I've sometimes thought that if the intent is a ten-thousand-year warning, the best way to achieve it would be a relatively shallow cave ending in a pit or chamber full of high-level waste vitrified just enough to prevent environmental dispersal.
It seems plausible that over a long enough scale of time, the only reliable way to communicate "everyone who messes with this will die" regardless of language is by ensuring that everyone who messes with it does die.
This is a really clever take. A recurring trope with both fantasy and sci-fi is the ancient / incomprehensible artifact guarded by lethal traps dating back thousands of years.
I haven't typically thought along the lines of "this deadly trap is for your own good" but with radioactive waste it might really be for your own good.
I forget where it was but some radioactive components of medical equipment made it's way into a scrap yard and caused all sorts of problems including long term medical issues and death of several people as well as being in a densely populated area. It feels a bit weird to put a deadly trap into a medical device but there's at least one instance where it would have saved a lot of heartache.
That was the Goiânia accident of 1987. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only such instance, which suggests that existing regulations around the safe decommissioning and disposal of such devices do a more reliable job of preventing accidental dispersal than booby-trapping equipment would - not to mention that this would make maintaining the equipment much more than usually fraught, besides.
And while these incidents aren't frequent, we are talking about very long time frames. It would be interesting if we could somehow look into the future and see how many incidents will occur.
Maintenance is a big concern. Although if we're willing to spend a lot of effort on how to label these things to appear obviously dangerous for long time frames then I think some time can also be spent on long term maintenance.
The whole idea behind the long-term warning project is that it should preserve its semiosis long after every other trace of its originating civilization has ceased to be detectable, so including maintenance in the remit would violate the fundamental premise.
(I don't think the premise is all that well founded, hence my original comment.)
Separately, the material in the Goiânia radiotherapy device was cesium-137, which has about a 30-year half-life, so any sample of given activity today would see that activity halved about 330 times over ten thousand years. I think it would take a much larger sample than typically found in medical equipment to remain hazardous at the end of that time! The long-term warning project has a somewhat narrower domain.
This also makes the waste accessible enough that should a future civilisation be advanced enough, they can possibly extract the waste and better process it to either make it safe or make it usable again.
I expect that historic landfill mining will be a thing in the distant future, where it'll be economically viable to mine old landfills because of the high concentration of valuable plastics and metal resources.
It depends a bit on how far out the civilization is, since even what's now high-level waste will decay over time, but there do exist some speculative reactor designs intended to be powered by reprocessed waste - with output in the single-digit megawatt range, granted, but a megawatt just where you want it is nothing to sneer at.
The thought does appeal, on the whole: archaeologists and engineers working side by side, the former chronicling the deep and long-dead human past through its garbage, before the latter haul it away to melt down and rebuild into a new human future. There's a story in that, I think.
And then the local witch doctors hear about the weird deaths and dig the “curse” up as a weapon[1] against their enemies :) if they are clever enough they make sure that the digging and distributing of it is not done personally but by less valuable people pressed into service (such as old slaves, enemies, etc etc)
1: not a nuclear bomb of course, just as radioactive contamination.
A civilization that primitive won’t have the technology to effectively disperse it to make a real difference.
We don’t even have the technology now. The main reason we don’t use dirty bombs now is that statistically increasing cancer rates decades down the road isn’t really tactically relevant in the moment.
History teaches us that people every possible gains available to them to hurt others.
From salting the earth[1], to gifting smalpox infected blankets[2], through carting away the grain[3], and a literal strong man sneaking literal nuclear waste material into tea to terrorise others[4].
What do you think reading more history will teach me?
Not to invent movie plots, one would hope. If the message cave is in any way to be weaponized, it's much more likely than anything else to be used as a place of execution.
Nah, no marking, period. Anything implying the area is host to some horrible lethal magic will invite warlords and rulers wanting to inflict horrible death on their enemies.
Comments
My first thought as well. Weird colors and randomly thrown corpses of both people and animals could perhaps make a better deterrent?
I've sometimes thought that if the intent is a ten-thousand-year warning, the best way to achieve it would be a relatively shallow cave ending in a pit or chamber full of high-level waste vitrified just enough to prevent environmental dispersal.
It seems plausible that over a long enough scale of time, the only reliable way to communicate "everyone who messes with this will die" regardless of language is by ensuring that everyone who messes with it does die.
This is a really clever take. A recurring trope with both fantasy and sci-fi is the ancient / incomprehensible artifact guarded by lethal traps dating back thousands of years.
I haven't typically thought along the lines of "this deadly trap is for your own good" but with radioactive waste it might really be for your own good.
I forget where it was but some radioactive components of medical equipment made it's way into a scrap yard and caused all sorts of problems including long term medical issues and death of several people as well as being in a densely populated area. It feels a bit weird to put a deadly trap into a medical device but there's at least one instance where it would have saved a lot of heartache.
That was the Goiânia accident of 1987. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only such instance, which suggests that existing regulations around the safe decommissioning and disposal of such devices do a more reliable job of preventing accidental dispersal than booby-trapping equipment would - not to mention that this would make maintaining the equipment much more than usually fraught, besides.
Yep, this was the one I was thinking about.
And while these incidents aren't frequent, we are talking about very long time frames. It would be interesting if we could somehow look into the future and see how many incidents will occur.
Maintenance is a big concern. Although if we're willing to spend a lot of effort on how to label these things to appear obviously dangerous for long time frames then I think some time can also be spent on long term maintenance.
The whole idea behind the long-term warning project is that it should preserve its semiosis long after every other trace of its originating civilization has ceased to be detectable, so including maintenance in the remit would violate the fundamental premise.
(I don't think the premise is all that well founded, hence my original comment.)
Separately, the material in the Goiânia radiotherapy device was cesium-137, which has about a 30-year half-life, so any sample of given activity today would see that activity halved about 330 times over ten thousand years. I think it would take a much larger sample than typically found in medical equipment to remain hazardous at the end of that time! The long-term warning project has a somewhat narrower domain.
This also makes the waste accessible enough that should a future civilisation be advanced enough, they can possibly extract the waste and better process it to either make it safe or make it usable again.
I expect that historic landfill mining will be a thing in the distant future, where it'll be economically viable to mine old landfills because of the high concentration of valuable plastics and metal resources.
It depends a bit on how far out the civilization is, since even what's now high-level waste will decay over time, but there do exist some speculative reactor designs intended to be powered by reprocessed waste - with output in the single-digit megawatt range, granted, but a megawatt just where you want it is nothing to sneer at.
The thought does appeal, on the whole: archaeologists and engineers working side by side, the former chronicling the deep and long-dead human past through its garbage, before the latter haul it away to melt down and rebuild into a new human future. There's a story in that, I think.
And then the local witch doctors hear about the weird deaths and dig the “curse” up as a weapon[1] against their enemies :) if they are clever enough they make sure that the digging and distributing of it is not done personally but by less valuable people pressed into service (such as old slaves, enemies, etc etc)
1: not a nuclear bomb of course, just as radioactive contamination.
A civilization that primitive won’t have the technology to effectively disperse it to make a real difference.
We don’t even have the technology now. The main reason we don’t use dirty bombs now is that statistically increasing cancer rates decades down the road isn’t really tactically relevant in the moment.
Read less fantasy and more history.
History teaches us that people every possible gains available to them to hurt others.
From salting the earth[1], to gifting smalpox infected blankets[2], through carting away the grain[3], and a literal strong man sneaking literal nuclear waste material into tea to terrorise others[4].
What do you think reading more history will teach me?
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth
2: https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...
3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi...
Not to invent movie plots, one would hope. If the message cave is in any way to be weaponized, it's much more likely than anything else to be used as a place of execution.
Nah, no marking, period. Anything implying the area is host to some horrible lethal magic will invite warlords and rulers wanting to inflict horrible death on their enemies.