[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.