Maybe we are thinking of this with too much of a helicopter parents view.
If there was a high exposure death area, and a way to easily send an animal into it, the truth and reality of the danger there would be very easy to convey.
This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
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Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#12I feel like there's something to think about here since we couldn't even keep the page with this information active for a decade and the goal is to keep the actual warning around for 10,000 years.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#13For the curious, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210404 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211025 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948606
We should create something like the olympiad to gather together and re-tell the epic story of danger every few years, rather than building a monument and hoping it still means something on its own.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#14For the curious, 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210404 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211025 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948606
We should create something like the olympiad to gather together and re-tell the epic story of danger every few years, rather than building a monument and hoping it still means something on its own.
Except that won't work in this case. This project was designed to outlive cultures due to the timeframes before radioactive waste becomes safe.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#15Repeating my comment from the last discussion:
This whole thing is an offshoot of antinuclear FUD. If civilization collapses to the point where people no longer realize that radiation is dangerous, then so many people have already died that a few more people dying early from radiation is just background noise.
In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to scare people from digging for it.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#16> We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
For the Level 1 message I suggest a sculpture of two vast and trunkless legs of stone, over a pedestal with the words
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#17[deleted]
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#18No it's just a place where you can find enough Plutonium to destroy your enemies or enough U238 to run your civilization for 1000 years... I used to dream that maybe 2500 years from now the Scientologists and the Mormons would fight it out over Yucca mountain but now it's clear the Scientologists won't last that long.
I could see celebrity participation in Scientology declining, but the actual organization itself has a ton of money and I don't see it going away anytime soon. If anything I see it going underground and pivoting into a full blown crime syndicate if their legal moneymakers aren't sustainable anymore.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#19Repeating my comment from the last discussion: This whole thing is an offshoot of antinuclear FUD. If civilization collapses to the point where people no longer realize that radiation is dangerous, then so many people have already died that a few more people dying early from radiation is just background noise. In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the fu…
> In addition, knowing human nature and our propensity for conspiracy theories, there will be people in the future who think all those signs were put there to dissuade people from finding a massive buried treasure. After all, the phrasing is pretty much what you would expect if someone had buried a treasure and wanted to scare people from digging for it.
I have to agree with this. What if in 1955 America we had discovered the equivalent of these warnings, and hints of a huge artificially constructed underground tunnel complex in the same location as Yucca Mountain, and we thought it was buried artifacts from some more technologically advanced precursor or alien civilization?
Dozens of billions of dollars would have been made available to excavate the site, damn the cost and damn the consequences.
Re: This Place Is Not a Place of Honor (1992)
#20There is a great doc about this place https://youtu.be/qoyKe-HxmFk