[HN Gopher] The challenge of designing nuclear waste warning mar...
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The challenge of designing nuclear waste warning markers to last
10k years
Author : lsllc
Score : 19 points
Date : 2023-08-26 18:55 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nightingaledvs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nightingaledvs.com)
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Weird to not mention the HIT Force.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Interference_Task_Forc...
| ifeja wrote:
| Lacked a good selection of designs of the warnings.
| nprateem wrote:
| Yeah. Looks like they went with a swarm of buried killer bees
| or something.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This is anti-Nuclear FUD.
|
| By a few thousand years, the most dangerous isotopes will be
| decayed. I doubt that the danger of a few people being exposed to
| these isotopes would actually be anything compared to the dangers
| of a civilization collapse.
|
| In addition, knowing humans, I think it is futile. I think no
| matter what you put, some curious human will want to find out.
|
| Think about it. Suppose we come across some alien UFO crash.
| Inside the crash site was a box with all sorts of scary looking
| markings. Do you really think no one would open the box because
| of those markings?
| cogman10 wrote:
| There's also the problem that what's scary depends a lot on
| culture. Really hard to believe that somehow cultural
| traditions making a marking scary would somehow survive but the
| actual knowledge to know this site has nuclear waste wouldn't.
| [deleted]
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _I think no matter what you put, some curious human will want
| to find out._
|
| Yeah. Don't the pyramids have warnings on them about getting
| cursed and such? I'd imagine these would be taken about as
| seriously.
| cogman10 wrote:
| These are all interesting thoughts but I think that if society
| lasts another 10k years AND it has somehow lost knowledge about
| nuclear waste sites it seems pretty unlikely that it will then
| have the ability to dig up those sites.
|
| We still have roman government records over 2000 years old. It's
| hard for me to believe that the current digital archiving of
| records wouldn't survive with society (barring catastrophic
| problems spelling the end of civilization).
|
| If society doesn't last that long, I really doubt we'll get to a
| level of sophistication that allows us to dig up nuclear waste
| while somehow also losing access to old records.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| If you're interested in a fantasy book series like this, the
| Broken Empire series (first book is called Prince of Thorns) is
| quite good.
| reed1234 wrote:
| Being able to dig a big hole does not equal knowledge about
| where things are buried. We are still finding ruins to this
| day. And digital records on things like ssds will decay faster
| than parchment for the most part.
| bombcar wrote:
| We've merrily dug into Egyptian pyramids with even more dire
| warnings on them. How would we know if future people would
| consider our warnings just as silly?
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _A place where no humans will tread for 100k years_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37258178 - Aug 2023 (205
| comments)
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(page generated 2023-08-26 23:01 UTC)