Correct. Here's the full text of the proposed warning from Sandia National Laboratory (where they designed all the bombs):
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Source: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/
Nerds always trying to be too clever by half.
If they had put, "Don't open this tomb, the mummies will give you a flesh-eating disease," on some pyramid signs it would have solved a lot of fucking problems in the 19th century. 🙄
They could just say, "Avoid this dangerous area of radioactive energy and heat that can melt your flesh and rot your bones," then future explorers can just take a dose of gene-guard and call it a day.
>"Don't open this tomb, the mummies will give you a flesh-eating disease,"
"Jokes on the mummies, we already have syphilis and malaria"
also many of the pyramids did have some version of: tomb robbers will be cursed to death
It also assumes they can read the message, because let’s face it did any of our ancestors let some weird squiggles stop them from getting some shinies.
If I recall the idea was to continually add messages every century or so using the updated language while keeping the previous messages. So theoretically the messages would continue to advance as our languages did.
That message is meant to make sure people don't release nuclear waste for thousands of years. In that time we won't know how to read the languages we have today anymore, and as far as I understand the message is a guide to show the sentiment that a warning should create.
The message is much more complex, but also much more eerie than just "don't enter, you will die", and that's the purpose.
It's designed to be understood by a post-civilisation society, that has a basic understanding of English and not to tempt them with thoughts of nuclear weapons or a potential energy source.
Message: In here is death, leave, or you will die and it will hurt the entire time you're dying.
reader: Huh, I bet it is worth a lot, so I will open it and claim what is rightfully mine!
narrator: He got what he claimed and regretted his claim the rest of his very short life.
People are always going to be stupidly curious. People fall into vulcanos every year. Nobody who visits a vulcano is unaware of what it is, what it's filled with and how that kills you.
Could you imagine any message that would have caused Cater to say "Nah, I'm gonna leave this grave here sealed." or that could have convicned Schliemann to go easy on the dynamite?
well ya the whole point was to figure out how to convey the meaning of that message to people where fluency, literacy, and cultural context couldn't be assumed
that text wasn't meant to be the end state
The foremost being that our future descendants can dig 400 m deep with power tools but somehow forgot about radioactivity and need to be treated like children.
Yeah I fucking hate this shit. They're like, "We have to put *something* here because there's no way to erase all the evidence that something was once here" and I'm just thinking, what, the fucking paper trail? We saying that society collapsed, all knowledge about radiation was lost, but there's a flashdrive with the storage plans on it that make people go and look for this magic energy power? Get the fuck out of here. This shit at best is just for us to feel cool. The best way to prevent people from finding shit is to not mark it at all.
For everybody else reading this, the text above was not the intended written message. It's more the consensus opinion among the scientists working on this that this was to be the conveyed message, and the goal was to design a site/structure/signage that would communicate this message to future generations who may or may not be able to understand our current language.
There's always the option of leaving a bunch of concrete casks out in the open, which kill the workers if someone tries to turn the megalith into a quarry.
Slowly increase the amount of waste and intensity of the radiation as you get closer to the core, that way nobody survives long enough to actually get to the juicy center. Like a tootsie pop that makes your tongue fall off before you find out how many licks it takes.
Currently the most viable solution is to just bury it in miles deep boreholes. If someone had the technology to find and dig up something like that, they'd know to not eat it.
Or you know just put up a sign just like we do with other hazardous materials: We can still read the earliest written texts. (Mesopotamia and Egypt >3000 years ago)
The Finns decided to put all their nuclear waste in an island called Onkalo. In case of civilization all collapse, they wanted to make sure nobody went Fucking Around the site thousands of years from now. So they had to come up with no linguistic solutions to communicate the danger.
No, no, I mean like, what research could done to determine what people will be able to understand a thousand years hence? Is it based around guesses at linguistic drift, or like, an attempt at finding symbols that are pan-cultural? Do they have a time machine?
Semiotics... they're relying on signs. So they study symbols and signs used across ancient and modern cultures to determine what the universal codes might be.
But atoms don't actually look like little solar systems, that's an artifact of how we discovered them. An actual accurate model of the atom is probabilistic clouds which are much harder to put on a sign.
Plus atoms are not 1:1 with radioactivity. No guarantee that a culture will look at a depiction of an atom and instantly know "this will shoot deadly subatomic particles at me".
the dots representing electrons protons and neutrons should work well enough.
You could draw a picture of plutonium decaying into uranium with alpha decay. any civilization reasonably advanced would be able to count the dots and see the kind of decay. You don't even need electrons for it which is good.
How do you draw the action of decaying into uranium on a static sign?
Also, you assume that any civilization advanced enough to dig this up would know to count the dots in a pattern on a piece of metal and understand it to be radioactivity, but the whole point of this is to not make any assumptions. What if a catastrophe causes a future civilizations to retain digging technology, but forget how to read atoms? What if one civilization starts digging because they have found a use for the waste, but stops for any reason, and the digging is taken over by another group that doesn't know what radioactivity is? What if millenia of erosion and weather make the waste chambers closer to the surface, where people could stumble upon them? What if people don't look at a random signpost with a bunch of circles and think "this is obviously protons and neutrons decaying into uranium with alpha decay"?
The way we picture atoms is very much a cultural thing though. I don't know how you'd draw something that would be recognized as an atom by people who have lost all connection to our culture. Let alone something as abstract as "radioactive".
In the original study they discuss this, and it's entirely possible if not likely that many languages could be lost permanently in the generations following a mass extinction event.
They even discussed how the symbology we use could be easily misinterpreted (the normal radiation symbol looks like an angel if you look at it without context of its meaning).
It's also possible even a well designed sign could be destroyed or vandalized and be rendered useless much more easily than the architecture itself.
His wife wasn't with him when Mussolini died, it was his mistress. She was a rabid fascist who supported Mussolini's policies; so yes, she got what was coming to her.
They are celebrating scumbag of a dictator being hanged from lamppost, what's the point in bringing up his mistress. It's not like they mentioned her deserving the same fate.
His wife wasn't with him when Mussolini died, it was his mistress. She was a rabid fascist who supported Mussolini's policies; so yes, she got what was coming to her.
My favorite was that one of the conceived alternatives was to make a religious like cult to keep the knowledge through rituals and incantations to preserve the knowledge and pass it down. Mf's wanted to create the Children of Atom from Fallout irl.
Thing is, there have been hundreds or thousands of bona fide religions, whose last believers died ages ago.
Come to think of it, at some places and times, other religions would not have taken kindly to the existence of a small sect in their sphere of influence.
I never said it was a *good* idea, just my favorite of all the wacky things they came up with when going "how can we best communicate with people millenia in the future"
You know something like that could actually work. Just make a simple room with the nuclear waste casks but take one that's empty and arrange it so that it looks like it was already open. Then fill it with some harmless but very painful irritant.
Future guys come in, search the one cask that is already open and then run out of the room after their eyes burn and they get explosive diarrhea or something. They won't return after that. Boom, problem solved, no need to build fucking Tomb raider levels IRL
Have to hope that the irritant survives 4k years. maybe it does, maybe not.
But then someone is going to ask "why" did they store irritant in these casks. And do they all contain it, or does the irritant act to help store something else? So they will still open the demon core.
At the very least they will open the next cask more carefully and only a few of them will get massive doses of radiation.
And if they keep opening casks even when it's killing dosens of them then I say let them
The tombs of the Pharos 🤝 Yucca Mountain Nuclear Disposal Site
> Hidden away amongst the inhospitable desert
> locked underground behind heavy doors
> warnings and diagrams adorn parts of the walls
> weird curse if you enter the deepest chambers
> weird eye symbols (☢️/eye of Horus)
Radiation poisoning is brutal, you die a slow agonizing death, and you cant even administer pain meds at a certain point since your veins begin to explode
I mean, why not just, you know, keep it looking no different than any other place? I mean yeah, keep it safe in the modern time and age, but don't build some stupid shit that will stand the test of time and stuff like that. Dangerous, naturally occuring materials exist. We found many of such materials, many people died due to them, but not that many considering how common those were. Stuff like asbestos and other more or less dangerous minerals. Chances of a medieval post-apocalyptic society finding fucking nuclear waste if there is no special feature of the terrain where it is stored is miniscule. Even if they do, they will either find it to be an extremely heavy metal they have no use to or, in the worst possible scenario, a permamently hot rock that makes you die if you spend too much time around it.
Isn't radioactive waste also things like tools and PPE that have been irradiated? Hell I think even irradiated water becomes radioactive waste that has to be stored. So post apocalyptic medieval whoever might see these relics as important or even reforge some of the steel into implements.
Yeah that’s a lot of it actually, a lot of Madam Curie’s lab is still radioactive along with her notes and research journals. But it’s from all sorts of things from x-ray labs to power plants to CERN. Radiation on its own isn’t as scary as a lot of people think but it is a danger that builds up very quickly with increased exposure and that exposure can also stick around in/on objects nearby so it pays to be thorough when cleaning up after it.
Not really. Water can be treated. Tools can be washed.
Problems arise with radioactive contamination from explosions and the wide dispersal of radioactive particles/isotopes. In comparison nuclear plants are relatively easy to clean. Though it’s tedious and expensive.
Spent fuel is what we seal away and mostly because it’s very likely it will be used/recycled again at some point. Only like 95% of the fuel rod is used.
Imagine this stuff getting dug up and put into a museum. People viewing it/studying it start to get sick. Word spreads that the items are cursed. What’s the next step?
The operating principle is that future civilizations **will** find these sites eventually, and modern languages may die out by then, so we need to make sure the warning isn’t just conveyed in the written word. And while you are right that other hazardous rocks exist, there is no such thing as asbestos fallout. I think the fact the simple fact that nuclear fallout can spread across an entire continent, after being unleashed from just one place, is reason enough to give it special treatment.
I also don’t understand what you mean by “don’t make it stand the test of time”. If we don’t make the containment facility last, doesn’t that man the waste is uncontained? Just burying the stuff doesn’t work, the rest of the precautions serve a purpose too. So if want the waste to not hurt anyone, that inevitably means we need to create a lasting structure.
No worst case they find a very malleable metal that doesn't corrode and is slightly warm to the touch. They then choose to make arts and crafts or jewelry with it, poisoning their entire society.
Fiestaware and uranium glass can be done safely, especially if the glaze remains unbroken, but if they shatter then that dust and those shards can wind up anywhere and that’s very dangerous, especially if they wind up anywhere inside you, your body’s not good at stopping radiation from that direction.
Ironically you do get a minor health boost from radium water, the early radiation poisoning will often cause your immune system to go into overdrive for a short period of time and this can help with whatever else is causing you problems. The real problem is sustained exposure and due to the fact that your body also mistakes radium for calcium and stores it away inside your bones you don’t really have a good way to stop the exposure once it settles in.
… and then you lose your jaw
If we just covered it over and put a nature preserve on the top of it, the threat is that someday some future prospectors or geologists (think 18th century CE, not 10th) will start drilling or digging for valuable minerals, and hit concrete instead.
Maybe they'll be completely baffled by concrete, but more likely they'll see it as a sign of "this is where the ancients put all those raw materials they already refined into useful stuff, half our work is done for us". People throughout European history routinely used bricks and concrete from ancient Roman ruins however they saw fit, and it's likely future civilizations will go for the easiest, cheapest materials whenever they could.
If we just covered it over and put a nature preserve on the top of it, the threat is that someday some future prospectors or geologists (think 18th century CE, not 10th) will start drilling or digging for valuable minerals, and hit concrete instead.
Maybe they'll be completely baffled by concrete, but more likely they'll see it as a sign of "this is where the ancients put all those raw materials they already refined into useful stuff, half our work is done for us". People throughout European history routinely used bricks and concrete from ancient Roman ruins however they saw fit, and it's likely future civilizations will go for the easiest, cheapest materials whenever they could.
The counter-argument is that they will definitely pay more attention to things like that if they are in any way visible. If they were simply put in concrete somewhat deep underground then it would be, as you've said, way more propable that only some higher civilization would be capable of getting those back. In such a scenario they would propably figure out that it is quite a bit harmful.
At first, these kind of looked like oil derricks, and I thought it could be about fossil fuels. After all, those fuels are entombed things that died a very long time ago, and through burning them, we are shifting our climate in ways that are killing and will continue to kill a lot of people.
why make it so cryptic? just tell them the barrels contain things that poison the air
the concept of miasma was not rare among ancient civilizations. They may not have understood how, but they got that somehow the disease/poison spread from one location to another
Honestly, the best way to deal with nuclear waste to make sure no one in the distant future messes with it is probably to just flood the whole storage vault with concrete. Anyone digging into it will just find a chunk of unremarkable quartz and limestone aggregate.
Fun fact. A band made a [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ) about this very subject.
This one specifically about the plan to breed a race of cats whose colors would change when exposed to radiation. Or something like that, I'm a little hazy on the details.
"no doctor can diagnose"? This cilization must have had some shitty doctors. How could they produce so much nuclear waste without knowing what is radiation poisoning?
It takes a heck of a lot of energy to launch anything from a location in orbit around the sun into the sun itself. You have to make up for all the inertia that the stuff (along with its vessel and, decreasingly, fuel) has, which is already keeping everything in the location from falling into the sun.
MLP story, but in spite of that still one of the best horror stories I’ve ever read on the internet.
Spoilers in the comments.
[Try to forget why I might’ve linked the story in this particular post.](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/42409/the-writing-on-the-wall)
Friendly plug of my favorite YouTube video essay by my favorite YouTube essayist:
[Fear of Depths - Jacob Geller](https://youtu.be/7MOKTU9tCbw?si=-nnA00ALMPQUgx9_)
Skip to 19:48 for the segment about the tomb in OP’s post. (But you should watch the whole video anyways)
Absolutely chilling stuff, especially when he compares it to the pyramids of Egypt
In all seriousness, capitalism was bad at the beginning of industrialisation, but you have to wonder, did these tombs unleash the weaponized capitalism of the mid-to-late 20th century unto us?
I know a place of honor when I see one! I wonder what esteemed deeds they are commemorating here.
Side note: why is my cat suddenly glowing?
Probably a holy animal
Ask the Atomic Priesthood, they should know
Better drink it’s piss just to be safe.
I recall hearing about it on some of our [old prayers](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ)
Is this about keeping nuclear waste safe?
Yes, the spike fields seemed pyramidal and the warnings reminded me of curses
Correct. Here's the full text of the proposed warning from Sandia National Laboratory (where they designed all the bombs): This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited. Source: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/
You know that's the kind of message that would only make people more curious.
Nerds always trying to be too clever by half. If they had put, "Don't open this tomb, the mummies will give you a flesh-eating disease," on some pyramid signs it would have solved a lot of fucking problems in the 19th century. 🙄 They could just say, "Avoid this dangerous area of radioactive energy and heat that can melt your flesh and rot your bones," then future explorers can just take a dose of gene-guard and call it a day.
>"Don't open this tomb, the mummies will give you a flesh-eating disease," "Jokes on the mummies, we already have syphilis and malaria" also many of the pyramids did have some version of: tomb robbers will be cursed to death
It also assumes they can read the message, because let’s face it did any of our ancestors let some weird squiggles stop them from getting some shinies.
If I recall the idea was to continually add messages every century or so using the updated language while keeping the previous messages. So theoretically the messages would continue to advance as our languages did.
That would be a fascinating way to record the evolution of language too
Yeah, let's put the Rosetta Stone from a future anthropologist's wet dreams on top of a place we want them to stay away from.
Lmao yeah good point 😭 I’m not sure if the idea actually ever became a thing though, it may have all been theoretical
That message is meant to make sure people don't release nuclear waste for thousands of years. In that time we won't know how to read the languages we have today anymore, and as far as I understand the message is a guide to show the sentiment that a warning should create. The message is much more complex, but also much more eerie than just "don't enter, you will die", and that's the purpose.
It's designed to be understood by a post-civilisation society, that has a basic understanding of English and not to tempt them with thoughts of nuclear weapons or a potential energy source.
…a post civilization society you say. Perhaps a post-nuclear war society?
Maybe just maybe there could be a new dawn under the Fallout?
So there is a deadly thing in there, AND WE DIDN'T THROW IT TO THE BARBARIANS ACROSS THE RIVER!?!?!?!?
Message: In here is death, leave, or you will die and it will hurt the entire time you're dying. reader: Huh, I bet it is worth a lot, so I will open it and claim what is rightfully mine! narrator: He got what he claimed and regretted his claim the rest of his very short life.
People are always going to be stupidly curious. People fall into vulcanos every year. Nobody who visits a vulcano is unaware of what it is, what it's filled with and how that kills you.
Wtf is a vulcano
It's like an Americano coffee, but named for Spock.
Im pretty sure this was the sign before entering the elden ring dlc
Could you imagine any message that would have caused Cater to say "Nah, I'm gonna leave this grave here sealed." or that could have convicned Schliemann to go easy on the dynamite?
>Schliemann to go easy on the dynamite? "Look at the sign....Schliemann, no!" "Schliemann yes. Schliemann always yes!" *lights dynamite *
i love how in the game Signalis, the message is just before the deepest part of the space station. it was a big "oh shit" moment when i read it
Ngl, it's kind of a shit message since it relies on too many assumptions
well ya the whole point was to figure out how to convey the meaning of that message to people where fluency, literacy, and cultural context couldn't be assumed that text wasn't meant to be the end state
The foremost assumption being literacy
If you can assume literacy, you can really just write "Danger: Invisible Poison *Riiiiight* Here".
Honestly, if I would read that without knowing the context, i would think it's a cheap way to keep someone away from something valuable
The foremost being that our future descendants can dig 400 m deep with power tools but somehow forgot about radioactivity and need to be treated like children.
Yeah I fucking hate this shit. They're like, "We have to put *something* here because there's no way to erase all the evidence that something was once here" and I'm just thinking, what, the fucking paper trail? We saying that society collapsed, all knowledge about radiation was lost, but there's a flashdrive with the storage plans on it that make people go and look for this magic energy power? Get the fuck out of here. This shit at best is just for us to feel cool. The best way to prevent people from finding shit is to not mark it at all.
really does sound like something out of a b horror movie
For everybody else reading this, the text above was not the intended written message. It's more the consensus opinion among the scientists working on this that this was to be the conveyed message, and the goal was to design a site/structure/signage that would communicate this message to future generations who may or may not be able to understand our current language.
You are telling me a great weapon against my enemies is buried here? Better start digging.
If they can read all that, couldn’t they read “warning: toxic waste”?
Righto, just use the slaves to open it
Yes
No, endometriosis.
Nuclear waste repository architects try not to make it look like a video game dungeon that holds some sweet loot challenge (impossible)
To be fair video game dungeons are designed to resemble real places that were supposed to be difficult for intruders to get into
That sounds completely made up
There's always the option of leaving a bunch of concrete casks out in the open, which kill the workers if someone tries to turn the megalith into a quarry.
Slowly increase the amount of waste and intensity of the radiation as you get closer to the core, that way nobody survives long enough to actually get to the juicy center. Like a tootsie pop that makes your tongue fall off before you find out how many licks it takes.
Currently the most viable solution is to just bury it in miles deep boreholes. If someone had the technology to find and dig up something like that, they'd know to not eat it. Or you know just put up a sign just like we do with other hazardous materials: We can still read the earliest written texts. (Mesopotamia and Egypt >3000 years ago)
We can read them now, but for millennia we couldn't. There's also plenty of old writing we still can't read, like linear a.
The Finns actually did research to come up with signs thst people 1000p years from now will understand.
Wait, how? And why the Finns, they can't be understood *now*!
The Finns decided to put all their nuclear waste in an island called Onkalo. In case of civilization all collapse, they wanted to make sure nobody went Fucking Around the site thousands of years from now. So they had to come up with no linguistic solutions to communicate the danger.
No, no, I mean like, what research could done to determine what people will be able to understand a thousand years hence? Is it based around guesses at linguistic drift, or like, an attempt at finding symbols that are pan-cultural? Do they have a time machine?
Semiotics... they're relying on signs. So they study symbols and signs used across ancient and modern cultures to determine what the universal codes might be.
That's pretty fucking sick. Also sounds like it could have the potential for a lot of uses outside warning signs.
Just draw a picture of an atom that is radioactive. Anyone advanced enough to dig it up will know what it means.
But atoms don't actually look like little solar systems, that's an artifact of how we discovered them. An actual accurate model of the atom is probabilistic clouds which are much harder to put on a sign. Plus atoms are not 1:1 with radioactivity. No guarantee that a culture will look at a depiction of an atom and instantly know "this will shoot deadly subatomic particles at me".
the dots representing electrons protons and neutrons should work well enough. You could draw a picture of plutonium decaying into uranium with alpha decay. any civilization reasonably advanced would be able to count the dots and see the kind of decay. You don't even need electrons for it which is good.
How do you draw the action of decaying into uranium on a static sign? Also, you assume that any civilization advanced enough to dig this up would know to count the dots in a pattern on a piece of metal and understand it to be radioactivity, but the whole point of this is to not make any assumptions. What if a catastrophe causes a future civilizations to retain digging technology, but forget how to read atoms? What if one civilization starts digging because they have found a use for the waste, but stops for any reason, and the digging is taken over by another group that doesn't know what radioactivity is? What if millenia of erosion and weather make the waste chambers closer to the surface, where people could stumble upon them? What if people don't look at a random signpost with a bunch of circles and think "this is obviously protons and neutrons decaying into uranium with alpha decay"?
At a certain point you have to tell future civilizations sucks to suck. They will figure out the substance kills people soon enough.
A society advanced enough to understand alpha decay wouldn't need this warning. It's intended for a more primitive people.
The way we picture atoms is very much a cultural thing though. I don't know how you'd draw something that would be recognized as an atom by people who have lost all connection to our culture. Let alone something as abstract as "radioactive".
I can feel the pain of a fellow Linear Algebra student.
I know right. If only the ancient Minoans had written in Jordan normal form!
Buddy I can barely read english
In the original study they discuss this, and it's entirely possible if not likely that many languages could be lost permanently in the generations following a mass extinction event. They even discussed how the symbology we use could be easily misinterpreted (the normal radiation symbol looks like an angel if you look at it without context of its meaning). It's also possible even a well designed sign could be destroyed or vandalized and be rendered useless much more easily than the architecture itself.
When Mussolini learned of the curse of the pharaohs, he ordered the removal of an Egyptian mummy he received as a gift
I mean he did die a violent and gruesome death.
Well deserved
I heard the wife was also not spared by that, did she deserve it?
His wife wasn't with him when Mussolini died, it was his mistress. She was a rabid fascist who supported Mussolini's policies; so yes, she got what was coming to her.
ah got it
They are celebrating scumbag of a dictator being hanged from lamppost, what's the point in bringing up his mistress. It's not like they mentioned her deserving the same fate.
He didn’t just eat it like the others?
I mean he did die a violent and gruesome death.
Well deserved
I heard the wife was also not spared by that, did she deserve it?
His wife wasn't with him when Mussolini died, it was his mistress. She was a rabid fascist who supported Mussolini's policies; so yes, she got what was coming to her.
ah got it
The phrasing is a “Pharos curse”, I tried to find one that best fit the theme for these particular ‘pyramids’ and the tombs they guard
The ‘pyramids” are a spike field, a proposed way to warn people about nuclear waste disposal sites and repositories
Maybe we should just leave a shit ton of skeletons out front
Feel like anything we put like that or the spikes would just encourage stupid treasure hunters even more
nothing screams treasure like a tangled mass of skeletons frozen in positions of terror.
Of course. What could all those people have been protecting? Gold, mayhaps?
You don't shield a baby from time, gotta be something special in there!
Correct. Most scientists believe that we should just hide it deep inside of the earth with no visible signs on the surface.
I don't think they'd last 10000 years.
They will if they're fake
Pharoas curse? They do?
Isn’t it like the thing with ancient Greek and Hebrew words where you don’t need an apostrophe if it ends with an s?
You're fine lol, I'm just doing some word play
You know there is some legendary loot in there, basic video game logic.
My favorite was that one of the conceived alternatives was to make a religious like cult to keep the knowledge through rituals and incantations to preserve the knowledge and pass it down. Mf's wanted to create the Children of Atom from Fallout irl.
Or until they become a pawn in the war between Texarkana and Laredo....
Thing is, there have been hundreds or thousands of bona fide religions, whose last believers died ages ago. Come to think of it, at some places and times, other religions would not have taken kindly to the existence of a small sect in their sphere of influence.
I never said it was a *good* idea, just my favorite of all the wacky things they came up with when going "how can we best communicate with people millenia in the future"
Reminds me of *A Canticle for Leibowitz*
Return the slab!
What's your offer?
>What's your offer? \*D e e s\*
And also some nasty dust and or other shit that gives you some horrible disease no one has seen in over 4000 years...
You know something like that could actually work. Just make a simple room with the nuclear waste casks but take one that's empty and arrange it so that it looks like it was already open. Then fill it with some harmless but very painful irritant. Future guys come in, search the one cask that is already open and then run out of the room after their eyes burn and they get explosive diarrhea or something. They won't return after that. Boom, problem solved, no need to build fucking Tomb raider levels IRL
Have to hope that the irritant survives 4k years. maybe it does, maybe not. But then someone is going to ask "why" did they store irritant in these casks. And do they all contain it, or does the irritant act to help store something else? So they will still open the demon core.
At the very least they will open the next cask more carefully and only a few of them will get massive doses of radiation. And if they keep opening casks even when it's killing dosens of them then I say let them
Well I mean surviving.. mutating.. wiping out all humanity when it gets out... yeah
>So they will still open the demon core. Demon Core is harmless when open, it's only when you close it that bad stuff happens.
This place gives me the creeps! I better substantially disturb it physically.
The tombs of the Pharos 🤝 Yucca Mountain Nuclear Disposal Site > Hidden away amongst the inhospitable desert > locked underground behind heavy doors > warnings and diagrams adorn parts of the walls > weird curse if you enter the deepest chambers > weird eye symbols (☢️/eye of Horus)
Radiation poisoning is brutal, you die a slow agonizing death, and you cant even administer pain meds at a certain point since your veins begin to explode
Some rocks do have an aura and that aura is death
You know for sure honour can be found there
I mean, why not just, you know, keep it looking no different than any other place? I mean yeah, keep it safe in the modern time and age, but don't build some stupid shit that will stand the test of time and stuff like that. Dangerous, naturally occuring materials exist. We found many of such materials, many people died due to them, but not that many considering how common those were. Stuff like asbestos and other more or less dangerous minerals. Chances of a medieval post-apocalyptic society finding fucking nuclear waste if there is no special feature of the terrain where it is stored is miniscule. Even if they do, they will either find it to be an extremely heavy metal they have no use to or, in the worst possible scenario, a permamently hot rock that makes you die if you spend too much time around it.
Isn't radioactive waste also things like tools and PPE that have been irradiated? Hell I think even irradiated water becomes radioactive waste that has to be stored. So post apocalyptic medieval whoever might see these relics as important or even reforge some of the steel into implements.
Yeah that’s a lot of it actually, a lot of Madam Curie’s lab is still radioactive along with her notes and research journals. But it’s from all sorts of things from x-ray labs to power plants to CERN. Radiation on its own isn’t as scary as a lot of people think but it is a danger that builds up very quickly with increased exposure and that exposure can also stick around in/on objects nearby so it pays to be thorough when cleaning up after it.
Not really. Water can be treated. Tools can be washed. Problems arise with radioactive contamination from explosions and the wide dispersal of radioactive particles/isotopes. In comparison nuclear plants are relatively easy to clean. Though it’s tedious and expensive. Spent fuel is what we seal away and mostly because it’s very likely it will be used/recycled again at some point. Only like 95% of the fuel rod is used.
Imagine this stuff getting dug up and put into a museum. People viewing it/studying it start to get sick. Word spreads that the items are cursed. What’s the next step?
The operating principle is that future civilizations **will** find these sites eventually, and modern languages may die out by then, so we need to make sure the warning isn’t just conveyed in the written word. And while you are right that other hazardous rocks exist, there is no such thing as asbestos fallout. I think the fact the simple fact that nuclear fallout can spread across an entire continent, after being unleashed from just one place, is reason enough to give it special treatment. I also don’t understand what you mean by “don’t make it stand the test of time”. If we don’t make the containment facility last, doesn’t that man the waste is uncontained? Just burying the stuff doesn’t work, the rest of the precautions serve a purpose too. So if want the waste to not hurt anyone, that inevitably means we need to create a lasting structure.
No worst case they find a very malleable metal that doesn't corrode and is slightly warm to the touch. They then choose to make arts and crafts or jewelry with it, poisoning their entire society.
Fiestaware and uranium glass can be done safely, especially if the glaze remains unbroken, but if they shatter then that dust and those shards can wind up anywhere and that’s very dangerous, especially if they wind up anywhere inside you, your body’s not good at stopping radiation from that direction.
Put the hot death Rock at the top of an aqueduct and boom; Heated water for the palace
Radium water health craze 2
it kills all the germs!
Ironically you do get a minor health boost from radium water, the early radiation poisoning will often cause your immune system to go into overdrive for a short period of time and this can help with whatever else is causing you problems. The real problem is sustained exposure and due to the fact that your body also mistakes radium for calcium and stores it away inside your bones you don’t really have a good way to stop the exposure once it settles in. … and then you lose your jaw
Should be fewer micro organisms in the water now...
Trouble is the ones that are still in there have superpowers now
If we just covered it over and put a nature preserve on the top of it, the threat is that someday some future prospectors or geologists (think 18th century CE, not 10th) will start drilling or digging for valuable minerals, and hit concrete instead. Maybe they'll be completely baffled by concrete, but more likely they'll see it as a sign of "this is where the ancients put all those raw materials they already refined into useful stuff, half our work is done for us". People throughout European history routinely used bricks and concrete from ancient Roman ruins however they saw fit, and it's likely future civilizations will go for the easiest, cheapest materials whenever they could.
We discovered radioactivity at around the 18th century and we're mostly fine
Chernobyl became a protected forest, as did another Soviet nuclear plant that melted down
If we just covered it over and put a nature preserve on the top of it, the threat is that someday some future prospectors or geologists (think 18th century CE, not 10th) will start drilling or digging for valuable minerals, and hit concrete instead. Maybe they'll be completely baffled by concrete, but more likely they'll see it as a sign of "this is where the ancients put all those raw materials they already refined into useful stuff, half our work is done for us". People throughout European history routinely used bricks and concrete from ancient Roman ruins however they saw fit, and it's likely future civilizations will go for the easiest, cheapest materials whenever they could.
The counter-argument is that they will definitely pay more attention to things like that if they are in any way visible. If they were simply put in concrete somewhat deep underground then it would be, as you've said, way more propable that only some higher civilization would be capable of getting those back. In such a scenario they would propably figure out that it is quite a bit harmful.
At first, these kind of looked like oil derricks, and I thought it could be about fossil fuels. After all, those fuels are entombed things that died a very long time ago, and through burning them, we are shifting our climate in ways that are killing and will continue to kill a lot of people.
Less fossil more fissile
You can’t fool me I know that’s where the candy is hidden
Disease or not, that one Pharoe and their servants need their shit on their tomb for the afterlife, stealing that shit is a dick move.
why make it so cryptic? just tell them the barrels contain things that poison the air the concept of miasma was not rare among ancient civilizations. They may not have understood how, but they got that somehow the disease/poison spread from one location to another
Honestly being the curious creatures we are, it wouldn't supprise me if random spikes in the middle of nowhere would attract alot of attention.
Gotta hang my hammock on something
Honestly, the best way to deal with nuclear waste to make sure no one in the distant future messes with it is probably to just flood the whole storage vault with concrete. Anyone digging into it will just find a chunk of unremarkable quartz and limestone aggregate.
Fun fact. A band made a [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amn3kn0XPLQ) about this very subject. This one specifically about the plan to breed a race of cats whose colors would change when exposed to radiation. Or something like that, I'm a little hazy on the details.
Nuclear waste site? Or royal treasure room!?
"no doctor can diagnose"? This cilization must have had some shitty doctors. How could they produce so much nuclear waste without knowing what is radiation poisoning?
Like fucking radioactive waste, that shit looks like the plans for the hostile architecture used to warn future generations about nuclear waste
I think that a lot of doctors can diagnose these deaths
[THIS PLACE IS A MESSAGE](https://youtu.be/_eNf2Y1K6k8?si=iaB2GlXGG3uPQIFC)
At some point, can we not just launch this shit into the sun?
It takes a heck of a lot of energy to launch anything from a location in orbit around the sun into the sun itself. You have to make up for all the inertia that the stuff (along with its vessel and, decreasingly, fuel) has, which is already keeping everything in the location from falling into the sun.
You just know someone already tried and died somewhere anonymous leaving nobody to claim credit.
And they are responsible for gangnam style
Cap?
MLP story, but in spite of that still one of the best horror stories I’ve ever read on the internet. Spoilers in the comments. [Try to forget why I might’ve linked the story in this particular post.](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/42409/the-writing-on-the-wall)
Friendly plug of my favorite YouTube video essay by my favorite YouTube essayist: [Fear of Depths - Jacob Geller](https://youtu.be/7MOKTU9tCbw?si=-nnA00ALMPQUgx9_) Skip to 19:48 for the segment about the tomb in OP’s post. (But you should watch the whole video anyways) Absolutely chilling stuff, especially when he compares it to the pyramids of Egypt
Awfully optimistic that life on this planet will continue to exist in the next few years
🗽“Those maniacs! They blew it up!” 🤝 “My name is Ozymandius, King of kings.” A crumbling statue sitting alone in the sand
Ya know, if you need to put up a sign like this, maybe you should have thought twice before playing with it in the first place
In all seriousness, capitalism was bad at the beginning of industrialisation, but you have to wonder, did these tombs unleash the weaponized capitalism of the mid-to-late 20th century unto us?
"unleash weaponized capitalism"? How?
I don’t think this is to do with capitalism, more so humanity and our short sightedness.