[snakeyjake]

> It's impossible to design a nuclear waste store that lasts 10000 years

Please help me understand. Society isn't going to "forget" nuclear chemistry.

It is perfectly possible to design a container that will remain intact for ten thousand years.

It is also perfectly possible to find a location that will be geologically stable for ten thousand years. We've already done it.

Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

Hell, write the warning in Sumerian. Or Esperanto. Or Toki Pona.

There is a strain of misanthropic doomsday fetishists who for the last two millennia have been constantly predicting the collapse of mankind.

I assume that they believe that humankind is stupid and destined to fail and that only they are smart enough to realize that in 12,000CE a neocaveman will try to dig up radioactive barrels like a moron.

I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

I do not understand why they have let the dystopian young adult fiction they read in their formative years infect their brain like a disease.

We are not going back to a hunter-gatherer society you (edit: deleted for "civility").

edit: And the entire "how do we craft a warning for the dumb future of idiotic humanity" makes even less sense when you spend even forty femtoseconds thinking about it. IF humanity has forgotten nuclear chemistry AND IF humanity has lost the ability to read warnings THEN it doesn't matter. They don't have the infrastructure needed to transport the waste long distances. Any pollution/harm will be localized to a deep-ass cave and the three people unfortunate enough to have opened the barrel. Fuck them. Who cares? It makes no difference.

Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

[wanderingstan]

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

It’s worth noting, however, that Sumerian was forgotten for nearly 2000 years: from ~200CE until the 1900s.

I agree it seems unlikely for a language to be completely forgotten again, we can’t be sure.

[rbanffy]

> Sumerian is 5,000 years old. We understand Sumerian. We are not going to forget Sumerian. A warning written in English is not going to be unreadable in 10,000 years.

The rate of change of our technologies is accelerating wildly. I assume they were thinking that losing written language and replacing it with something we haven't invented yet would be a perfectly plausible evolutionary path. Whoever lives there 10,000 years from now might be a distant descendant of our civilization and, if we are optimistic, will be to us what we are to cavemen. A couple revolutions and they might even not remember we existed. Or have misconceptions about us that can hurt them - let's say they think the radioactive site is one of the cities we lived during an ice age. They might also be completely alien to the idea of industrial scale nuclear fission - because they have been using fusion for so long, and because fission existed only for a short hundred years or so - radioactive waste might be not on their top 50 guesses as for why did we build that place.

> I do not understand what they are basing their predictions on.

Looks like a worst case scenario - civilizational collapse, loss of technology and historical records... If we assume the happy path, we don't need to do anything - we can even assume they'll be able to burn all the high-grade waste in MSRs in the next 100 years and be done with that.

> Please, help me understand why so many people who outwardly appear to be intelligent waste even a moment thinking about this.

Because caring for others is a hallmark of our civilization, and because we know the damage those materials can cause to our descendants and because we assume they'll be like us, we empathize with them.

[troyvit]

Why are we making fun of the Sumerian copper merchant though? Because his customer wrote his complaint in clay in a climate that -- even 5,000 years ago -- was pretty dry.

We don't do that anymore. We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years. That isn't misanthropic doomsday fetishism, that's happening right now.

So there goes a lot of information. Nobody is going to see that negative Yelp I left of Knott's Berry Farm, and everybody is going to have to relearn how to build anything like we have today.

What about energy? Most of it still relies on non-renewable resources that are getting harder and harder to extract. If we ever did have a global collapse, say due to nuclear war, conventional war, a lucky solar flare or gamma ray burst, covid done right, an ice age, asteroid collision, what have you, we won't have many pitch springs just leaking fuel all over for us to burn like we did last time. Instead we'd have to find another way to bootstrap ourselves back to the level where powerful energy output is possible. There will still be plenty of petroleum under ground, we just won't know it's there.

So yeah I see lots of reasons why we'll lose the knowledge and ability to bring ourselves back to this level if there's a big enough catastrophe, and ten thousand years is a long time for something (or some things) to go down. One could even argue that the decline has already started, and we're going to go out with a long, drawn out whimper.

But in your favor I think we're forgetting that humans have been and always will be tough, curious assholes, so honestly centralizing our nuclear waste, sealing it up, and leaving it in a mountain is way above the bar we normally set for ourselves. It might kill a few of our future cave-people, but eventually they'll put up their own signs and eventually figure out how to weaponize it.

[542354234235]

>We write our stuff down in volatile memory and mostly live on coasts that are going to be awfully wet in the next thousand years.

There are over 3,000 towns with a population over 10,000 people in the US. Any random Middle school or Highschool library in those towns would be more than enough to give a future society an excellent grasp of modern science and engineering. There are also over 3,000 colleges in the US, whose libraries would expect to give advanced understanding.

Just because we now have unfathomably more information digitally than Sumerians ever had doesn’t mean we also don’t have unfathomably more information printed as well. If one set of encyclopedias in one grandma’s basement is found, that is more condensed knowledge than was produced by thousands of years of early societies.

[troyvit]

Cool. Now they just have to last 10k years. I'll add that the last person I know to be in Colorado State University's library observed almost no books, Just computer stations.

[_dain_]

You hit the nail on the head. It's from that era of anti-nuclear hysteria and overpopulation doomers. Collapse stories are an expression of vanity. "Après moi, le déluge."

[snakeyjake]

They just don't understand the arrogance they exude.

"We are on the path to ruin. I have foreseen it. You are all blind sheep."

Bitch, humanity is fine. Get over yourself.