9 ms·

Ten Thousand Years

125 points by program 2y ago

dools 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      It's way to late once you start to feel ill from radiation
      - dools 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        For a real life example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident 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 2y ago
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-242-2012-09-10/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-1...
- Vecr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  What would be an universal depiction of increasing entropy?
  - Vecr 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
        2y ago
trhway 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - apeace 2y ago
      > the ones who dare to disrespect the sign The idea discussed in the article is how do we make a sign which can even be understood in 10,000 years? They need to understand we are saying "bad, stay away" in order for them to even know if they disrespect it. There is a risk they think we're saying "this is great, come and see!" > That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society. Sure, it could start something harmful to society. But what if there is no warning at all? They're just as likely to start their own religion which says they should spread this stuff everywhere, far across the planet. Which could render much of Earth uninhabitable. Seems worth the risk of creating a "fear of radiation" religion, to save the Earth and life itself.
      - defrost 2y ago
        > But what if there is no warning at all? Sounds like the situation when the aquatic apes uncovered Shinkolobwe and Oklo.
spondylosaurus 2y ago
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 https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0400/ML040080812.pdf
nektro 2y ago
this episode also ended up in video[1] form in partnership with Vox [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM
grues-dinner 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.
    - foxglacier 2y ago
      Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.
xkef 2y ago
There's a great documentary called "Into Eternity" from 2010 about the Norwegian solution for the nuclear waste problem.
brazzy 2y ago
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 2y ago
  High level nuclear waste gets less radioactive pretty quick. It gets easier further out, not harder.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  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/S0265931X15001058 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.
asimpleusecase 2y ago
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 2y ago
  The British tried that already in '56 and '57 https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46 https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cl... They needed to do much better.
  - szszrk 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        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/ https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/maralinga-rainy-land/
praptak 2y ago
Have enough of such sites and you have prevented establishing a civilization that doesn't care about radiation.
- Vecr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) [2] https://youtu.be/ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA https://youtu.be/ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA
deleted 2y ago
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flerchin 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Which would put it roughly in line with railways, in my head? I.e. sort of mundane pieces of infrastructure still serving a purpose?
- NikkiA 2y ago
  Actually, go a step further, put the warning in X modern languages, and mention that you get a free rosetta stone with every purchase.
rbanffy 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - kaz-inc 2y ago
    The sounds a bit like the book Sphere by Michael Crichton.
- amenhotep 2y ago
  Egyptian tombs and sarcophagi are a apposite example, considering the fate of huge numbers of mummies - we dug them up, ground them down to make paint or medicine, shipped them across the world to unwrap as curiosities at dinner parties. It is tempting to think that human civilisation shows basically the same characteristics as human babies - it will literally put anything it finds in its mouth unless you stop it!
flobosg 2y ago
(2014)
sapphire42 2y ago
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 2y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on It seems like a related phenomenon to "there's an XKCD about that"
  - conartist6 2y ago
    And of course there is an XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3003/ https://xkcd.com/3003/
cyberax 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...
varun_ch 2y ago
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_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Eart...
ge96 2y ago
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?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 00N8 2y ago
  - no way to access it if we develop technology to get clean energy from material that's currently seen as waste - the sun is one of the most expensive destinations in the solar system, in terms of energy budget - underground, on the moon, even Pluto or interstellar space, would be cheaper - very extensive & well engineered shielding would be needed to protect against release in case of a launch mishap, but once you've encapsulated it that thoroughly, it's actually safe to keep basically anywhere, & there's little point actually launching it
  - ge96 2y ago
    That almost seems counterintuitive about the sun, since I would think as a heavy thing, objects would want to fall into it... But I understand orbits are faster near it. Gotta read up on that Moon is an idea far away from unadvanced people Fair point on the last bit
MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
Would someone who knows more than me please weigh in on why we even bother with storing these waste products? Can't we build other things to use the waste products in series until the material is much easier to deal with?

125 points by program 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    It's way to late once you start to feel ill from radiation
    - dools 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        For a real life example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident 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 2y ago

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-242-2012-09-10/page/n15/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/interzone-magazine-242-2012-09-1...

Vecr 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
What would be an universal depiction of increasing entropy?
- Vecr 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      - 2y ago

trhway 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - apeace 2y ago
    > the ones who dare to disrespect the sign The idea discussed in the article is how do we make a sign which can even be understood in 10,000 years? They need to understand we are saying "bad, stay away" in order for them to even know if they disrespect it. There is a risk they think we're saying "this is great, come and see!" > That bound to create a religion/cult and that would probably cause much greater harm to that society. Sure, it could start something harmful to society. But what if there is no warning at all? They're just as likely to start their own religion which says they should spread this stuff everywhere, far across the planet. Which could render much of Earth uninhabitable. Seems worth the risk of creating a "fear of radiation" religion, to save the Earth and life itself.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > But what if there is no warning at all? Sounds like the situation when the aquatic apes uncovered Shinkolobwe and Oklo.

spondylosaurus 2y ago

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 https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0400/ML040080812.pdf

nektro 2y ago

this episode also ended up in video[1] form in partnership with Vox [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEqzt36JEM

grues-dinner 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  The tough part about radiation itself isn't painful so causality can be hard to ascertain.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    Yea it might take many years but if it's a big enough problem, it would surely be obvious that only the cask-contents-munchers are having deformed babies or whatever.

xkef 2y ago

There's a great documentary called "Into Eternity" from 2010 about the Norwegian solution for the nuclear waste problem.

brazzy 2y ago

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 2y ago
High level nuclear waste gets less radioactive pretty quick. It gets easier further out, not harder.
grues-dinner 2y ago
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/S0265931X15001058 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.

asimpleusecase 2y ago

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 2y ago
The British tried that already in '56 and '57 https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46 https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cl... They needed to do much better.
- szszrk 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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/ https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/maralinga-rainy-land/

praptak 2y ago

Have enough of such sites and you have prevented establishing a civilization that doesn't care about radiation.

Vecr 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film) [2] https://youtu.be/ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA https://youtu.be/ayLxB9fV2y4?si=4VoMTuV6aWTzpquA

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flerchin 2y ago

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 2y ago
Which would put it roughly in line with railways, in my head? I.e. sort of mundane pieces of infrastructure still serving a purpose?
NikkiA 2y ago
Actually, go a step further, put the warning in X modern languages, and mention that you get a free rosetta stone with every purchase.

rbanffy 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- kaz-inc 2y ago
  The sounds a bit like the book Sphere by Michael Crichton.
amenhotep 2y ago
Egyptian tombs and sarcophagi are a apposite example, considering the fate of huge numbers of mummies - we dug them up, ground them down to make paint or medicine, shipped them across the world to unwrap as curiosities at dinner parties. It is tempting to think that human civilisation shows basically the same characteristics as human babies - it will literally put anything it finds in its mouth unless you stop it!

flobosg 2y ago

(2014)

sapphire42 2y ago

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 2y ago
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on It seems like a related phenomenon to "there's an XKCD about that"
- conartist6 2y ago
  And of course there is an XKCD: https://xkcd.com/3003/ https://xkcd.com/3003/

cyberax 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-ha...

varun_ch 2y ago

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_Earth_Record_Cover_-_GPN-2000-001978.jpg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Sounds_of_Eart...

ge96 2y ago

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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00N8 2y ago
- no way to access it if we develop technology to get clean energy from material that's currently seen as waste - the sun is one of the most expensive destinations in the solar system, in terms of energy budget - underground, on the moon, even Pluto or interstellar space, would be cheaper - very extensive & well engineered shielding would be needed to protect against release in case of a launch mishap, but once you've encapsulated it that thoroughly, it's actually safe to keep basically anywhere, & there's little point actually launching it
- ge96 2y ago
  That almost seems counterintuitive about the sun, since I would think as a heavy thing, objects would want to fall into it... But I understand orbits are faster near it. Gotta read up on that Moon is an idea far away from unadvanced people Fair point on the last bit

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago

Would someone who knows more than me please weigh in on why we even bother with storing these waste products? Can't we build other things to use the waste products in series until the material is much easier to deal with?