• X@piefed.worldEnglish
    6 days

    I can’t help but feel that these messages will have the exact opposite effect on some people.
    (looks around, sees no danger) “ORLY?”
    (starts digging) “tf is this shit?” (dies inexplicably a month later)

    • Sundray@lemmus.orgEnglish
      6 days

      Trying to make the booty unappealing only enhances the desire for booty.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5 days

      Every time I see this topic come up, I start to think: What is the oldest known practical warning sign? Like, Ancient Egyptian is a dead language, we forgot, and then deciphered it. And even then, we could tell the difference between “O ye who dost desecrateth my tomb, let your crops wither in the fields, your daughters be barren and your sons not inherit” and “Caution: Asp pit. Movie Protagonists Only.”

      Forget all the pompous “This is not a place of honor” shit and just write the word “poison” in every known language including the silly made-up ones no one actually speaks like Esperanto, Klingon and Welsh. “Poison Disposal Site” “Le site disposale poissonneaux” “Das PoisondiBosalsite” “El sito disposalo poisono” etc.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4 days

        “Caution: radiation, this invisible poison will destroy your DNA, this poison will destroy all who approach it. Those who do cannot solve the following puzzles ensure their own demise” followed by some d&d ass mechanical puzzle locks that test if someone understands the basics of chemistry from identifying uranium and plutonium on a periodic table to demonstrating an understanding of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation as a byproduct of nuclear fission.

        But you want all that past the big scary “no honor” stuff. You need to scare away every human society from tribes focused on things like honor and taboos to curious scientific societies. To present a puzzle that very clearly states "you will definitely die in this way if you dig without understanding how to solve these puzzles and still making them dig through concrete behind those puzzle doors is a good deterrent.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4 days

          Any mechanical mechanism is out of the question. We’re talking about a message that needs to last 10,000 years. For context, the great pyramid at Giza is about 4,500 years old. You’re not going to build something complicated enough to act as a “solve this riddle and we’ll open the door” that’s going to last for 10,000 years without maintenance.

      • CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.socialEnglish
        4 days

        Everytime this comes up the practical answer is to just not mark it and bury it as deep as you can.

        If your mark it as poison, or honestly and descriptively, people will try to use it as a weapon, or a manhood test, or whatever dumb shit might happen. The patronizing warnings won’t be legible to survivors and they’re, quite frankly, embarassing.

        My money is on descriptive warnings buried with the waste that only get exposed if it’s exposed. You still run the risk of people trying to weaponize it but at least they aren’t being attracted to the site by the warnings themselves.

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5 days

      Yeah, something like “this shit will literally cook you alive just from being near it and you will be condemned to die before you feel it” would get the point across better.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5 days

        The issue they were dealing with was that the material would be hazardous longer than almost any known language has been spoken. We could bury the waste, civilization collapses, and then rebuilds and it would still be hazardous.

        So how do you convey the danger in a way that will stick?
        The messages as written are more the point to convey, rather than literal words.
        The pyramids had big warnings of bad things if you break in, but combined with the decoration we were convinced something special was there.
        So how do we structurally convey "this is not a place of honor”?
        They had notions like covering the site with trash and so on. You don’t bury a king with discarded animal bones, and you don’t pile trash on something you want to honor.

        I think they ultimately decided that the best path was to largely leave it unmarked, but case it in enough hardened concrete that anyone in the future would realize we weren’t totally unsophisticated, and at that layer start putting more directed messages referencing chemical elements.

        Some of their diagrams were pretty good though.

        If you stand on a ledge, it could fall. If you fall, you die. Don’t stand on the ledge.
        Digging here is like standing on a ledge.

        I was also really taken with the notion of genetically engineering cats to glow near radiation, and spreading the belief that glowing cats are dangerous.

        • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
          5 days

          those images could end up like, “alright the ancestors were telling us that to become strong, we must face their biggest fear, the containers of great power they concealed in the mountain”

          Before you know it, they have a coming of age practice where you have to touch a barrel of vitrified waste

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4 days

            Yup, it’s why a big part became “bury it so deep that anyone capable of digging to it will have the concept of nuclear danger, and know we did too”.
            They’re also essentially building a Rosetta stone that can hopefully bridge the gap in understanding.

        • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5 days

          I was also really taken with the notion of genetically engineering cats to glow near radiation, and spreading the belief that glowing cats are dangerous.

          Don’t forget the associated song

    • terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      6 days

      “just saying, if you wanted to bury a bunch of treasure and ensure no one finds it…”

    • SalmiakDragon@feddit.nuEnglish
      5 days

      I definitely read something about researchers concluding that it was best to not put up any signs at all to warn future humans about nuclear waste - just make it hard to access by like covering it in concrete.

    • Neverclear@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5 days

      It would be better to place a trail of imcrementally increasing amounts of radioactive waste leading up to the main disposal site. That way, you have some treatable symptoms first before you open a door and get instant melty face.