Radioactive Warning for Future Generations

tengu1sd writes "The Los Angeles Times discusses the problems with trying to leave a message for generations down the line. From the article: 'Symbols tend to lose their meaning over time. Exactly how and why Stonehenge was built, for instance, has long remained a mystery. Warnings, they argue, would be misunderstood or dismissed, the same way ancient grave robbers ignored curses inscribed on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs to seize the riches inside. The curse of plutonium packs a painful penalty.'"

Simple solution

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.

Re:Simple solution

[networkBoy (774728)]

Na, just type:
Warning, Lawyers buried here.

No-one will ever dig it up.
-nB

Re:Simple solution

[Scrameustache (459504)]

Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.

FTFA

It would be surrounded by 48 granite or concrete markers, 32 outside the berm and 16 inside, each 25 feet high and weighing 105 tons, engraved with warnings in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic and Navajo, with room for future discoverers to add warnings in contemporary languages. Pictures would denote buried hazards and human faces of horror and revulsion.

Re:Simple solution

[Scrameustache (459504)]

As the FTA points out, people who robbed the pyramids in Egypt didn't pay any attention to the warnings about curses

Yeah, um, curses? Should I worry about black cats too?

Re:Simple solution

[Andrzej Sawicki (921100)]

So right. This reminded me of a Terry Pratchett quote:

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

Re:Burial in Ancient Rock!

[Itchy Rich (818896)]

Again, any society capable of getting there will also have discovered the periodicity of chemistry...

So, you're saying that before 1896 the human race would have been incapable of mining out a couple of hundred metres of concrete? Any pharoah worth his salt could have that concrete shaft carved into a tasteful spiral staircase within his lifetime.

Re:Simple solution

[larry bagina (561269)]

addendum: Perhaps future archaelogists will be fascinated to learn that the ancient romans colonized north america and utilized nuclear power.

Re:A cantilcle for leibowitz

[iamlucky13 (795185)]

That's not quite the story. It wasn't an order that survived but the church. In Canticle for Leibowitz the Catholic church survived a nuclear holocaust and an ensuing uprising against all technology. While some clung to hope, most started destroying any technology they found in a desperate effort to prevent the same thing from ever happening again. Humanity would've been completely back in the stone age but for a Catholic engineer dedicating his life to preserving it. It's pretty much all lost anyway, and the book follows the course of humanity trying to re-achieve the modern world based on what he was able to rescue, long after he and everyone else who understood it was dead. It often presents situations that suppose how a person not familiar with a technology might react. For example, when some monks who had studied Leibowitz's documents figured out how to make a light bulb, one of their brothers was scandalized that they were messing with devilish powers, while others recognized that there was some impressive knowledge that had long been lost.

It's not a decidedly Catholic book, although the author was a member of the church and some issues like euthanasia and seperation of church and state enter into the story line. The Catholic chuch has maintained Apostolic succession for 2,000 years and is basically independent of political boundaries, so if any entity seems capable of enduring a nuclear war, the Catholic church is it, and it is a fitting structure for the plot to make use of.

The church did not exist in the book for the purpose of preserving the works. The church was there, as it was before the war, to try to understand and bring humanity closer to God. One order of the church was founded on the idea that preserving the technology of the past could aid in that, just like Mother Theresa's Sister's of Charity was founded for providing care to the poor.

A big tunnel filled with stuff that makes people sick hardly seems like something that could effectively inspire a religious devotion. At the very least, it would make a poor premise for a religion and an rather uninspiring reason to maintain an order. I think merely attempting to maintain the message that the stuff in the tunnel should be left alone (with further details for any potentially advanced civillization) is going to be the safest way to handle this.

Away from the fictional side of things, while I think some measures should be taken to make it clear that the waste is a hazard, I doubt it will be a problem. First of all, I don't believe a massive collapse of civillization and loss of scientific knowledge will happen. We're unaware of anything like that happening in our past (discounting myths like Atlantis). Secondly, this isn't going to be easily accessible. The Yucca Mountain proposal places the waste something like 1000 feet down. It's also all in a very hard and chemically stable ceramic form, encased in concrete and steel. It will be hard for anybody dumb to get to and get out of the tunnel. Finally, it would not be the first time mankind has discovered harmful things. Bubonic plague comes to mind as one thing we handled in our history.

Very Easy Solution.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Write it in English.

If civilization ever devolves to the point where English is no longer recognized/understood, then guess what?

The cavemen who have replaced us won't be our problem to deal with. We'll all be happily dead.

Seriously, if such a warning is ever needed, to hell with Humanity 2.0. I can see it now:

Ogg (sipping a skull full of blood): Me say, is nice of other human to warn us of glowy shiny.

Eck (nodding his head before picking something out of his hair and eating it): Mmmm. Yes, is pity they stupid and bash selves.

Ogg and Eck: Ahahahahaha!

Well, screw you, future savages - may you all wilt and die from radiation poisoning.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[oudzeeman (684485)]

Thats right - in 10,000 years English will be unchanged!

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, eodcyninga, rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[by Anonymous Coward]

Good for you, you can recite Beowulf.

Oh - wait, you've proved my point. English may change, but the knowledge to decipher it isn't likely to disappear.

Try to keep in mind that there's almost certainly never going to be another 'Dark Ages'. The world's population is a damned sight higher, and the idea that every last person who understands English is just going to disappear off the face of the planet is ludicrous, at best.

We have no Library of Alexandria to burn to the ground - in the US alone, we have libraries in every moderately sized town. Not to mention countless brick and mortar stores. And college campuses. And elementary schools.

And let's not forget the Internet(tm). While reading it on the Internet doesn't make it true, there's a hell of a lot of knowledge that's scattered across the world.

So, where is Rome, that it might fall and plunge the world into the damnable darkness? Rome no longer exists, and that weakpoint of our civilization has been condemned with her.

Re:Very Easy Solution.

[BobNET (119675)]

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, eodcyninga, rym gefrunon hu ða æelingas ellen fremedon.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Just post it on the internet

[by Anonymous Coward]

Then future generations can look it up on the wayback machine.

Tourist signs

[dotslashdot (694478)]

Today's warning sign is tomorrow's tourist attraction. If anything, the warning signs will attract tourists, exposing them to more radiation. "Hey lookie here FuturoBillyBob, these ancient symbols must lead to treasure, because no ancient symbol would ever be a warning, right?" This will inevitably lead to naturally selecting out curious tourists who will die out from radiation poisoning and not pass on the curious gene. The "Where's Waldo" series will plummet in sales, causing its publisher to go out of business, reducing the sales of red and white horizontally striped sweaters, thick glasses, blue pants and brown shoes as well as stocking hats, unleashing an economic chain reaction leading to a global economic collapse that will start nuclear war, resulting in the annihilation of mankind. So don't mess this up, LA!

Well, to crib an idea from Larry Niven ...

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

just make a huge pile of glowing, long-lived nuclear waste, and surround it with a high stone fence. Put signs on that barrier in every language known to Mankind that say "if you cross this fence you will die". Undoubtedly, some people will cross that fence. Niven called this effect "Evolution in action" and that's certainly the case. However, after a few years, the growing pile of radioactive skeletons would serve as a graphic example to future generations about the dangers of radioactive waste, while simultaneously cleaning the gene pool.

The monumental task of warning future generations

[mxpengin (516866)]

An article about the same topic here [doe.gov]. Its foccused on the repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

there should be additional deterrants

[artifex2004 (766107)]

There need to be additional deterrants, in case whoever finds the site later is too stupid, too greedy, or too malevolent to keep away from the site.

This may sound cruel, but I really think some attractively shiny sealed containers with neurotoxins or simple, stable, chemical poisons should be added in another layer under the surface. Perhaps they already plan to do this, and just don't want to make the information public. But would you rather a few people die on the surface, reinforcing the idea that the site is full of death, or let those people dig down and extract some of that waste, before expiring and leaving it out in the open on the surface, later? That would surely end up having a more catastrophic effect on local life.

Re:there should be additional deterrants

[natrius (642724)]

This may sound cruel, but I really think some attractively shiny sealed containers with neurotoxins or simple, stable, chemical poisons should be added in another layer under the surface.

"The people who built this put so much effort into deterring people from entering it. There must be something valuable inside."

What warning is needed?

[NotQuiteReal (608241)]

If civilization has deteriorated to the point that the future critters no longer have the technology to detect the danger, maybe a good old fashioned dose of mutation will kick-start them back on the path!

Plutonium is fuel, not waste

[Zobeid (314469)]

The problem with our current reactors is that they only "burn" a small fraction of their nuclear fuel and leave the rest as waste. With reprocessing and more advanced reactor designs, it's possible to extract far more energy and leave behind waste that's not dangerous for anywhere near as long.

The highly radioactive stuff we're struggling to "entomb forever" at Yucca Mountain is probably the same stuff we'll be scrambling to dig up and use as fuel 50 years from now.

To whom may dig here

[hedley (8715)]

I am Nobutu Bangari and I am in posession of a large consignment of gold
that my people left me some time ago. you are free to dig here to find it but
as a token of good faith I ask that you remit to my swiss bank account a small
fee that we will reimburse to you once the bullion is secured by you.

etc

Just translate that and no-one would dare bother digging.

Hedley

The answer is obvious

[Tablizer (95088)]

A Goatse statue/image! It crosses cultural and language boundaries like nothing a bunch of eggheads in a lab can ever cook up.

COBOL

[Embedded Geek (532893)]

languages die and words once poetic or portentous become the indecipherable marks of a long-forgotten scribbler

Heck, write the damn thing in COBOL. After all, what better language to use than one that refuses to die despite every best effort to kill it?

In the not so distant future...

[TCQuad (537187)]

Skull and crossed bones.

Cool! Pirate treasure!

Re:Nuclear Waste isn't a problem anyway

[fredmosby (545378)]

Natural uranium is 99.3% U238 and 0.7% U235. U235 has a half life of 700 million years. U238 has a half life of 4 billion years. Isotopes with longer half lives are less radioactive. Therefore U238 is far less radioactive than U235.

Depleted uranium is uranium that has had most of the U235 separated out. Making it less radioactive than natural uranium

The average natural uranium content in topsoil is about 2 parts per million(that's without any contamination of any kind). Iraq has more than a trillion tons of topsoil. In the first meter of soil there is already more than two million tons of natural uranium. Adding a few thousand tons of depleted uranium will have no effect on the people of Iraq.

The effects of uranium are well known and have been studied by many countries other than the United States. You are just making up a conspiracy theory because you have no facts on your side.