to go out on a limb and surmise that, barring cataclysmic events, 10k years from now the majority of people will speak an english-derived language that is mostly understandable to someone living in the present day. Information transfer in the past was extremely analog, slow-moving, and lossy. Today we are rapidly approaching a "single meme pool" and your tweets are getting archived for eternity, whether you like it or not.
Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.
!0,000 Years ago was ~8000 BC. Nobody knows what languages people spoke back then. Our oldest reconstructed languages like Proto-Uralic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic are hypothesized to have been spoken around then, but they are very rough guesses and certainly are unintelligible to all modern humans.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadTo those who haven't read the article yet, the real title is Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Prof Ast was the material scientist on one of the multidisciplinary teams tasked to design warning symbols for 10,000 year nuclear waste storage sites. He used to go around collecting old lab computers that were going to be thrown out and resurrect them with Windows 2000 or Puppy Linux installs.
… did you enter?
>No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
>Nothing valued is here.
"But I just need to use the laundry machines."
>...Fine.
I was one of his last tenants in 2013. I always enjoyed conversing with him.
Probably a better approach is to accept the fact that nuclear waste will either be cleaned up or destroy humanity long before ten thousand years comes to pass, and spend the money they spent on this exercise in speculative fiction instead on working toward a real solution.
There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.
It had been a while since I read it, and on rereading it, I'm not convinced the narrator was ignorant of who built the ruins he is looking at. Nevertheless, it's a pretty amazing artifact of someone looking at the ruins of collapsed culture, imagining how grand it must have been in comparison to the bleak present.
That initial text was not intended to be written, but communicated through the design of the message system. Interesting.
I expected more skulls and crossbones.
"Sweet, it's like some secret pirate tomb! Maybe they buried some treasure here!"
I do think worrying about radioactive waste given how much carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere is a bit like bandaging a stubbed toe on an amputated leg.
Carbon dioxide is certainly a concern, but most of its problems will never produce a place that people shouldn't stumble or explore because of unseeable danger.
I often think of the story of the Goiânia accident to be applicable. Four people ended up dead because two people stole something they thought might have value but was radioactive.[1]
It is prudent to assume that dangerous waste should be disposed of in a way that assumes there won't always be guards.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident
Actually it has value to our civilization, because much of the low-grade uranium "waste" could be put into breeder reactors and turned into plutonium - and reused as nuclear fuel.
Read about it here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_163.shtml
(edit: made it more clear what I meant)
I think it's possible that a similar effect would happen with attempting the same thing to the knowledge of nuclear fission...
It both serves as a very valuable source of rare energy and at the same time gets rid of the "waste" of old redundant processes, what's not to like ?
edit: found a mirror http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
http://imgur.com/a/DGizu
http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.
Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of natural uranium. It has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. By the "long half-life = ZOMG! DANGERRRRR!" standard it must be really, really bad, no?
Nope. It's just not very radioactive. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and even get free shipping (no hazmat or anything).
Uranium was also used to color glass in the early 20th century. While it's not used for that purpose any more (and I probably would not routinely drink out of a uranium glass vessel), it's not considered hazardous. There's a lot of it for sale on eBay.
The really dangerous stuff tends to have a short half-life (= intensely radioactive, again by definition) and an affinity for body tissues. For example, iodine-131 -- half-live 8 days, and gets absorbed by your thyroid gland, or strontium-90 -- half-life about 29 years, and gets absorbed into your bones (it mimics calcium).
The people who convinced you that isotopes with long half-lives are somehow more dangerous? They either didn't know what they were talking about, or they were lying to you.
> Radioactivity declines exponentially with time. By 10,000 years after the waste was buried here, the waste will be no more hazardous than the ore from which the radioactive material was taken [see 50 FR 38071a].
Mesopotamian Ziggurat, Teppe Sialk, dates from around 2900BC (~5000 yo). Gobekli Tepe 12,000 years old?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinct...
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/extinction/massext/stateme...
In the very least, we are the only creatures to inhabit Earth, that if we become extinct, it is somewhat likely that we are both the victim and the perpetrator.
The first oxygen-excreting algae may have a prior claim...
Well, their descendants are pretty much everywhere you see something greenish, so it seems to have worked out.
> We build skyscrapers and Howitzers for intentional purposes, not because we excrete them.
We also emit pollution for intentional purposes. They might not be particularly noble purposes, but they're 100% intentional by each of humanity's individual parts.
I think you're confusing "the tools we use" versus "the ways we change the globe". Most of the worldwide changes we cause are not explicitly planned or built, but side-effects of the "metabolism" of our civilization.
Perhaps we somehow contaminate it all with nuclear waste. Even then, there'll be safety underground for long term living, relative safety even in contaminated areas for short term work, and radioactive water can be cleaned by distillation, mechanical or chemical means. We might have to set up a lot of infrastructure to do all that, but we've done a good job of setting up far more complex infrastructure already. It took only a couple of hundred years since the beginning of powered machines to get to where we are now. We could do it all again many times over in the next 10,000 years.
Even pessimistically over one human lifetime I bet that "15 people" turns into at least 30.
You get gene pool and interbreeding issues with too small of a pool, then again you'd be amazed what you can store in liq nitrogen for a long time.
Also looking at the temporary and limited mineral and energy requirements, the earth isn't going to support 7B or 9B or even 1B for much longer, on a geologic / radiation timescale.
For awhile you can turn mined petrochemicals and chemical fertilizers into lots of human biomass. The key is for awhile, temporarily.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_sulfide
Also, cost must be a factor. Turning materials back into ore is extremely expensive.
If you still don't see it, maybe picture yourself standing near a burning warehouse full of water versus standing near a burning warehouse full of cinnabar?
Has a worst case half life of 50 years.
http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/
Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects.
But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
[2] https://clu-in.org/download/remed/incpdf/times.pdf
There were two problems. The use of breeder reactors had some proliferation concerns: they can be used to make warheads. Not a big deal in the US, as the US can already make warheads, but harder if you want to export nuclear waste reprocessing to other countries.
Transporting the waste was deemed risky. More so after 9/11, as fresh waste is so radioactively hot, it needs to be kept in water, or it will overheat. If you crash a plane into a transport vehicle, or a re-processing plant, it will create quite a mess.
So there is no way the nuclear waste will stay in the ground for 10,000 years. I suspect it will be less than a hundred years before someone digs it up, and reprocesses it.
Burying nuclear waste is itself waste.
Nuclear fuel recycling seems totally viable, and I imagine nuclear "waste" could be reprocessed and used for as long as there are fissionable products left in it. At which point it would pose minimal danger and save us a boatload on 10,000 year warning signs.
People are scared by the phrase 'breeder reactor'; which is poor marketing, calling it a 'waste reduction reactor' is slightly longer, but also more accurately describes what it does and sounds a LOT better.
I think it may have been a result of Fukushima, but I gained an interest in the topic and spent a few tens of hours researching. A proper waste reduction reactor produces three categories of radioactive material.
* Stuff that is so crazy hot it'll cool off in a 'short' period of time.
* Stuff that is good for use in reactors (a subset of the above).
* Stuff that will take a LONG time to decay; which means that it is active, but very very slowly emitting.
They wonder if this really worth it, since in the end coming into contact with the waste is a bit of a self-limiting problem, in that people exploring will become sick and die. It will ergo, become a "Place to avoid" anyway. If the cost is bound to be a few explorer's lives every few millennia in any case, and that's what will send the real message, then... well... you see?
Finally though, they just wonder how to construct something massive, durable, and yet not likely to be cannibalized for parts or scrap! They even raise the issue of what 400+ generations of unknowable humanity might do to the marker structure, without disturbing the rest of the site.
But also isn't it a treasure trove? Nuclear waste can be reprocessed into fresh fuel. The waste has a large amount of useful energy left.
How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now?
Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground.
2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later.
3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the more accessible areas of the site. Ideally, it should not leak out and should not be easily removable by human means. However, the main goal is to have people getting sick by repeated exposure. Nothing that kills right away, but something that leads to reduced life span and/or quality of life.
> Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."
The point is not to issue any overt warning. People will be smart enough to create a story that fits the scenario. Instead of a fortress made to guard unfathomable riches with ancient evils, you want them to think of us like a bunch of idiots that messed with stuff they did not quite grasp and got Darwinized in the process. There will always be 3Ds jobs: dumb, dirty and dangerous. You masquarade as one of such places and people will not give it a second thought.
What exactly is the benefit of that?
If you're willing to poison people, just go ahead and poison them.
Alternatively, you may want to fetch a dictionary and look up the meaning of word "tradeoff".
As a hacker, I'm used to the thought of "what is the worst possible way I can make this UI", but it's cool to see it applied in an entirely different field.
Not that uncommon. I have known 2 architects who used architecture against probably what they learned in school or dreamed of building.
One was designing casinos. Apparently they did "dark patterns" before computer UI people did it. Think about open places, to inspire and generate positive emotions and so on, well their guidelines was to entrap, confuse, isolate and promote whatever kept people playing longer. She eventually quit and became a housewife.
The other one, lost their job where they designed office buildings, and the only job they found in their town was building prisons. Talk about soul crushing. Well, they said they didn't care it was just a job. But, I know it would bring me down if I was building that.
I do not really know much about architecture personally, so I appreciate the input. I do feel sorry for the people who do the soul crushing work like that, making the world just a little worse in order to survive. We all have a choice, even if we can't see it now.
> She eventually quit and became a housewife.
I think she ended up working for IKEA.
I'm not quite sure about that.
Lots of architecture is used to intimidate, to signal power and that you should be afraid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower
Speer's plans for Germania, the world capital that was supposed to be built on top of Berlin, were pretty impressive and pretty insane.
If a child draws like a child, that's probably not worth mentioning.
If a brilliant artist draws like a child, that's pretty damn impressive.
I dunno, I can think of a modern architect or two who could design a dystopic hellscape intended to deter humans from entering for 10,000 years in his sleep …
> It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify.
I certainly wouldn't attribute those purposes to, say, the Brutalists.
Somewhat counter intuitively, it's actually a bit more difficult to crash into the sun than to leave the solar system.
There's also the small problem that an explosion on launch could result in a massive area being exposed to highly concentrated radioactive fallout.
Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?
Supposedly it "encourages people to vote thoughtfully," which would be somewhat less silly if the buttons weren't tiny and about a millimeter apart.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11852316 and marked it off-topic.
It has always seemed a waste of effort to me. If some primitive post-dystopian human were to dig hundreds of meters through salt (!) and come into contact with the waste they would be rapidly educated as to the hazard and go find something better to do. Anyone less primitive should have no trouble interpreting some straightforward pictographs preserved on a few strategically placed brass plaques embedded in granite. In the meantime surround the site in stainless barbed wire and perform routine inspections.
I guess it was kinda fun thinking about this `problem.' Once. Long ago. But since then it seems to have just devolved into a boondoggle attracting an ever greater circle of paper writers. Meanwhile, with all of these great minds sweating 10,000 year hypotheticals, the actual handling of waste is down to yahoo contractors mixing high level waste with randomly procured cat litter, producing nitrate fueled nuclear waste explosions...
Priorities. In order. Not.
Advantage: tomb robbers who steal the statues will receive radiation poisoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Human_reactions
10K years is a really long time to keep a computer running. Who's going to do that, other than more computers?
But even if you cut out any electronics and use something as basic as a rock with a whistle carved into it for the wind to blow through, it will still be susceptible to getting clogged up/eroded.
These researchers are talking the long path .. how do we warn people who make not have any knowledge our civilization exists in its current form?
Too many people today think this will last forever; that we're in a golden age that we cannot easily return from.
Is anyone actually following these suggestions? My cynical assumption is that they'd be laughed out of the house by the people who actually hold the construction purse-strings.
Politicians probably care about this a lot much than they are given credit for; while plenty are actually short-sighted and narrowly selfish (just like plenty of non-politicians), no doubt a lot of the perception of that comes from people who disagree with them on what is best for the future portraying the politicians disagreement as disinterest. (This frequently happens when the disagreeing parties are not politicians, as well.)
> Jo climbed down and walked over, the sand squeaking beneath her boots. She followed Steve’s head around the shape, only to find another shape behind it. The sand had shifted in between the two, but the writing was still clear. She stood next to Steve and looked. There were faces, two of them. And there was writing, in many different forms. “Hey, I think that’s Chinese -- I saw something like it in my ancient history class,” said Steve as he knelt to get a closer look.
> “So send a picture to Cindy in Remote -- you know she likes that old stuff,” shrugged Jo. “What did they want around here? Those faces aren’t scary. That one looks scared and that one looks sick, I’m not impressed. ” She stepped out between the pillars and looked around. They had stopped just before the center. There was nothing there but sand and scrub. She squinted and saw that every passage way was blocked by these little shapes sticking up in the middle. She sighed. All this stuff for... nothing?
[1] http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...
If that happens, some major catastrophe has undoubtedly already occurred which makes the possible death of a bunch of future-cavemen who happen to start digging in the wrong patch of desert pale in comparison.
If we're really worried about this scenario we should worry less about marking specific sites, and more about trying to come up with a way to store all our existing scientific and cultural knowledge in a non-perishable manner, in many places, that can be dug up and hopefully eventually decoded by people of the future. Purely from an avoid-human-suffering point of view, telling people "don't dig here" isn't nearly as valuable as telling them about infectious diseases, and vaccination, and...
99pi did an awesome about this. I thought the most interesting idea was that culture permeated much deeper than anything else. So seed our world with these stories of cats that changed color near radiation or something like that would do best. Since symbols meaning change but oral tradition or old wives tales last much longer.
The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, carbon fiber, or a material that wouldn't degrade in 10,000 years. Then inside the monument would have to feature even more information. WOW!
Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.