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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I posted this because I'm fascinated by the intersection of architecture and long-term thinking. Example: the sculptures and terrazzo floor at the Hoover Dam [1], the Long Now clock, the Georgia Guidestones [2], the design of the Arctic seed vault [3]. When people design for the very long term they can produce very interesting results.

The scale of the landscape described in the article seemed to match the depth of time involved in the various projects.

[1] http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/brochures/wingedfigures.pd...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault

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Into eternity is a documentary on a long term nuclear waste storage facility in Finland. It is fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)

Thanks. Looks very interesting, and I've just bought a copy from Amazon.

The trailer is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ.

Communicating 10,000 years into the future is certainly a challenge but I just realized that this idea of warning people of a radioactive waste dump is surely not actually worth a huge effort. Being just one place, only a very small number of people will be able to visit it up close where it's dangerous. Isn't that about the same level of danger as the existence of poisonous plants, carnivorous animals, high risk places for lightning strikes, drowning, etc? And massively safer than disease, including genetic disease and inbreeding. Perhaps the best solution is just to not bother warning anyone if our society oneday forgets about it. If it affects enough people, they'll figure out the connection to the site themselves.

What are they going to think about us if we let their archaeologists run into death without even trying to warn them...

"not actually worth a huge effort"

I think I'd argue that if we (human civilisation) are going to create a very long term hazard such as a radioactive waste dump, then we have a moral obligation to the people who it might one day endanger. Even if the number of such people is small, I think we still have a duty to them. We had a choice to build this thing, but they won't have a choice about living with it.

A cynical view is that the effort that went into the WIPP marker design was an effort to pre-empt objections to it being built. Gregory Benford (a physicist and science fiction author) was part of the design team, and he devoted part of a book, Deep Time [1], to his experience. Whatever the ultimate motivation of the US DOE and others, it seems like the design team took the ethical component of their task seriously.

[1] http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html

> a very long term hazard such as a radioactive waste dump

That part is an oxymoron because radioactive waste decays.

If you really want to stack future archaeologist bodies like cordwood, think of industrial waste, or coal plant fly ash waste, or mining waste. The half life of cobalt-60 is about half a decade... in a million years that a pure ingot would be "mostly harmless", because 1 over n to the 200000th means there won't be much Co-60 left in that ingot... For a good laugh assume a 1 Kg ingot how many years until the last atom decays? Sooner than you'd think. On the other hand arsenic, cyanide, and organometallics are forever, in a billion years you could crack open an industrial storage vat and kill everyone at an archaeological dig. Assuming their biochemistry remains the same, and they're not using drones to do the dig...

"That part is an oxymoron because radioactive waste decays."

Its a hazard until the waste decays. If the waste takes a long time to decay then its a long-term hazard. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24k years, for example. Other transuranic isotopes have half-lives measured in hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.

I agree with you about industrial waste, though.

Why does nobody get worked up about unknown civilizations 10,000 years in the future stumbling across a chemical waste dump and getting killed by it? It's very odd that all the emphasis is on nuclear, when nuclear waste dumps will be a tiny fraction of the hazards created by current civilization.

I'm sure your Mother told you 'two wrongs don't make a right' as a child though.

And?

If one guy steals a hat, and another guy murders the storekeeper, it's reasonable to ask why people are more upset about the hat than the murder, and that does not in any way justify the hat.

The concept that you are interested in is known as deep time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time) and there is a book by the same name by Gregory Benford (http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-Millen...) that explores the idea in greater depth.

Thanks! I'm familiar with the term, and I have a copy of the Benford book that I bought when it was published. The sections on the WIPP marker and the Cassini message are particularly interesting.

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