Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Just write it in every major language. Several languages have survived thousands of years through today, which is how the Rosetta Stone worked.
Why not make a hard-to-break-into storage fascility (secure as in 60-foot concrete walls & 3-foot glass-encased steel plating for the containers)?
Then if 10,000 years from now the civilization is dead, and the surviving humans are at the level of chimps, they will not be able to get into a secure bunker.
If the future humans HAVE the technology to break in, we can surely assume they would have Geiger counters, etc., and know better than play in the radioactive waste
Leave it unmarked and buried deep in an area that has no mineral deposits or anything worth mining. No-one will know, so no-one will want to go snooping for treasure. To get to it, you'll have to know that something's there in the first place. To dig that far you'll need tech. If you've got the tech to drop a shaft down 1000ft, well, you'll have all the gear necessary (and normally, on-hand)to detect radioactivity.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The idea is to preserve humanity at all costs. As far as we know, Earth is the only home for intelligent life - and, perhaps, life at all - in the universe. Is that true? Probably not. But we don't know. I believe the the prospect of a lifeless Earth and, thus, universe (if the waste somehow made it to the ocean, that is possible) is unnerving, and so these steps are taken. Additionally, we don't know if the people of the future will be "cavemen" or not. Suppose civilzation is forced to move underground? They could be just as civilized as, say, 18th century Europe (no ready access to electricity would result in some societal devolution), but still plenty intelligent in other areas like math or psychology. They just wouldn't have access to sophisticated enough tools to detect radiation. The heart of the project is that we don't know what life will be like in 10,000, but we're damn sure going to try to protect it.
In response to the problem of symbols losing their meaning: haven't any of these people read "Contact"? Use prime numbers -it doesn't matter what language you speak, prime numbers are the same to everyone!
Are you kidding? I can't tell.
If I give you the sequence 43, 7, 23, 119, what does that mean? A short story? A warning? A name? Prime numbers aren't a language, they have no inherent semantics.
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.
Skull and crossed bones.
Skull and crossed bones.
Cool! Pirate treasure!
Since there is no language or system of symbols which is instinctively understood by humans, coming up with a symbol or something to write on a sign that a generation of people with no knowledge of our civilization would understand is a lost cause.
The best solution is to just use a well defined symbol, such as the nuclear hazard symbol we use now, and plaster it all over the place. The first time it's encountered, it won't mean anything. But after the 5th guy dies soon after building his hut near one of those signs, the rest would catch on, and the symbol would develop meaning within their civilization. This is how humanity has always learned what is safe and not safe, and where good and bad places to live exist.
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."
Future governments might consider it a deposit of weapon technology for them to use if it is too deadly. Don't make the warning sign attractive.
-- up-modding policy: make a good point, write self-contained.
That's the UNIVERSAL symbol of death. And engraved depictions of people and bones, and stuff.
Look their are two possible scenarios we need to worry about.
In the first scenario we continue our impressive technological progress and civilization does not collapse. In this case simple messages in major world languages and records in other places around the country plus the radioactivity itself will be more than enough to pass this information on to a civilization unimagineably more technically adept than we are. Likely this civilization will have found a much better solution for radioactive disposal (or will just want to reprocess the waste) but even if not we can count on them to be better able to solve the problem of warning people away thatn we are.
In short if we expect civilization to continue to progress we don't need to make warnings that will last for more than 500 years and english will accomplish that.
On the other hand if civilization does collapse and humanity returns to primitive existance it seems a bit silly to worry about this radioactive waste. If societal collapse is a serious worry then we should be putting this effort into caching technology and information to help rebuild civilization not making sure future cave-men avoid cancer. The harm from radioactivity is bad and sucks but it doesn't even register compared to the harms and loss of lifespan from global collapse of civilization. Heck, while some people might die discovering the mysterious deadly waves might even help civilization to rediscover scientific knowledge.
Overall I think a lot of this buisness is just silly. Before going and wasting all this time trying to communicate the danger first figure out in what scenarios it will be important to do that and then ask if in those scenarios these sort of warnings really are the most productive thing we can do to help.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Are you kidding me? A CITY? You do realise that we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every living thing on this planet, right? Destroying a civilisation nowadays doesn't require the destruction of a city by a marauding army. That's far too much effort...
A Biological Weapon is accidentally released. In an attempt to protect the population, nuclear weapons are fired at supposed infection hot-spots. Anarchy errpupts as the deaths from this plague start killing all over the world, spread by the rapidity of travel as allowed by jumbo-jets. The Bio-agent and bombs kill all but 0.01% of the population of the planet and make 75% of the survivors sterile. Remaining Food crops are destroyed as nuclear winter sets in. Simply finding sufficient food is an almost impossible task.
Do you really think keeping the internet running or teaching your kids to read is as important as finding food for them?
It does not take a huge ammount of time for an abandoned house to start to crumble. It does not take long for the freshly unprotected contents of a crumbling house to be destroyed by the environment. It works the same with Library buildings and books.
Language standardisation is largely due to modern communications. Assume the UK and Ireland, the USA and Canada, and Australia and New Zealand, are each cut off from one another - the three major English Speaking parts of the world. Without communications to keep the language similar, local dialogues will develop resulting in harsh accenting. With illiteracy ubiquitous, English turns into Engrish, Australish and Redneck. The written word is no longer recognised. Technology falls back to the dark ages.
Not quite so ludicrous
I've got a much simpler way for society to collapse: run out of oil.
Without oil we have mass starvation, inability to continue with modern medicine, transportation significantly reduced, and we have lost much of the pre-industrial cultural knowledge that would hold society together. Oh, we'll probably settle on a much more primitive level of society, but a dark ages is a-coming, eventually. Isa people gonna die? You bet.
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.
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,
Or here's another thought: just bury it.
Bury it in a pluton of ancient rock, several hundred meters down, as most current proposals suggest. When the site is filled, backfill it with concrete from the top to the bottom of the shaft.
Any society with sufficient resources (technology, tools, time) to cut through that to see what we buried will also undoubtedly have an archaeological record of us, and will probably also have at least a very rudimentary understanding of nuclear physics. (Remember we might regress - think HG Wells.)
In short, they're going to see that we went to a hell of a lot of trouble to dispose of something. That should be enough warning.
Of course, you could also arrange dots into the periodic table. Again, any society capable of getting there will also have discovered the periodicity of chemistry, even if they don't understand our numbers or element names. A few arrows pointing at the swarm of dots representing the constituents of the waste ought to be enough. Pour slabs of something with a table of dots into the concrete at ten foot increments.
All the stuff about communicating with them further than that is B.S. - never ask a humanities major a question when the audience is the scientists of the future - all you need to use is simple science. That's like asking a roofer to perform a heart transplant.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"The idea is to preserve humanity at all costs."
Why, yes it is, so the sensible thing to do is to not make the hideous stuff in the first place, no matter what it costs us now to do something different.
money-mouth
Nuclear power is concentrated heat,that is all it is, a very dangerous and expensive and elaborate way to make some "hot", at a tremendous cost, both in dollars and in time and effort,and for millenia to come. We have a plethora of other heat sources and techniques to make power, we should be concentrating on devloping them and using them. We have practical fusion power, it is called "the sun", abundant sunshine on the earth, perfectly useable. There's a start. Deep underground-more heat, useable. And so on. renewable biofuels, min hydro setups, ocean thermocline temp and mineral/ion differences (automatic current flow), atmosphere/land natural static currents exploitation (tesla action), and whatever, there is a huge list now that taken as a total is quite enough, either as a "works right now-use it" scene or "looks good, throw some R&d at it" level. IF we just did that, and not the other.
If we REALLY were concerned over future humans we wouldn't be poisoning THEIR planet now, would we?
Nuclear "power" was a sap, a stealthy way to develop atomic weapons by the thousands, they had to come up with some marketing gimmick to "sell" it to the plebians, and to hide the true military costs. It has never been profitable in civilian use for power, and here is another example why, no one readily admits to the cost of disposal, and even in todays dollars with todays prices it isn't near the so called "deal" they kept claiming it was going to be for decades. I was just reading some figures the other day (sorry, didn't bookmark the article), compaing costs with coal generated, natural gas, hydro, commercial wind power, etc, and..no big deal, it is not even close to being significantly cheaper, and is actually more expensive than some of the options. granted, they all have drawbacks, all of them, but still..we can do even better. I would class nukes as 'close, but no see-gar, the waste is a deal breaker". It really isn't all that great, except perhaps for submarines. And if you add in disposal and decommissioning power plants and guarding them for generations, it is more costly just in dollars than the other methods of generating electricity by far.
The solution is simply to make bullets and bombs out of it, give it a catchy name like 'Depleted Uranium' instead of 'Radioactive Waste', start an illegal war under false pretences, and dump thousands of tons of it indiscriminately wherever fighting occurs, ensuring large amounts are vaporised and scattered through the atmosphere.
And, since its much easier to supress research into the carcinogenic, mutagenic and heavy-metal toxicity of the radioactive waste when it is part of a military programme, both the enemy, innocent civilians and friendly troops struck by friendly fire or on reconstruction duties can be sacrificed to slow (or rapid, depending on exposure) deaths due to radioactive and toxic particles ingested through exposure to battlegrounds where radioactive munitions have been used, or even the air, water and food chain in contaminated areas, with a clear conscience and plausible deniability.
I think the most easily recognisable warning of radioactive danger for future generations will be the US Flag.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Presumably it meant something very important to those who built it, but now we don't know what that was. Surely this is an excellent summary of the dilemma facing those who want to bury a deadly substance and keep it undisturbed for millenia?
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
If you think a few thousand tons of radioactive waste could kill all the life on Earth, when diluted in the waters of all the world's oceans, then you have left the realm of reason.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Quite wrong. Modern historians have been striving for half a century now to correct the urban myth of a "Dark Ages". Not much changed at all after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The problem is that in 3,000 years the people will start trying to re-intepret the original religious texts and give them meanings that didn't exist before...
You accidentaly added three zeros to that number. And you spelt days wrong.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/