[HN Gopher] Ten Thousand Years
___________________________________________________________________
Ten Thousand Years
Author : program
Score : 106 points
Date : 2024-12-16 22:18 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (99percentinvisible.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (99percentinvisible.org)
| dools wrote:
| 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.
| dxuh wrote:
| 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.
| dools wrote:
| 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.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| It's way to late once you start to feel ill from radiation
| dools wrote:
| 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
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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.
| jrmann100 wrote:
| 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...
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| krior wrote:
| What would be an universal depiction of increasing entropy?
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| krior wrote:
| 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?
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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")
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| > In the next two panels
|
| Has a very different meaning it drawn left-to-right and
| they read it right-to-left.
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
| dxuh wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| 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
| nektro wrote:
| this episode also ended up in video[1] form in partnership with
| Vox
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| foxglacier wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| The tough part about radiation _itself_ isn 't painful so
| causality can be hard to ascertain.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| >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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| jrowen wrote:
| 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.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| 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.
| dustingetz wrote:
| 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.
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > 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.
| jrowen wrote:
| 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?
| lisper wrote:
| > Add a meteor impact or a nuclear war
|
| If either of those happens, radioactive waste will be the
| least of anyone's worries.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Immediately, yes. 10 thousand years later, probably not.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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!).
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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?
| jrowen wrote:
| 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.
| Neikius wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Mm, radium water. They'll figure it out alright. _After_ they
| explored the commercial opportunities. :)
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| psychoslave wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > 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.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| > 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > 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.
| troyvit wrote:
| 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.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >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.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| > 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.
| _dain_ wrote:
| 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. "Apres moi, le deluge."
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.)
| notahacker wrote:
| 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.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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"...)
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| 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? ~
| jellicle wrote:
| 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".
| ooterness wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| turnsout wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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...
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Also a very good documentary:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
| xkef wrote:
| There's a great documentary called "Into Eternity" from 2010
| about the Norwegian solution for the nuclear waste problem.
| brazzy wrote:
| 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.
| Vecr wrote:
| High level nuclear waste gets less radioactive pretty quick. It
| gets easier further out, not harder.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| brazzy wrote:
| > 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.
| preisschild wrote:
| > 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/2016/2
| 0...
|
| > 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.
| eschaton wrote:
| 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.
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| szszrk wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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.
| szszrk wrote:
| 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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/
| szszrk wrote:
| 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.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I think it would be better to leave these tribes alone instead
| of interacting with them.
| preisschild wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| Have enough of such sites and you have prevented establishing a
| civilization that doesn't care about radiation.
| Vecr wrote:
| 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.
| beeforpork wrote:
| 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.
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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.
| lloeki wrote:
| 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.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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.
| atombender wrote:
| 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
| flerchin wrote:
| 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.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| Which would put it roughly in line with railways, in my head?
| I.e. sort of mundane pieces of infrastructure still serving a
| purpose?
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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).
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| flobosg wrote:
| (2014)
| sapphire42 wrote:
| 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 :)
| petsfed wrote:
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on
|
| It seems like a related phenomenon to "there's an XKCD about
| that"
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| UltraSane wrote:
| 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.
| jmward01 wrote:
| 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...
| varun_ch wrote:
| 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...
| ge96 wrote:
| 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?
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