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This is not a place of honor

wipp.energy.gov

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Re: This is not a place of honor

#191

Post by drdaeman »

felipeerias wrote: post #173
tinco wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like? Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly…

We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

Throughout the 10K years from now on, hazardous atmospheres probably won't be an issue, because of robotics - which wasn't even an imaginable option for the most part of the last two millenia (and now we're rapidly getting good at this stuff, so I somehow doubt Qin Shi Huang's tomb would remain unexplored for long).

Re: This is not a place of honor

#192

Post by emp_zealoth »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #143
ccvannorman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats that change color as a geiger counter? Shut up and take my money!

One of the many discarded methods of solving Dwarf Fortress's cat population problems. We then had to expend many Dwarf-hours and precious resources safely disposing of the irradiated cat remains. The cats were still angry.

Irradiated Cat-splosion. Stuff that nightmares are made of!

Re: This is not a place of honor

#193

Post by refurb »

apsec112 wrote: post #42
refurb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what chemical waste can you not safely dispose of? All organic compounds can be incinerated at a high enough temperate to destroy them (even nerve agents). The only thing I can think of would be metal poisons, but even those can be turned into a form that is less toxic.

Don't think there are any non-toxic forms of mercury or arsenic. There are forms that are less bioavailable, but that's equally true of nuclear waste.

A lot of metals can be converted into insoluble, inert minerals that have low-to-no toxicity. Mercury can be converted to mercury (II) sulfide which is insoluble in water and has no vapor pressure.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_sulfide

Re: This is not a place of honor

#194

Post by kbart »

cturner wrote: post #186
kbart wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geological and political stability are concerns for both marked and un-marked sites, I don't see how marking would solve any of these.

Sure. I should have been clearer in what I wrote. From your earlier post, "put it in the tunnels inside a mountain then blow all entrances up". With the geology, you want a place where you can firmly reason about what's going to happen over a long period of time. Maybe there would be sites where you can do the thing of putting it into mountains. But mountain geology is not necessarily stable. Consider how mountains a…

I didn't mean to downplay the difficulty. I understand that despite marked/un-marked choice it's still very difficult engineering problem, but from the cultural point of view, I believe, it's safer to keep such things hidden away as possible and un-marked to avoid any attention than to hope that the future civilizations will take our advice to stay away.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#195

Post by refurb »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
refurb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what chemical waste can you not safely dispose of? All organic compounds can be incinerated at a high enough temperate to destroy them (even nerve agents). The only thing I can think of would be metal poisons, but even those can be turned into a form that is less toxic.

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Dioxin Has a worst case half life of 50 years. http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/ Lists very small quantities as still quite dangerous to reproduction or causing cancer in exposed subjects. But on a 10,000 year scale I fail to see how it would still be a problem. A few hundred, definitely still risky.

Anything organic can be safely destroyed through careful incineration. PCBs (related to dioxins) need a really high temperate to be destroyed, but can be.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#196

Post by vilhelm_s »

tinco wrote: post #141
orbitingpluto wrote: post #105

I'm never understood this marker system. Graves have been marked in a threatening manner so that they would not be plundered. It doesn't work. The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up. Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate wi…

You're not thinking on the 10.000 year timescale. So you hide it, after 1000 years someone starts digging there and finds it anyway, they see the messages and stop, and then the site is left unhidden for the next 9000 years, what should it look like? Also even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years? And how would you prevent people from using the poison as the potent weapon it clearly…

> even if poisoning people was ethical, how would the poison last 10,000 years?

Leave a fraction of the radioactive unshielded and buried less deeply, to ensure that wannabe grave-robbers die of radiation poisoning before they uncover much of the cache?

Re: This is not a place of honor

#197

Post by lsaferite »

patrickk wrote: post #159
neltnerb wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was pretty interesting that they weren't really talking about making the site "threatening", but making it "repulsive". Poor craftsmanship, ugly terrain, uncomfortable heat, low value materials, etc. Some of their design photos were very different from what I'd assumed, and pretty much immediately triggered my "eww" response. Not intimidating exactly, just uncomfortable.

They attempted to go with "repulsive" for a nuclear waste disposal site in Finland, there's a really cool documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ

Thank you for this. I've only watched a little so far but it's a great documentary.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#198

Post by icebraining »

drdaeman wrote: post #191
felipeerias wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still haven't opened the tomb of the first emperor of China, which has been closed for more than two millennia. One of the main reasons is the presence of enormous amounts of mercury. Whole rivers of it, according to tradition. There's your poison.

Throughout the 10K years from now on, hazardous atmospheres probably won't be an issue, because of robotics - which wasn't even an imaginable option for the most part of the last two millenia (and now we're rapidly getting good at this stuff, so I somehow doubt Qin Shi Huang's tomb would remain unexplored for long).

If you assume we'll have robotics, then this whole question is simplified - they'll probably have some easy way to lookup standard iconography of this era.

This question is hard because you can't assume we'll be a technologically advanced society; for all we know, we'll be living with stone age technology.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#199

Post by Leynos »

Bromskloss wrote: post #177

Do the signs ever get to the point and say that it's about radioactivity?

Yes.

The first written message a visitor to the site would encounter reads:

    DANGER

    POISONOUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE BURRIED HERE

    DO NOT DIG OR DRILL HERE BEFORE 12000 AD.
This message is to be rendered in seven different languages. Subsequent messages explain the situation in more detail.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#200

Post by lsaferite »

antihero wrote: post #158

Surely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication. Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it. You could even tier the messages…

And then some far future warlord-in-making sees "The things here make death" and stops reading and starts digging.
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