This is not a place of honor • Hacker News Board

Re: This is not a place of honor

#91

Post by crpatino » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:51 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #54

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and success is measured in minimizing that number. The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. Not to attract pilgrims for centuries with mysterious messages and monoliths, who go home to die of unknown sores and blood problems.

> The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now? Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."

> How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now?

1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground.

2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later.

3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the more accessible areas of the site. Ideally, it should not leak out and should not be easily removable by human means. However, the main goal is to have people getting sick by repeated exposure. Nothing that kills right away, but something that leads to reduced life span and/or quality of life.

> Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."

The point is not to issue any overt warning. People will be smart enough to create a story that fits the scenario. Instead of a fortress made to guard unfathomable riches with ancient evils, you want them to think of us like a bunch of idiots that messed with stuff they did not quite grasp and got Darwinized in the process. There will always be 3Ds jobs: dumb, dirty and dangerous. You masquarade as one of such places and people will not give it a second thought.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#92

Post by Wingman4l7 » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:54 AM UTC

Bromskloss wrote: post #90

kaishiro wrote: post #27

Just wanted to say I accidentally fat fingered a downvote while trying to do the opposite. Sorry!

It's annoying that you can't retract your votes. What is the point with that? Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?

There's some karma threshold you have to achieve to get downvote privileges (possibly coupled with a minimum account age, but I don't know for sure).

Re: This is not a place of honor

#93

Post by morgante » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:59 AM UTC

crpatino wrote: post #91

morgante wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most effective way might be, to kill interlopers as immediately and unambiguously as possible. How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now? Also, killing people is a great way to send the message that "something valuable is here."

> How would you make a system which could kill interlopers quickly and reliably 10,000 years from now? 1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground. 2. Put a (much smaller) booby stash in a moderately innaccesible place above. People who make it this far should get the first symptoms within one hour and probably die painfully a few weeks later. 3. Leave smaller traces of the stuff laying around in the m…

> 1. Put the real stash of waste very, very deep underground.

What exactly is the benefit of that?

If you're willing to poison people, just go ahead and poison them.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#94

Post by PhasmaFelis » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:01 AM UTC

Bromskloss wrote: post #90

kaishiro wrote: post #27

Just wanted to say I accidentally fat fingered a downvote while trying to do the opposite. Sorry!

It's annoying that you can't retract your votes. What is the point with that? Also, I can only upvote. Are you given the power to do the opposite once you're seasoned enough or something?

> It's annoying that you can't retract your votes. What is the point with that?

Supposedly it "encourages people to vote thoughtfully," which would be somewhat less silly if the buttons weren't tiny and about a millimeter apart.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#95

Post by ccvannorman » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:02 AM UTC

frostirosti wrote: post #72

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ 99pi did an awesome about this. I thought the most interesting idea was that culture permeated much deeper than anything else. So seed our world with these stories of cats that changed color near radiation or something like that would do best. Since symbols meaning change but oral tradition or old wives tales last much longer.

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

Re: This is not a place of honor

#96

Post by Turing_Machine » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:06 AM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #87

e12e wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very good documentary on the subject. For me it really drove home the idea that current nuclear power comes with too expensive externalities in the form of "keep this stuff safe for 100 000 years". We've never come close to doing something like that as a species. I don't think we ever will.

Actually, after a couple of hundred years it's no more dangerous than the ore from which it came. No one worries about putting up signs around natural uranium ore bodies. Saying that "x has a long half-life" is exactly the same thing as saying "x is not very radioactive". By definition.

Example:

Uranium-238 is the most common isotope of natural uranium. It has a half-life of 4.468 billion years. By the "long half-life = ZOMG! DANGERRRRR!" standard it must be really, really bad, no?

Nope. It's just not very radioactive. You can buy uranium ore on Amazon and even get free shipping (no hazmat or anything).

Uranium was also used to color glass in the early 20th century. While it's not used for that purpose any more (and I probably would not routinely drink out of a uranium glass vessel), it's not considered hazardous. There's a lot of it for sale on eBay.

The really dangerous stuff tends to have a short half-life (= intensely radioactive, again by definition) and an affinity for body tissues. For example, iodine-131 -- half-live 8 days, and gets absorbed by your thyroid gland, or strontium-90 -- half-life about 29 years, and gets absorbed into your bones (it mimics calcium).

The people who convinced you that isotopes with long half-lives are somehow more dangerous? They either didn't know what they were talking about, or they were lying to you.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#97

Post by Merad » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:07 AM UTC

mholt wrote: post #25

Interesting. I know that the idea of launching radioactive waste into the sun or out of the solar system is highly criticized for the potential for things to go wrong (and rightly so), but do the critics really think that the earth -- with humans on it -- will be more reliable in 10,000 years than space flight even 100 years from now?

Getting out of the solar system is incredibly difficult. Well, not necessarily difficult, but expensive. So far we've launched a grand total of five spacecraft that will leave our solar system, with a combined mass of just over 2500 kg. That doesn't even put a dent in the amount of nuclear waste we're talking about.

Somewhat counter intuitively, it's actually a bit more difficult to crash into the sun than to leave the solar system.

There's also the small problem that an explosion on launch could result in a massive area being exposed to highly concentrated radioactive fallout.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#98

Post by joshmarinacci » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:07 AM UTC

While I appreciate the effort they put into it, trying to plan anything for 10,000 years in the future is sheer folly. We have no idea what humanity will be like in 200 years, much less 10,000.

Assuming we are around at all, we'll likely have mastered fusion power (thus no longer creating nuclear waste) or have mastered space flight (thus we can chuck it into the Sun) or have discovered that concentrations of radioactive materials are incredibly useful and not waste at all. A few hundred years ago crude petroleum was a waste product as well.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#99

Post by cloakandswagger » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:08 AM UTC

samplonius wrote: post #48

beefield wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that long before 10 000 years has lapsed, this so called waste is no more considered waste. For example, my understanding is that you can use current waste as a fuel in thorium cycle.

The plan in the US was to enrich waste in breeder reactors, mix in some fresh fuel, and re-use it. It was the nuclear fuel cycle. Lots of resources on the technology. There were two problems. The use of breeder reactors had some proliferation concerns: they can be used to make warheads. Not a big deal in the US, as the US can already make warheads, but harder if you want to export nuclear waste reprocessing to other…

This is something I've always wondered about, especially when confronted by environmentalist camps that oppose nuclear power.

Nuclear fuel recycling seems totally viable, and I imagine nuclear "waste" could be reprocessed and used for as long as there are fissionable products left in it. At which point it would pose minimal danger and save us a boatload on 10,000 year warning signs.

Re: This is not a place of honor

#100

Post by stickfigure » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:08 AM UTC

SCAQTony wrote: post #82

What language(s) did the earth speak 10,000 years ago. The concept is electrifying for will English or any other language written or spoken today even exist? The monument would have to be a "Rosetta Stone(s)" quite obtrusive and large like a pyramid. It would have to be written in multiple present and ancient languages. It would would have to feature math formulas and illustrations etched foot deep into Titanium, car…

I'm going to go out on a limb and surmise that, barring cataclysmic events, 10k years from now the majority of people will speak an english-derived language that is mostly understandable to someone living in the present day. Information transfer in the past was extremely analog, slow-moving, and lossy. Today we are rapidly approaching a "single meme pool" and your tweets are getting archived for eternity, whether you like it or not.

Scratch that. I already can't read twitterspeak. Sigh.