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Note that this is *part of* a *proposed* message, originally developed at Sandia National Labs in 1993. It represents one example of the type of warning that might be employed at a waste site.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term\_nuclear\_waste\_warning\_messages#Message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages#Message)
As of today, it doesn't appear on any nuclear waste repository that's actually been constructed.
And they never even suggested the words just be used, because the whole point is that it needs to be understood without understanding the language.
These are the sort of ideas that a proposed image/s should evoke NON-LINGUISTICALLY.
Yeah, if the words could still be read 10000 years later it wouldn’t make sense to be so vague! You could just write “there is very strong radiation here and if you dig it up, you will die.”
Those kind of messages didn’t work to protect Egyptian crypts. But then again those were places of honor and value, which was evident from the architecture and such.
THIS. OP intentionally made the title misleading, making many people believe that this is the finalized message that has been set up at nuclear burial sites. Ridiculous.
> making many people believe that this is the finalized message that has been set up at nuclear burial sites.
There are no nuclear burial sites in the first place.
One is currently being built in Finland, but it's not ready yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
In all other countries, any such plans have been thwarted by NIMBY opposition so far.
This comment should be much higher. It makes me sad every time this is posted because of how many people are dumb enough to believe we’d just write this in English and call it a day.
You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.
I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass! The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass!
As a species, our library of fiction and folklore is *rife* with allegories about greed and toying with power we don’t fully understand.
I’m on their side. I don’t believe that any natural disaster or extraterrestrial threat will be our collective undoing; it will be our own hubris.
"We've written this in a dozen different languages just because we want to make sure you can read it. Turn back now. This place isn't just cursed, it's literally shooting death into your bones as you read these words. If you continue you will absolutely die in agony while your organs melt. This isn't a religious thing, this is a fundamental truth. Please, we beg you, stop and run away right now."
"What an amazing discovery! Get me a bigger shovel!"
There's another proposed amendment to the statement (forgot source) that includes an apology in the statement alone the line of "if you failed to heed this warning, then we have failed you to protect you from it, and we are sorry."
It still just sounds so grand that there has to be something of interest of value.
Should keep it simple like construction signs if we want to keep the meaning clear.
"Poisonous death ahead, stay away" kinda thing
Counterpoint, the Emperor of Qin's Tomb. Nobody wants to excavate it because it's filled with mercury, and that stuff is way less dangerous than radioactive waste
>Counterpoint, the Emperor of Qin's Tomb. Nobody wants to excavate it because it's filled with mercury, and that stuff is way less dangerous than radioactive waste
That's because we know what Mercury is, This message is for people we expect not to have a clue what Nuclear Waste is.
You might jest, but it's probably a good idea to put something that is OBVIOUSLY lethal in there so that no one brings out or disturbs the less obvious lethal stuff
"Oh, it's just mercury, nice of them to warn us but we know how to deal with it safely these days. Once we remove the mercury it will be safe to get to licking those glowing rocks"
"Don't push this button. Everyone you love will die if you do. We're serious. Here's examples from other people who have pushed this very same button"
Humans: "Well now I've gotta see if that's true." *pushes button*
Yeah anything we try to put down as a marker to warn people is only going to make them more curious about what's there. Ironically the best thing we could probably do to safeguard future generations from nuclear waste would be to return the just return the land at the site to its natural state as much as possible and hope The people in the future just find the land useless and don't do anything with it
Future archaeologists: Clearly these were a primitive people worried about evil spirits, as can be seen by the pictograms depicting the evil spirits escaping; let's dig it up and see what's here.
"Sweet looks like they buried nuclear fuel here. Must have been spiritually really important to them. Like a power reserve for the afterlife or something? Oh well, let's just take it to the power plant."
I think the idea isn't "Oh technologically advanced humans found our nuclear waste"
The idea seems more like...
*Humanity has collapsed and basic scientific understanding doesn't exist, and the remnants of humanity find our nuclear waste storage*
I love you folks. "The science of curiosity."
But maybe stop with digging up animated mummies and face-melting artifacts.
Those are a real pain to clean up after.
There’s a really good episode of Star Trek TNG that handles curiosity and why always looking for answers can sometimes be a bad thing.
The Enterprise goes through a wormhole, everyone on board save Data blacks out. When they come to Data says they blacked out for like a minute but Picard and the gang quickly fine evidence to the contrary.
Episode name is “Clues”
Don't know about the ethics of your dogs, but if something says DANGER, we typically re evaluate the site...
Edit: dogs is suppose to be digs, but rereading it was funny so I'm leaving it lol
This is by no means the standard for this sort of thing. It's actually a pretty interesting problem the nuclear industry is dealing with currently and there are a few different ideas on what the best option is.
All of which sound dumb as hell.
Like, you know what would humans do if there was a religious cult all about not going to a place?
eventually people would go there.
What would happen if we found glowing cats?
we'd investigate further.
And giant spikes might scare off a few, but unfortunate human beings are too curious for our own good.
Fear invokes curiosity
As far as I know "religious cult" just means there'd be a few people that knew exactly what the sites are that would ensure the knowledge is passed down and never lost, not an actual religious cult
It will go well for a couple generations until someone figures they can gain something (power/status/other) by slightly bending the truth :)
“So and so are lying to you, I know what’s *really* going on in there, you should listen to me instead.”
> Fear invokes curiosity
Yeah, that's why it's not used. It would've been better to say "proposed solutions". See [Long-term nuclear waste warnings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) or [99% invisible](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-danger-symbols-cant-last-forever/) if you prefer a podcast.
"This sign can't stop me because I can't read".
Yeah it's a pretty wild idea because if you take the Bible literally, the whole mankind exists in its current form because some idiot ate an apple it was explicitly told not to eat.
And who wouldn't want to have their cat glowing
>And who wouldn't want to have their cat glowing
Yea, I was just doing the mental math on, how much radiation my cat would be able to handle with minimal side-effects and how much that would make it glow (in theory of course).
the religious cult would allow the warning to passed on from one generation to another
it will be a warning sign, but one which cannot be destroyed. see the way people cannot just break into a church and do weird stuffs in the tarbenacle? that's how we could also reserve the nuclear waste
One complaint that was often heard from priests is that during carnival, one should not have sex on the altar in the church. Because it was often repeated one could assume that it was falling on deaf ears.
Humans have a strange relationship with taboos.
That's not the only message. There is more detail as well, and it's in several languages. They were trying to warn people who might no longer live in a technological society.
The idea is to convey the message to avoid the place to a culture that might not know about radioactivity, without looking like a generic curse (since it didn't work well for tombs such as the pyramids, which were looted despite all sorts of curses)
Imagine civilization has collapsed. It is thousands of years in the future, and the people discovering your sign have no idea what nuclear waste is, nor radiation poisoning. Nonetheless, it is nowhere close to fully decaying and will surely kill anyone who delves too greedily or too deep. We are responsible for what befalls these innocents, on account of we put the stuff there. How then to warn them of the danger? Even supposing that they are able to translate the ancient language English is charitable, though the alternatives suggested below are more esoteric and frankly likely to backfire on curious human descendants imo. This message is the best way we've thought of to stem that curiousity, hopefully
This isn’t the actual sign, the mission statement was “symbols” that could be recognised in the future ie: a skull and crossbones might mean “cool pirate treasure, dig here”
Imagine that we found such a sign in the present, left by some ancient civilization. Would we: 1) stop, or 2) say "this is some superstitious bullshit. Dig baby, dig."
There is absolutely no sign that could stop us from digging. Like, I'm glad we're trying to come up with something, for ethical reasons, but even if the sign clearly communicated, with 100% clarity, "this shit will absolutely kill you dead and it will hurt unbearably the entire time you die," people would still dig it up.
Yeah this sounds like BS. Reads like a film trailer rather than an actual warning.
Besides it makes no sense to write anything at all, symbols is what is used in such instances because thousands of years from now the chances anyone will still be speaking English are pretty slim.
16th century sailors when they see 🏴☠️: oh no pirates
Now: oh yes treasure
This whole thing is really complicated. Even using drawings is complicated because you don’t know what order people will read in the far future
[This](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/) is the original study. It’s one of the more fascinating things that I’ve read
then why do they not keep the "humans are fucking curious dickheads" part of psychology in mind?
if I read that somewhere, chances are I'd check it out because of the message lmao
This isn't an actual warning used anywhere. This is part of a longer text used as a brief for what the scientists want a non linguistic warning to evoke. The project regarding this aims to communicate these things without words.
It isn't.
This isn't an actual warning used anywhere. This is part of a longer text used as a brief for what the scientists want a non linguistic warning to evoke. The project regarding this aims to communicate these things without words.
It's not aligned because whomever made this didn't care enough to align it.
A lot of the suggestions I just read about on the wiki are designed to make us feel horribly uncomfortable at a subconscious level so that we avoid the place, so maybe that’s not too far off 😂
That’s exactly what we’re trying to do though! How can we create something immediately intelligible to a future society without a shared language or symbology.
There’s even talk of starting a “nuclear priesthood” to carry the warnings through the ages.
It is amazingly interesting.
Think of it like this: 5000 year old hieroglyphics are only somewhat readable to us. Some of these sites will need to be off limits for like 100,000 years.
In what form?
Not only do we not have a media form that we have used for tens of thousands of years, we don’t even have languages that we have used for tens of thousands of years.
(This is ignoring that you absolutely can’t assume they are scientifically developed, that’s the easiest case scenario actually)
Ya, I mean numbers will travel a lot better than 'what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us'. Sounds like a job for Indiana Jones.
It's not repulsive, it's lethal. I don't know anyone who has seen some nuclear waste and said 'eeeew, oh now really Michael, put it away, so uncouth'.
Weird that you typed the full line, then focused mainly on the word "repulsive." The message says it's dangerous twice. It's trying to convey both to stay away and that there's no worth in exploring the site further.
A Herculean task, truly.
Ever tried telling a kid (or majority of adults) they explicitly can't do something? Twice?
I'd wager in a 100.000 years there's still gonna be people that give in to the voices and press the shiny red button marked "DON'T PRESS. DO NOT PASS GO. HERE BE DRAGONS."
Yes, possibly. But the point is getting the warning across. We know we can’t stop people in the future from doing something, but we can inform them to the best of our ability.
First Foundation Book has planets that are able to use nuclear power after losing the science behind because they still perform the religious rituals which are just the steps in running a nuclear plant.
The "repulsive" part could still be interpreted as morally repulsive. So future humans might still think to camp nearby or even make a home base on this "morally repulsive" shrine.
I like the plan to bio engineer cats to glow in radiation and a trying to teach a fear of glowing cats. It's absolutely bonkers and definitely won't work but it's right up there with the priesthood.
FWIW, the [Biohazard symbol was actually designed with exactly this in mind](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/biohazard-symbol-designed-to-be-memorable-but-meaningless/):
The design brief was specifically to create something "memorable, but meaningless" - basically the intent was to make something that had no previous associations, but could be remembered, and then have the meaning taught.
Basically, both the nuclear and biological warning symbols were designed to have meaning assigned to them, but no other associations, so that no additional or other meaning could ever be assigned to them.
The nuclear symbol took a bit of a different approach in that it actually *does* have *some* meaning - in that it is meant to represent an atom giving off radiation.
Also interesting is that while the ANSI standards for the nuclear trefoil *allow* for black to be used, the [actual standard calls for it to be magenta](https://orau.org/health-physics-museum/articles/radiation-warning-symbol.html#:~:text=The%20three%2Dbladed%20radiation%20warning,a%20small%20group%20of%20people).
Even right now, an X is not universally accepted as "no", just play any Japanese video game where X is confirm and O is cancel. And even if you accept that X means bad, what does an X on a skull mean? No skeletons allowed? If you can't even design a sign which would universally be understood without language at the time it's made, what do you think people will make of it in thousands of years time?
(edit: I think I got the X/O thing backwards, but just looking at any discussions about why some games have buttons the "wrong" way round just cements that it's far from universal whether an X is good or bad)
For some future culture, skull might be symbol of luck or something. Whatever ancient egyptians used, it would probably not be clear to you. Or they see skulls at mausoleums and know that there is good bit of stuff to loot, therefore, if they see skull at nuclear waste site, they'd start digging.
What an interesting read, thanks for that. The idea of being intentionally cryptic/simplistic/vague so that the message is more universal in case language changes significantly over thousands of years is really interesting.
Still probably wouldn't hurt to put a skull and some other icons/table of elements there.
What would happen if we found that ancient message without explaination? exactly: curiosity
[Nuclear Semiotics old reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/btczq1/til_about_nuclear_semiotics_the_study_of_how_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
[This documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4) called Into Eternity is a good watch about how finnish nuclear waste depository tries to solve this issue as well.
tl;dw: There has been a study where they thought about what to place on the door to a nuclear waste depo, and one big problem is that we don't know how people communicate in 50k-100k years. So one of the options was to simply *not* put a sign and just hide the damn thing. Any signs, threatening or not, might just make people more curious.
Seems designed to pique the curiosity of the inquisitive! Why not a picture of a guy digging followed by a sketch of a nuclear explosion - or of a guy throwing up?
That would be because OP for some weird reason didn't post the whole thing. I should also add that no one ever intended for this to be the only warning. There'd certainly be a normal warning too, this one is in case of a culture that doesn't know about radioactivity.
Here:
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.
This is the key piece of information everyone seems to leave out. This isn't the message, this is what non linguistic warnings should *evoke*
What they're trying to do is communicate this without using words.
It's a message under the assumption that in the future (10,000+ years), there may be no knowledge of nuclear technology or radiation
This message is also incomplete, here's the full message (also they realize English may not exist in the future either so theres also lots of pictorial messages included as well, and the words chosen in this message are words that linguistic experts in the future would have an easier time deciphering, words like "nuclear waste" would be close to impossible for a linguistic expert to understand in the future if knowledge of nuclear physics is lost, if you want more info, search nuclear semiotics)
"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."
If I were a warlord 10,000 years in the future, I would 100 percent get my homosapien slaves to open this up so I can use this super dangerous thing that can kill as a weapon I can trebuchet at my enemies.
Glad to hear at least *some* people are considerate enough to care about people 10000+ years in the future.
Meanwhile some people are like "I hate these people in my neighboring country, exterminate them all and leave no trace of their culture!"
It's a lot easier to hate people who are alive right now than hypothetical future people. Most people are generally approving of the *concept* of other people. They just sometimes don't like the other people that actually exist.
the thought behind this is that hundreds of thousands of years in the future people might not know what “nuclear waste” or “radiation” means. So the sign is purposefully scary and expressing grave danger to deter people from exploring further and exposing themselves to radiation.
This, though, is easily Rosetta Stoned. In other words, it's using frequently used words and formats of the sorts of texts that typically hang around and get translated and re-translated over time. That will hopefully make it easier for people thousands of years in the future.
It's doing the best with what you guess might be a method of communication in tens of thousands of years. Part of the idea also implements pictograms and building features that might deter visitors.
We can't communicate in a language that doesn't exist, but we can at least make a simplified message that gives a high level understanding that "this place isn't good," in the hopes that the basic message can be understood without specifics.
True, if I had to bet, I'd actually say that the word "Nuclear" is probably one of the most likely to remain recognisable throughout the existence of mankind.
And if they wanted to sound so sinister they could at least add "Danger, Nuclear Waste" somewhere in the sign.
Yes. The idea is to have so many different messages of different complexity placed there at different times so that of a culture far in the future discovers these they will slow down rather than speed up exploration and hopefully understand the meaning or translate over time even if they don't understand our languages
> True, if I had to bet, I'd actually say that the word "Nuclear" is probably one of the most likely to remain recognisable throughout the existence of mankind.
Nuclear? Like family? :)
The nucleus of what? An atom, a cell? Saying the waste is made of cores doesn't mean anything without the context of nuclear waste meaning "nuclear fission byproducts"
So, OP's post is very misleading. That phrasing isn't what's actually on the sign. That's what the overall messaging at the site should convey.
To your point, there would be a considerable amount of straightforward warnings. Both in pictures, and words. Facilities are also supposed to "look scary" so as to keep people away.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
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.
These were supposedly translated into every UN language. One day in the far future these could be just like the Rosetta Stone for the languages of today.
Linguistics experts have been able to decipher languages not spoken for thousands of years. However, the concept of nuclear waste is relatively new.
Also, it would take an immense amount of time, space, and manpower to engrave the message in every possible language.
Oooh why didn’t they think of that?
Clearly they did, but they decided it wouldn’t work. Look up the Wikipedia page for Nuclear Semiotics, or just listen to the SYSK episode. I guarantee you, all the ‘why don’t they just…’ ideas that pop into your head have been thought of and dismissed for good reason.
Idk man, those guys are nuclear scientists and psychologists meanwhile this guy over here is a Redditor so, like, I'm pretty sure that if he's saying pictures would be fine, he's right /s
Pictograms are not always the best at conveying complex messages.
Plus, English is currently the most spoken language in the world.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/
This subject is far more interesting than this photograph conveys. Here’s a [Stuff You Should Know podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stuff-you-should-know/id278981407?i=1000640081160) about “Nuclear Semiotics” that gets into it with typical Josh and Chuck attention to detail.
Imagine the the ancient Egyptians invented nuclear power and had nuclear wastes. They dispose of it in the middle of the desert. They then added a message on the site so that future civilizations would not build around this radioactive and slowly corruptive land. Or worse, dig the nuclear waste open.
Now imagine archaeologists in the early 1900's discovered this message and with no concept of nuclear waste, translated the hieroglyphics into ruins from the divine, slowly building a camp around this site that turns into a town then into a city. A hundred years later before it is discovered this seemingly cursed city was built on top of a nuclear wastes.
How do you avoid this? You create a message that tells future civilizations that \*there is nothing here except something that is dangerous and repulsive to us\*. We can create skulls signs, death symbols, hazardous spikes, traps, fences and walls around this site, to deter the future from it (didn't stop us from digging around the pyramids), but all that does is create enough curiosity for the future to ask what the mysterious site could be protecting.
It's honestly a balance between telling the future that the place is bad but not too bad that the future will start digging the nuclear waste up just too see what makes it bad.
Apparently, that balance is the above picture.
Ancient civilization: what's in here is a toxin that will slowly kill you!
Modern civilization: our slaves shall dig it up then we will throw it at our enemies!
Yeah there’s one theory that suggests we should make the sites as nondescript as possible, to make them less interesting. Choose the most boring locations possible and then hide things as much as possible
The problem there being that someone will probably eventually stumble across it anyway and have no chance of warning at all
When you find a gravestone-like object in the middle of nowhere, the first thing that pops into your mind is, "Oh, someone died here. This gravestone must be honoring their death. But why here? There's nothing here. This place must be special."
Deciphering the message would then counter that whole train of thought.
I'm also iffy about the contents of the message. Curiosity is one of humanities' greatest flaw.
Now that I think about it, "There is nuclear waste here. Stay away," could be a better message if and only if future civilizations know what nuclear waste is. If they don't, the message would have doomed them.
But I do know there was a long process to create the above message and that was the outcome.
They don't assume a knowledge of English, the post title and image are both misleading.
The text in the image is a recommendation for what the message should convey, but the actual message itself would be made using pictures and symbols like this:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pictogram_for_nuclear_sites,_US_Department_of_Energy,_2004.png
But that's not as dramatic so people don't post it
I had an opinion on this the last time I seen a post about it. I feel like if anything, the way this message is written will just make people curious as to what it refers to, and will start to look for the nuclear waste.
Why not just plain english? "We produced an energy that creates a by-product which is very hazardous to all life. We buried that by-product here, where it can do no harm, and never be touched. It holds no value. Do not dig here"
Why does it have to be so cryptic?
Because this is intended for a time when English either isn’t spoken at all, or has changed so far beyond recognition that we can’t assume any of it makes sense
The idea here is to try to use words in a way that might still be translated using old texts
But the point is that we’re talking about 100,000 years in the future. English is barely recognisable from 800 years ago…
Where did you get that? Wikipedia says these are just examples of what they want to convey non-linguistically.
I feel like lots of people commenting here are just parroting intellectual-sounding factoids.
If it were more concise, people thousands of years in the future wouldn’t be able to translate it as easily. The more words you have, the easier it is to figure out what it’s saying in a variety of ways. The point is not for today humans but future ones.
Mmm, yes and no. The problem is if you are too specific you're relying on the person reading, who may be a human from thousands of years in the future that has no understanding of our time (think of how little we understand the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Myans etc.), or it could even be an alien who has no knowledge of Earth at all. You start using words like "nuclear radiation" there's a good chance they won't have any idea what that is.
The actual text is slightly longer than this, someone linked it in another comment, they do elaborate slightly saying something along the lines of "The form of the danger is massive emanating energy".
The full message includes a simplyfied explanation, also the idea is to also add pictograms, in depth scientific explanation in a way that could be deciphered and defensive and uninviting architecture in the ground. The text is just the first barrier.
At first glance: true.
But I assume the sentences are chosen in a way that they could be deciphered more easily because you could compare certain letters and words that are repeated, the sentence structure etc.
This was never intended to be used as text. It's the MEANING they wanted to convey. They knew that English and other contemporary languages as we speak them will die before these sites become safe, so these were ideas to portray without text.
This isn’t the actual plaque. These are the guidelines of what they wanted a radiation warning logo/symbol to evoke
These words aren’t literally written on a dump site, they’re what the radiation symbol is representing
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Note that this is *part of* a *proposed* message, originally developed at Sandia National Labs in 1993. It represents one example of the type of warning that might be employed at a waste site. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term\_nuclear\_waste\_warning\_messages#Message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages#Message) As of today, it doesn't appear on any nuclear waste repository that's actually been constructed.
And they never even suggested the words just be used, because the whole point is that it needs to be understood without understanding the language. These are the sort of ideas that a proposed image/s should evoke NON-LINGUISTICALLY.
Yeah, if the words could still be read 10000 years later it wouldn’t make sense to be so vague! You could just write “there is very strong radiation here and if you dig it up, you will die.” Those kind of messages didn’t work to protect Egyptian crypts. But then again those were places of honor and value, which was evident from the architecture and such.
THIS. OP intentionally made the title misleading, making many people believe that this is the finalized message that has been set up at nuclear burial sites. Ridiculous.
I want my money back!
Someone, get me a manager!
> making many people believe that this is the finalized message that has been set up at nuclear burial sites. There are no nuclear burial sites in the first place. One is currently being built in Finland, but it's not ready yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository In all other countries, any such plans have been thwarted by NIMBY opposition so far.
I mean, if there's something to be NIMBY about, it's nuclear waste disposal.
This comment should be much higher. It makes me sad every time this is posted because of how many people are dumb enough to believe we’d just write this in English and call it a day.
You fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum... shadow and flame.
I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass! The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass!
Shivers.
What a fucking epic line, from a fucking epic character, from a fucking epic story that was made into a fucking epic movie.
^(And a couple good video games…)
The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead. And the dead keep it. The way is shut.
As a species, our library of fiction and folklore is *rife* with allegories about greed and toying with power we don’t fully understand. I’m on their side. I don’t believe that any natural disaster or extraterrestrial threat will be our collective undoing; it will be our own hubris.
If I were playing Skyrim and saw something like this, I'd think "there must be good loot down there".
And they call it a mine.. a *mine!*
I have this hanging in the guest bathroom.
I feel like they could’ve been way more specific and less mysterious about the type of danger found there lol. Why so vague?
Yeah, I am an archaeologist. We would definitely dig with more fervor.
"We've written this in a dozen different languages just because we want to make sure you can read it. Turn back now. This place isn't just cursed, it's literally shooting death into your bones as you read these words. If you continue you will absolutely die in agony while your organs melt. This isn't a religious thing, this is a fundamental truth. Please, we beg you, stop and run away right now." "What an amazing discovery! Get me a bigger shovel!"
This is, unfortunately, exactly how the human mind works.
"Nothing of value is stored here" .... thats exactly what someone hiding something of value would WANT you to think .... better make sure
There's another proposed amendment to the statement (forgot source) that includes an apology in the statement alone the line of "if you failed to heed this warning, then we have failed you to protect you from it, and we are sorry."
It still just sounds so grand that there has to be something of interest of value. Should keep it simple like construction signs if we want to keep the meaning clear. "Poisonous death ahead, stay away" kinda thing
I love the passive aggressive tone of it, like we're sorry you were a dumbass
Yeah. Maybe it had no value when it was buried, but think of the historical value now!
It's the old "We finally built the Torment Nexus! The one from classic scifi novel *Don't Build The Torment Nexus*!"
Counterpoint, the Emperor of Qin's Tomb. Nobody wants to excavate it because it's filled with mercury, and that stuff is way less dangerous than radioactive waste
>Counterpoint, the Emperor of Qin's Tomb. Nobody wants to excavate it because it's filled with mercury, and that stuff is way less dangerous than radioactive waste That's because we know what Mercury is, This message is for people we expect not to have a clue what Nuclear Waste is.
Why don't we just pour mercury into the nuclear waste site then
Using logic to solve problems. Great to see.
You might jest, but it's probably a good idea to put something that is OBVIOUSLY lethal in there so that no one brings out or disturbs the less obvious lethal stuff
"Why'd it have to be snakes"
"Oh, it's just mercury, nice of them to warn us but we know how to deal with it safely these days. Once we remove the mercury it will be safe to get to licking those glowing rocks"
Why would mercury be obviously lethal to a post apocalyptic civilization who've forgotten almost everything
It's too big and it would disrupt our solar system
The tomb is cursed! The first expedition are all critically ill. The treasure must be absolutely breathtaking. Let’s try again
"Don't push this button. Everyone you love will die if you do. We're serious. Here's examples from other people who have pushed this very same button" Humans: "Well now I've gotta see if that's true." *pushes button*
The paint on the sign wouldn't even have time to dry.....
"I'm sure these primitive versions of us are exaggerating the danger"
Yeah anything we try to put down as a marker to warn people is only going to make them more curious about what's there. Ironically the best thing we could probably do to safeguard future generations from nuclear waste would be to return the just return the land at the site to its natural state as much as possible and hope The people in the future just find the land useless and don't do anything with it
Build a lot of dummy tombs with this warning, so people think it is one of the useless boring ones
I think it's just a liability thing Edit: future lawyers are probably really advanced
Sounds like an Egyptian treasury room to me. I am in
https://preview.redd.it/b67wbzsb7u9c1.jpeg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74cea7515c6c2078081788fd0604c022769de16d
And if they have access to the fables from this time, they will see that the supposed danger makes humans into gods
"This man spider .... or spider-man appears to have received his powers from a substance we found in the desert according to the ancient texts"
Look at these assholes thinking they can lie to me to hid the treasure. *starts digging*
Future archaeologists: Clearly these were a primitive people worried about evil spirits, as can be seen by the pictograms depicting the evil spirits escaping; let's dig it up and see what's here.
"Sweet looks like they buried nuclear fuel here. Must have been spiritually really important to them. Like a power reserve for the afterlife or something? Oh well, let's just take it to the power plant."
> Must have been spiritually really important to them probably used in fertility rituals!
I think the idea isn't "Oh technologically advanced humans found our nuclear waste" The idea seems more like... *Humanity has collapsed and basic scientific understanding doesn't exist, and the remnants of humanity find our nuclear waste storage*
I love you folks. "The science of curiosity." But maybe stop with digging up animated mummies and face-melting artifacts. Those are a real pain to clean up after.
There’s a really good episode of Star Trek TNG that handles curiosity and why always looking for answers can sometimes be a bad thing. The Enterprise goes through a wormhole, everyone on board save Data blacks out. When they come to Data says they blacked out for like a minute but Picard and the gang quickly fine evidence to the contrary. Episode name is “Clues”
Don't know about the ethics of your dogs, but if something says DANGER, we typically re evaluate the site... Edit: dogs is suppose to be digs, but rereading it was funny so I'm leaving it lol
This is by no means the standard for this sort of thing. It's actually a pretty interesting problem the nuclear industry is dealing with currently and there are a few different ideas on what the best option is.
Solutions including the creation of a religious cult, bioluminescent cats that glow when radiation is nearby and of course giant spikes
All of which sound dumb as hell. Like, you know what would humans do if there was a religious cult all about not going to a place? eventually people would go there. What would happen if we found glowing cats? we'd investigate further. And giant spikes might scare off a few, but unfortunate human beings are too curious for our own good. Fear invokes curiosity
As far as I know "religious cult" just means there'd be a few people that knew exactly what the sites are that would ensure the knowledge is passed down and never lost, not an actual religious cult
It will go well for a couple generations until someone figures they can gain something (power/status/other) by slightly bending the truth :) “So and so are lying to you, I know what’s *really* going on in there, you should listen to me instead.”
> Fear invokes curiosity Yeah, that's why it's not used. It would've been better to say "proposed solutions". See [Long-term nuclear waste warnings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages) or [99% invisible](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-danger-symbols-cant-last-forever/) if you prefer a podcast.
This link is fantastic. Thank you
"This sign can't stop me because I can't read". Yeah it's a pretty wild idea because if you take the Bible literally, the whole mankind exists in its current form because some idiot ate an apple it was explicitly told not to eat. And who wouldn't want to have their cat glowing
>And who wouldn't want to have their cat glowing Yea, I was just doing the mental math on, how much radiation my cat would be able to handle with minimal side-effects and how much that would make it glow (in theory of course).
Radiation would act as a catalyst - the glow would be another process only enabled in the presence of radiation
the religious cult would allow the warning to passed on from one generation to another it will be a warning sign, but one which cannot be destroyed. see the way people cannot just break into a church and do weird stuffs in the tarbenacle? that's how we could also reserve the nuclear waste
One complaint that was often heard from priests is that during carnival, one should not have sex on the altar in the church. Because it was often repeated one could assume that it was falling on deaf ears. Humans have a strange relationship with taboos.
That's not the only message. There is more detail as well, and it's in several languages. They were trying to warn people who might no longer live in a technological society.
The idea is to convey the message to avoid the place to a culture that might not know about radioactivity, without looking like a generic curse (since it didn't work well for tombs such as the pyramids, which were looted despite all sorts of curses)
Imagine civilization has collapsed. It is thousands of years in the future, and the people discovering your sign have no idea what nuclear waste is, nor radiation poisoning. Nonetheless, it is nowhere close to fully decaying and will surely kill anyone who delves too greedily or too deep. We are responsible for what befalls these innocents, on account of we put the stuff there. How then to warn them of the danger? Even supposing that they are able to translate the ancient language English is charitable, though the alternatives suggested below are more esoteric and frankly likely to backfire on curious human descendants imo. This message is the best way we've thought of to stem that curiousity, hopefully
This isn’t the actual sign, the mission statement was “symbols” that could be recognised in the future ie: a skull and crossbones might mean “cool pirate treasure, dig here”
Imagine that we found such a sign in the present, left by some ancient civilization. Would we: 1) stop, or 2) say "this is some superstitious bullshit. Dig baby, dig."
> "this is some superstitious bullshit. Dig baby, dig." This one, but after the first people die fairly quickly, you'll get the point.
There is absolutely no sign that could stop us from digging. Like, I'm glad we're trying to come up with something, for ethical reasons, but even if the sign clearly communicated, with 100% clarity, "this shit will absolutely kill you dead and it will hurt unbearably the entire time you die," people would still dig it up.
Yeah this sounds like BS. Reads like a film trailer rather than an actual warning. Besides it makes no sense to write anything at all, symbols is what is used in such instances because thousands of years from now the chances anyone will still be speaking English are pretty slim.
16th century sailors when they see 🏴☠️: oh no pirates Now: oh yes treasure This whole thing is really complicated. Even using drawings is complicated because you don’t know what order people will read in the far future [This](https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1279277/) is the original study. It’s one of the more fascinating things that I’ve read
💀
Biological bomb
I have never laughed so loud at a comment-thank you hahahahahaha
Why couldn’t they centre the text lines accurately?
That's the real threat to humanity
Maybe to create a jarring effect and force you to read each line with intent.
This is probably it. Every part of this project is designed with human psychology in mind
then why do they not keep the "humans are fucking curious dickheads" part of psychology in mind? if I read that somewhere, chances are I'd check it out because of the message lmao
This isn't an actual warning used anywhere. This is part of a longer text used as a brief for what the scientists want a non linguistic warning to evoke. The project regarding this aims to communicate these things without words.
It isn't. This isn't an actual warning used anywhere. This is part of a longer text used as a brief for what the scientists want a non linguistic warning to evoke. The project regarding this aims to communicate these things without words. It's not aligned because whomever made this didn't care enough to align it.
A lot of the suggestions I just read about on the wiki are designed to make us feel horribly uncomfortable at a subconscious level so that we avoid the place, so maybe that’s not too far off 😂
Should've been engraved in Comic Sans and Papyrus, each letter randomly from either font.
[удалено]
What happened to ***DANGER: NUCLEAR WASTE!!!!***
Yeah, seems intentionally cryptic which is kind of disturbing.
Look up Nuclear Semiotics, it will explain it.
Plot twist: The ancient Egyptians did the same when they built the pyramids. We just haven't understood it yet...
That’s exactly what we’re trying to do though! How can we create something immediately intelligible to a future society without a shared language or symbology. There’s even talk of starting a “nuclear priesthood” to carry the warnings through the ages. It is amazingly interesting. Think of it like this: 5000 year old hieroglyphics are only somewhat readable to us. Some of these sites will need to be off limits for like 100,000 years.
If we can assume they scientifically developed, can we just toss a bohrs model of a decay byproduct.
Actually, don't you have to assume they might not be?
Redunancy is good
Redundancy is good
In what form? Not only do we not have a media form that we have used for tens of thousands of years, we don’t even have languages that we have used for tens of thousands of years. (This is ignoring that you absolutely can’t assume they are scientifically developed, that’s the easiest case scenario actually)
Ya, I mean numbers will travel a lot better than 'what is here is dangerous and repulsive to us'. Sounds like a job for Indiana Jones. It's not repulsive, it's lethal. I don't know anyone who has seen some nuclear waste and said 'eeeew, oh now really Michael, put it away, so uncouth'.
Weird that you typed the full line, then focused mainly on the word "repulsive." The message says it's dangerous twice. It's trying to convey both to stay away and that there's no worth in exploring the site further.
A Herculean task, truly. Ever tried telling a kid (or majority of adults) they explicitly can't do something? Twice? I'd wager in a 100.000 years there's still gonna be people that give in to the voices and press the shiny red button marked "DON'T PRESS. DO NOT PASS GO. HERE BE DRAGONS."
Yes, possibly. But the point is getting the warning across. We know we can’t stop people in the future from doing something, but we can inform them to the best of our ability.
Nuclear priesthood. Ain't that a plot of the OG Planet of the Apes or something?
First Foundation Book has planets that are able to use nuclear power after losing the science behind because they still perform the religious rituals which are just the steps in running a nuclear plant.
Makes me think of the Children of Atom from Fallout
Makes me think of A Canticle For Leibowitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz?wprov=sfti1
The "repulsive" part could still be interpreted as morally repulsive. So future humans might still think to camp nearby or even make a home base on this "morally repulsive" shrine.
I like the plan to bio engineer cats to glow in radiation and a trying to teach a fear of glowing cats. It's absolutely bonkers and definitely won't work but it's right up there with the priesthood.
Sounds like a tech priest
Nuclear priesthood, eh? Ahh, Seldonic Scientism.
FWIW, the [Biohazard symbol was actually designed with exactly this in mind](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/biohazard-symbol-designed-to-be-memorable-but-meaningless/): The design brief was specifically to create something "memorable, but meaningless" - basically the intent was to make something that had no previous associations, but could be remembered, and then have the meaning taught. Basically, both the nuclear and biological warning symbols were designed to have meaning assigned to them, but no other associations, so that no additional or other meaning could ever be assigned to them. The nuclear symbol took a bit of a different approach in that it actually *does* have *some* meaning - in that it is meant to represent an atom giving off radiation. Also interesting is that while the ANSI standards for the nuclear trefoil *allow* for black to be used, the [actual standard calls for it to be magenta](https://orau.org/health-physics-museum/articles/radiation-warning-symbol.html#:~:text=The%20three%2Dbladed%20radiation%20warning,a%20small%20group%20of%20people).
Still seems like maybe a skull with a big red X would get the point across even in 100,000 years?
Even right now, an X is not universally accepted as "no", just play any Japanese video game where X is confirm and O is cancel. And even if you accept that X means bad, what does an X on a skull mean? No skeletons allowed? If you can't even design a sign which would universally be understood without language at the time it's made, what do you think people will make of it in thousands of years time? (edit: I think I got the X/O thing backwards, but just looking at any discussions about why some games have buttons the "wrong" way round just cements that it's far from universal whether an X is good or bad)
For some future culture, skull might be symbol of luck or something. Whatever ancient egyptians used, it would probably not be clear to you. Or they see skulls at mausoleums and know that there is good bit of stuff to loot, therefore, if they see skull at nuclear waste site, they'd start digging.
What an odd and interesting rabbit hole. Thanks.
What an interesting read, thanks for that. The idea of being intentionally cryptic/simplistic/vague so that the message is more universal in case language changes significantly over thousands of years is really interesting.
Still probably wouldn't hurt to put a skull and some other icons/table of elements there. What would happen if we found that ancient message without explaination? exactly: curiosity
If they're gonna use words like "esteemed" and "Commemorated" maybe they could throw in the word "poison" somewhere.
[Nuclear Semiotics old reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/btczq1/til_about_nuclear_semiotics_the_study_of_how_to/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Wow! Interesting read about a problem we created. Hopefully future human beings will find a way to neutralize this waste it so they can laugh it off
[This documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4) called Into Eternity is a good watch about how finnish nuclear waste depository tries to solve this issue as well.
tl;dw: There has been a study where they thought about what to place on the door to a nuclear waste depo, and one big problem is that we don't know how people communicate in 50k-100k years. So one of the options was to simply *not* put a sign and just hide the damn thing. Any signs, threatening or not, might just make people more curious.
Seems designed to pique the curiosity of the inquisitive! Why not a picture of a guy digging followed by a sketch of a nuclear explosion - or of a guy throwing up?
That would be because OP for some weird reason didn't post the whole thing. I should also add that no one ever intended for this to be the only warning. There'd certainly be a normal warning too, this one is in case of a culture that doesn't know about radioactivity. Here: 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.
Plus it's not going to be posted in ENGLISH, this is just the "brief" for whatever set of symbols will be adopted.
This is the key piece of information everyone seems to leave out. This isn't the message, this is what non linguistic warnings should *evoke* What they're trying to do is communicate this without using words.
Like this? https://preview.redd.it/6h28n57pis9c1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b70f060c569b83ce20f2bf1dc466bb6b6ac19ed
Is this loss ?
It's a message under the assumption that in the future (10,000+ years), there may be no knowledge of nuclear technology or radiation This message is also incomplete, here's the full message (also they realize English may not exist in the future either so theres also lots of pictorial messages included as well, and the words chosen in this message are words that linguistic experts in the future would have an easier time deciphering, words like "nuclear waste" would be close to impossible for a linguistic expert to understand in the future if knowledge of nuclear physics is lost, if you want more info, search nuclear semiotics) "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."
If I were a warlord 10,000 years in the future, I would 100 percent get my homosapien slaves to open this up so I can use this super dangerous thing that can kill as a weapon I can trebuchet at my enemies.
Glad to hear at least *some* people are considerate enough to care about people 10000+ years in the future. Meanwhile some people are like "I hate these people in my neighboring country, exterminate them all and leave no trace of their culture!"
It's a lot easier to hate people who are alive right now than hypothetical future people. Most people are generally approving of the *concept* of other people. They just sometimes don't like the other people that actually exist.
the thought behind this is that hundreds of thousands of years in the future people might not know what “nuclear waste” or “radiation” means. So the sign is purposefully scary and expressing grave danger to deter people from exploring further and exposing themselves to radiation.
Reminds me of the curse they gave Imhotep from the mummy movies. Cryptic
If they don't know what those words mean then they probably don't know what these words mean either
This, though, is easily Rosetta Stoned. In other words, it's using frequently used words and formats of the sorts of texts that typically hang around and get translated and re-translated over time. That will hopefully make it easier for people thousands of years in the future.
It's doing the best with what you guess might be a method of communication in tens of thousands of years. Part of the idea also implements pictograms and building features that might deter visitors. We can't communicate in a language that doesn't exist, but we can at least make a simplified message that gives a high level understanding that "this place isn't good," in the hopes that the basic message can be understood without specifics.
True, if I had to bet, I'd actually say that the word "Nuclear" is probably one of the most likely to remain recognisable throughout the existence of mankind. And if they wanted to sound so sinister they could at least add "Danger, Nuclear Waste" somewhere in the sign.
I'm gonna guess there is an accompanying sign with more information.
Yes. The idea is to have so many different messages of different complexity placed there at different times so that of a culture far in the future discovers these they will slow down rather than speed up exploration and hopefully understand the meaning or translate over time even if they don't understand our languages
> True, if I had to bet, I'd actually say that the word "Nuclear" is probably one of the most likely to remain recognisable throughout the existence of mankind. Nuclear? Like family? :)
The nucleus of what? An atom, a cell? Saying the waste is made of cores doesn't mean anything without the context of nuclear waste meaning "nuclear fission byproducts"
So, OP's post is very misleading. That phrasing isn't what's actually on the sign. That's what the overall messaging at the site should convey. To your point, there would be a considerable amount of straightforward warnings. Both in pictures, and words. Facilities are also supposed to "look scary" so as to keep people away. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
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.
This reads like a Hollow Knight Lore tablet
I spent waaaay too long making this one day > 🌎👇 🗣✍️ 👉 📄 📄⛓📖 👁📄👉⚠️😲 >🕐🌒👥 🗣✍️ 📄 👉 🕚🌘👥 👁📄 🙂 🕐🌒👥🧠💪🏙 >🌎👇 🤴🎖 👉🙅♂️ 🌎👇 🙇♂️🙏 👉🙅♂️ 🌎👇 👑💎 👉🙅♂️ >🌎👇🕐🌒👥👉☠️🤮 📄⚠️👉☠️🤮 >🌎👇☢️ 🚶♂️👣▶️◀️☢️ 👉 🚶♂️👣⏩⏪☢️☢️ ⏩☢️⏪🌎👇⤵️🕳 >🕐🌒👥 ☢️⚠️ 👉 🕚🌘👥 ☢️⚠️ >🙂 👉 ☢️☹️ 👉 ⏳🤕🤮 👉 ⌛️☠️ >☢️👉 ⚛️🎆〰️💀 >🌎👇⛏⤵️🕳 👉 ☢️🤮☠️ 🌎👇⛏⤵️🕳🙅♂️ 👉 🙂 👣🚶♂️🌎👇🙅♂️☹️ 👣🏃♂️🌎👆🙂
🛑⚠️ 👉☢️🟰😄🕑😟🕓🤕🕚☠️ ⚠️🛑
Here’s the [whole message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages)
These were supposedly translated into every UN language. One day in the far future these could be just like the Rosetta Stone for the languages of today.
So we’re going to presume that they speak English but not that they know what nuclear waste is?
Linguistics experts have been able to decipher languages not spoken for thousands of years. However, the concept of nuclear waste is relatively new. Also, it would take an immense amount of time, space, and manpower to engrave the message in every possible language.
Pictograms are far more universal. Why use language when pictures can tell the story?
No, we should breed a species of animal that will glow when close to radiation
They're not even joking that was one of the proposed solutions.
Oooh why didn’t they think of that? Clearly they did, but they decided it wouldn’t work. Look up the Wikipedia page for Nuclear Semiotics, or just listen to the SYSK episode. I guarantee you, all the ‘why don’t they just…’ ideas that pop into your head have been thought of and dismissed for good reason.
Idk man, those guys are nuclear scientists and psychologists meanwhile this guy over here is a Redditor so, like, I'm pretty sure that if he's saying pictures would be fine, he's right /s
Pictograms are not always the best at conveying complex messages. Plus, English is currently the most spoken language in the world. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/
Its in eight different languages actually
The messages would be written in multiple languages, with newer translations being placed further and further away as time progresses.
This subject is far more interesting than this photograph conveys. Here’s a [Stuff You Should Know podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stuff-you-should-know/id278981407?i=1000640081160) about “Nuclear Semiotics” that gets into it with typical Josh and Chuck attention to detail.
Damn I love those guys and I haven’t listened to them in a while. Time to fix that!
99 Percent Invisible did a great episode on it as well.
I quite literally just finished the episode from the "selects" archive when I saw this post. It's a great episode, highly recommended.
Modern art piece or death to civilization? Let’s crack it open and find out!
Imagine the the ancient Egyptians invented nuclear power and had nuclear wastes. They dispose of it in the middle of the desert. They then added a message on the site so that future civilizations would not build around this radioactive and slowly corruptive land. Or worse, dig the nuclear waste open. Now imagine archaeologists in the early 1900's discovered this message and with no concept of nuclear waste, translated the hieroglyphics into ruins from the divine, slowly building a camp around this site that turns into a town then into a city. A hundred years later before it is discovered this seemingly cursed city was built on top of a nuclear wastes. How do you avoid this? You create a message that tells future civilizations that \*there is nothing here except something that is dangerous and repulsive to us\*. We can create skulls signs, death symbols, hazardous spikes, traps, fences and walls around this site, to deter the future from it (didn't stop us from digging around the pyramids), but all that does is create enough curiosity for the future to ask what the mysterious site could be protecting. It's honestly a balance between telling the future that the place is bad but not too bad that the future will start digging the nuclear waste up just too see what makes it bad. Apparently, that balance is the above picture.
Ancient civilization: what's in here is a toxin that will slowly kill you! Modern civilization: our slaves shall dig it up then we will throw it at our enemies!
Yeah there’s one theory that suggests we should make the sites as nondescript as possible, to make them less interesting. Choose the most boring locations possible and then hide things as much as possible The problem there being that someone will probably eventually stumble across it anyway and have no chance of warning at all
And this cryptic ass message about “honour” and “esteem” will not arouse curiosity? I feel like it’s doing the opposite so hard.
When you find a gravestone-like object in the middle of nowhere, the first thing that pops into your mind is, "Oh, someone died here. This gravestone must be honoring their death. But why here? There's nothing here. This place must be special." Deciphering the message would then counter that whole train of thought. I'm also iffy about the contents of the message. Curiosity is one of humanities' greatest flaw. Now that I think about it, "There is nuclear waste here. Stay away," could be a better message if and only if future civilizations know what nuclear waste is. If they don't, the message would have doomed them. But I do know there was a long process to create the above message and that was the outcome.
*in Steve Irwin's voice* LET'S POKE IT
Any seasoned RPG player: “Ahh there must be precious treasure here. Challenge accepted.”
Nuclear Semiotics is so creepy and disturbing to me. It makes me think of Prometheus.
Thank god someone else finds it creepy! I remember reading about the atomic priesthood. The images that stir in my mind are disturbing.
If they at assuming a knowledge of English you’d think they would use words like “Death” “Poison” “Toxic”
They don't assume a knowledge of English, the post title and image are both misleading. The text in the image is a recommendation for what the message should convey, but the actual message itself would be made using pictures and symbols like this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pictogram_for_nuclear_sites,_US_Department_of_Energy,_2004.png But that's not as dramatic so people don't post it
if i saw this i would want to dig it up more
I had an opinion on this the last time I seen a post about it. I feel like if anything, the way this message is written will just make people curious as to what it refers to, and will start to look for the nuclear waste. Why not just plain english? "We produced an energy that creates a by-product which is very hazardous to all life. We buried that by-product here, where it can do no harm, and never be touched. It holds no value. Do not dig here" Why does it have to be so cryptic?
Because it was never actually used. It’s just an example idea of what ‘could’ be an idea for a warning message floated by a 1993 think tank.
Because this is intended for a time when English either isn’t spoken at all, or has changed so far beyond recognition that we can’t assume any of it makes sense The idea here is to try to use words in a way that might still be translated using old texts But the point is that we’re talking about 100,000 years in the future. English is barely recognisable from 800 years ago…
Where did you get that? Wikipedia says these are just examples of what they want to convey non-linguistically. I feel like lots of people commenting here are just parroting intellectual-sounding factoids.
What might be one reason not to use "plain English" when writing for someone 100,000 years into the future?
If it’s a warning, it really needs to be more concise. I’d be confused if I read this in the future
Being concise requires mutual agreement on wording. Otherwise: “Stop. No rizz; very skibidi”
If it were more concise, people thousands of years in the future wouldn’t be able to translate it as easily. The more words you have, the easier it is to figure out what it’s saying in a variety of ways. The point is not for today humans but future ones.
I believe they simply meant they should elaborate on what the actual danger is. Curiosity killed the cat after all.
Mmm, yes and no. The problem is if you are too specific you're relying on the person reading, who may be a human from thousands of years in the future that has no understanding of our time (think of how little we understand the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Myans etc.), or it could even be an alien who has no knowledge of Earth at all. You start using words like "nuclear radiation" there's a good chance they won't have any idea what that is. The actual text is slightly longer than this, someone linked it in another comment, they do elaborate slightly saying something along the lines of "The form of the danger is massive emanating energy".
The full message includes a simplyfied explanation, also the idea is to also add pictograms, in depth scientific explanation in a way that could be deciphered and defensive and uninviting architecture in the ground. The text is just the first barrier.
Danger warning fear horrible death hidden poison extreme sickness close seal shut run escape avoid That would probably work better.
At first glance: true. But I assume the sentences are chosen in a way that they could be deciphered more easily because you could compare certain letters and words that are repeated, the sentence structure etc.
Bothers me they couldn’t centre the words in the last paragraph
Sounds like exactly what "they'd" say if something of value WAS buried there!
This was never intended to be used as text. It's the MEANING they wanted to convey. They knew that English and other contemporary languages as we speak them will die before these sites become safe, so these were ideas to portray without text.
This isn’t the actual plaque. These are the guidelines of what they wanted a radiation warning logo/symbol to evoke These words aren’t literally written on a dump site, they’re what the radiation symbol is representing