Funny thing is, if we discovered some ancient tomb or burial site with these messages we'd write it off as superstition and open it up anyway. I'm not sure some future civilization would be any different.

I agree. Hiding something and saying "please don't look for it," seems extraordinarily naïve of human nature.

If the threat is widespread human and environmental destruction, I wonder if an additional layer of warning does not need to consist of more constrained lethality. "We're going to show you what this stuff is, you should've really paid attention to the warnings."

"It is a place of evil: all who venture into the pit die in agony within a few days," seems like something that would have more cultural weight. And be trivially re-discoverable at any point. People don't go wandering into lava to see what's below. People wouldn't have stripped the Egyptian tombs if the warnings on the wall consistently came true. Perhaps the best warning of danger is danger.

And then, if the threat model is drilling, it seems to me very unlikely that a future mining civilisation would not understand pictures, maps and diagrams illustrating the content. Is an illustration really more culturally ambiguous than language?

Especially given we know cave paintings from several thousand years ago are relatively intelligible. People hunting bison.

You are totally right. I read that and I felt a chill right up my back telling me, There's cool stuff in there, go get your crowbar!

I thought someone was quoting halo at first.

Anyway, that's probably the reason that energy line is here. But you'd simply check everything you can measure at the time, conclude superstition and continue anyway.

I also particularly liked the idea of covering it with a layer of small boulders to make it unappealing to agriculture. It's like, have you ever heard of New England?

But is that better than leaving things lying around in unmarked caves? People's curiosity might kill them, but the best you can do is warn them.

I used this text as an intro to the classic D&D adventure "Tomb of Horrors" - in my reimagining, the ancient evil at the bottom of the tomb was its civilization's version of nuclear waste.

That sphere of Annihilation.... our first 'total party kill'.

Are there recognized symbols for vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, weight loss reaching near skeletal stages and finally death? Along with some kind of indicators for passage of time that seems more useful at least for high exposure areas.

The issue with that is we can make 0 assumptions about the culture we are trying to communicate with so pictograms aren't a good medium to begin with but let's set that aside. Consider maybe they don't even read left to right or top to bottom so now without carefully making sure they know how time is represented your message can be interpreted as one of resurrection and healing maybe?

Some things, like the passage of the sun in the sky, should be universal. Literally every civilization on Earth is familiar with the concept of a day. Death is a universal concept too.

Of course there is no helping if the future people are especially dismissive of your warnings, but they should suffer from debilitating radiation sickness before they get too far away, so at least the leak would be somewhat contained.

Interesting story idea for a post-apocalyptic agrarian society where some guy wipes out his rival's towns by lightly burying preapocalyptic nuclear waste in the town square to kill off the inhabitants while preaching about curses and gods smiting the inhabitants for their sins.

Yeah time was meant more as just an illustration of how careful we have to be with and pictographic warnings because of how little we can take for granted about the people we are trying to warn.

Right. If you're assuming written language will have entirely changed, barring some earth-wide catastrophe we can (likely) assume a future civilization will understand the IDEA of radiation - making the actual danger and representation of radiation the most important element to communicate.

Why not exploit human evolutionary psychology for the task? A lawnmower warning label would communicate more to future civilizations than a poem translated in several dozen languages. (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VJYAAOSw~xlaqj-d/s-l1600.jpg)

Gory imagery always gets the job done.

Except it doesn't, also because of psychology.

The ancient Egyptians learned this the hard way. Many of their tombs were marked with graphic warnings threatening anyone who disturbed them with various horrible ends. But most of them were robbed regardless, and those that weren't were eventually cracked open by 19th and 20th century archaeologists.

That wasn't because the people violating those tombs didn't understand the warnings (the archaeologists certainly did). It was for two reasons:

1. Some people, like the archaeologists, are going to read the warnings and dismiss them as dumb ancient superstitions; and

2. Other people, like ancient grave robbers, are going to read the warnings and think "Huh. They really want me to stay out of that place. There must be something really valuable in there!"

I wonder if Indiana-Jones-style death traps would successfully show trespassers that the site's builders were serious, or if this would only attract more curiosity.

Most of the best traps can only be sprung once, or at most a few times. So you get the first trespasser, but everyone after that just walks over it.

And honestly, Indiana Jones style traps would never survive 10 years of deferred maintenance, much less 10,000 years. Even simple traps like weak floors over spike filled pits would tend to rot and collapse over the years, especially if you need to build it lightly enough that a single person can trigger it unknowingly.

The only Egyptian tombs that survived to the modern era were the ones so well hidden that nobody had managed to stumble across them.

Also not having a pile of gold at the end of the tunnel might help.

Then again, we can't really know if the future civilization will consider out spent nuclear fuel as a pretty good store of value.

the radiation is the death trap

I was thinking the same. However, the problem is not to avoid people from getting in and causing harm to themselves, but them getting the dangerous stuff out and causing harm to others who actually heeded the warnings. You'd need extremely strong radiation

If you're talking about 10,000 years in the future it may not matter so much since the radioactivity would be much less after so many half lives.

Exactly. You can't rely on the radiation itself as a deterrent.

How about actual corpses arranged so that they look as if they died violently?

Not the exact message, but definitely should give pause to anybody visiting the place in the far future.

"Somebody made that place super dangerous to get into. There must be something really valuable in there!"

I'd go the other way... Give the impression there was something really valuable in there.

Have a main chamber with a solid pedestal in the center. Then, on walls throughout the complex, depict some golden treasure that never existed resting on said pedestal using wall art.

Imagine a scavenger, with a clear vision in their head of what the chamber looks like, arriving in an empty room: "Someone must have already raided this place."

Meanwhile, the nuclear material is under that chamber.

Then don't make the place inaccessible. If you're warning people about a threat, you need to show them where the threat is, not hide it.

I suppose it's because without any context a pictogram like this could be interpreted as a letter or a symbol, not an actual warning. It's not immediately obvious looking at this that it's a human hand being stabbed. Also it doesn't convey that the thing stabbing you is invisible. And if you figure out that the stabbing thing is burried then you might want to dig it out to use as a weapon against others.

"This is where you get poison rocks to put in the rivers of enemies."

Why do we care more about people 10k years into the future than we do about the ones alive today? It's ok for pollution and wars to take lives, why isn't it ok to do so in the future?

Also, why do they assume future visitors will enter through the front door? I thought their intention was to bury the entrance and erase all signs it existed.

I believe a while ago I read a fanfiction where the characters in the story found this place. They didn't understand the warning until they all suffered from ARS.

Was it the MLP fanfiction 'The Writing on the Wall'?[0] I'm not a brony, but it's actually a really good read. It would be better if the finders are real far future preindustrial civilization though, since the ponies have access to magic and should've found out about the danger of radiation BEFORE going in, but eh.

Here's a summary from Tvtropes: >The Writing on the Wall is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic by Horse Voice. Daring Do is asked to help in the excavation of the most ancient tomb known to ponykind - thousands of years older than the oldest known masonry, with incredible craft and skill going into the construction of the impressive edifice. Ancient text in a number of languages, all of them long since lost, is carved into every surface in one of the rooms of the structure nearest to the surface, likely some kind of curse meant to warn away would-be looters. Workers work to breach the walls below, to find the secrets of this ancient place, but perhaps they should have heeded the writing on the wall.

[0] http://www.fimfiction.net/story/42409/the-writing-on-the-wal...

Possibly, yes.

These messages were listed in succession in an art installation as part of the Amsterdam light festival. An intriguingly dark contrast to the rest of the atmosphere.

Doesn't embedding these messages into art defy their very purpose of being a warning?

That list was never intended to be literally used as a warning - think of it as a set of acceptance criteria against which any plan to mark a nuclear waste disposal site must be judged. It needs to communicate those things, unambiguously, across time and culture, for 10000 years.

These messages aren't currently used as warnings, and exhibiting them as art will never diminish the literal message that they convey.

I am just thinking that, if future archeologists discover these warnings / language in frequent association with art, then they will probably not think twice about excavating an actual nuclear disposal site that exhibits them. They will probably think that the warnings were placed there to scare away thieves.

The warnings will not be in English.

I find that irresistible. I want to go check it out!

As if Cesaer, Napoleon, Adolf, Stalin, Atilia, or Ghengis would not immediately rip that open and force slaves/captives to carry it into enemy camps and armies.

Guys, it's not the waste that's the problem here.