
This Place is Not a Place of Honor (2006) - sdfx
http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor
======
kyleburton
Come on, have modern humans actively shunned any archeological site? Have we
even shunned hostile environments? I think it's the contrary, we're drawn to
them.

A plaque with all the UN languages is a rosetta stone, something of obvious
intrinsic value. The Periodic table too - to any potential future civilization
that hasn't already rediscovered those things, it may be a sought after source
of knowledge.

The site is also attractive to those who would wish to use what's there to
their advantage - as a weapon against their enemies, likely w/o really
understanding the consequences.

Too expensive to launch it into the sun, no other solution (if we're not going
to derive the value of reprocessing and actually use it up).

------
adw
I've been kind of obsessed with WIPP for years. Even if you don't buy the
reasoning, it's just... I used to work on science in this area: colleagues
were working on Synroc, and I was working on theoretical techniques which you
could apply to predicting how well it'd work. So it was on my mind anyway. But
there's so much in the WIPP report, the richness and depth of it, that who
cares if it actually happens? Seriously, the report's worth your time anyway.

I really couldn't get away from this. I used to do a lot of music. Here's a
track I made in '05/'06 off my record:
(<http://www.hiddenmusic.co.uk/releases/symbolic/>, free download);

<http://www.last.fm/music/Covert/_/A+Place+of+Honour>

Like I said; obsessed...

~~~
PebblesRox
Ooh, I like it. I have a design exercise that involves listening to a song for
inspiration. This will be perfect! Thank you for sharing. I agree that this is
a fascinating idea.

~~~
adw
Cool! I'd love to see what you come up with.

~~~
PebblesRox
Here you go!

[http://i920.photobucket.com/albums/ad42/BucketPebble/NoHonor...](http://i920.photobucket.com/albums/ad42/BucketPebble/NoHonor.jpg)

------
chaosmachine
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794205>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=773137>

~~~
hegemonicon
And more recently: <http://www.slate.com/id/2235504/>

------
fnid
During my work at a utility with lots of nuclear power plants, my boss talked
about this very issue. He described the problem and the proposed solution
being the tall objects sticking out of the ground.

One of the young people on the team quickly thought out loud, "Sounds like
Stone Henge!"

------
hegemonicon
This is a very hard problem to solve, as the very act of marking something
signals "Hey, there's something important here!" The natural curiosity of
whoever finds it is likely to override any respect they might have for the
warnings of a long dead civilization.

~~~
mdemare
Yes, this is the same problem that the Pharaos tried to solve, and look how
well that turned out.

~~~
curtis
If we're using the pharaohs as a guide, then perhaps we should make a massive
monument, mark it with the most creative signage we can think of, and then
bury the nuclear waste somewhere else.

------
byrneseyeview
They could have concentric circles of increasingly deadly threats: start with
tripwires, end with landmines. If every time you get closer to the nuclear
waste, you're more likely to die, you will probably get the idea.

~~~
decode
If you can make tripwires and landmines that still work in 10,000 years, you
can probably do better things with nuclear waste than just put it in a cave.

Remember: the earliest known writings are less than 6,000 years old. We're
talking about planning for almost twice that. This is an incredibly long
period of time, in human terms (though not in geological terms, which is what
created the problem in the first place).

------
astine
How about a skull? Pictures of people dying of radiation?

I can't see giant monuments doing anything other than enticing people to dig.
However, reliefs and images of people dying of radiation poisoning might be
less ambiguous.

------
ramanujan
Good sci fi. Silly for the government to care about this. I mean, really,
_10000_ years?

If future civilizations are technologically advanced, detecting radiation
won't be a problem.

If future civilizations have fallen back to the stone age, spatially localized
buried nuclear waste is going to be the least of their problems. It would be a
rounding error in the annual death rates.

