this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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There are groups of designers who have the job of making symbols and systems that can survive for an extremely long time. One of their tasks was to design “signage” that might let generations thousands of years in the future not go poking around in nuclear waste yards. But the more crazy deadly and dangerous you make an artifact look, the more those future scientists are going to want to get into them.
This is not a place of honor
Is this loss?
This is the face you make when you realize that under there is the thing you have been looking for.
The mythical WMD, the one to eliminate your enemy, and finally bring peace to your peoples
Put it out of reach of humans without advanced tech. Under 2km of antarctic ice, in a deep sea trench, things like that. We are not talking millions of years, only a few thousand. And in case of accidents, water/ice is a great radiation blocker.
Yeah, I need these pants. They suit me.
Better off writing "this place is cursed and will kill those that enter"
They wrote that on the entrance to the pyramids. It didn't discourage anyone.
I wrote it on my mom's house.
This guy never watched Indiana Jones
The nuclear spike deterrent field has been a favorite of mine
This one looks cool, and I think that’s its biggest problem. It’s clearly a massive, man-made structure with no obvious purpose, yet with striking visual impact. To the hypothetical future civilization that is unaware of the dangerous nuclear waste, it basically begs to be investigated.
Probably something religious.
Yeah because desecrating religious sanctuaries has stopped humanity thus wait
Oh, I meant it more in the sense how archeologists/historians often say something was used for some religious or ritual purposes when they can't come up with a better explanation. See for example Stonehenge or roman dodecahedrons. There was also the idea for an atomic priesthood which would be charged with keeping the knowledge about nuclear waste sites.
His Glow will spread!
Some real Hyperion Shit going on here. Anyone from the web should prolly move on...😳
Oh man imagine jumping out of a plane and ramming one of those up your ass at full speed.
Sploosh.
If you are falling out of plane at full speed with no pant on.
You have bigger problem
Become the torus
Yeah iirc the absolute best solution proposed was to not put any markings at all and bury it deep enough that any future civilization advanced enough to get to it will probably realize what it is long before they actually get to it.
I watched a documentary about that: Into Eternity
What I thought was interesting about the film was the balance between entertaining a fantastical vision of some future explorer stumbling across the radioactive site, and the mundanity of most of the actual work.
One of the engineers said something like: "When we seal this up with so much concrete, there's no way you're getting in here without machinery. We should be more concerned about a future civilization that comes back here for radioactive materials when they've exhausted all other natural sources"
And then there's a whole section of the film about rules-lawyering the storage site. The dump was chartered by the Finish government to seal waste "for all time", and the engineers were mad that nothing is truly permanent.
Man this would be such a killer start or premise for a sci fi book
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.
I was thinking about this and their thinking was way too complicated. The symbol you need is bones. Bones are always associated with death and decay because after death, bones are the thing that's left.
And yes I know they thought of it but I think their dismissal of it is wrong. Their counter argument that it was once a symbol of something else by some culture, therefore. But again by its very nature it's associated with death. Any society capable of this excavation is also capable of thinking "hmm what did they mean? outside of our own culture of course" and will quickly figure out it's bad.
The number one site archeologists are interested in is a graveyard. Because it tells you a lot about the people buried there.
This is funny because it's a symbol of bones, not actual bones. You know laser etched onto a platinum disc (or whatever other alloy that doesn't degrade) along with other signals that death is what will happen to you if you dig there. Any civilizaiton capable of that kind of excavation will be capable of figuring out "This is a symbol conveying a message. The message is death, not marking a juicy graveyard".
And just like the other guy, I think your fear is more likely with these other ominiuos-but-doesn't-tell-you-why markings (if the language is lost). They see all those random spikes and will think "holy shit this is the mother of all sites".
I think the only way to get it taken seriously is to include depictions of the site and depictions of what radiation sickness looks like.
Make like a 100 page comic that starts with someone opening a cask and removing a fuel element, then dying days later, the element leaving contamination, which kills someone else months later, causes birth defects, etc until it's returned.
You're not going to scare a society into never investigating something, but you might be able to convince them to put it back and bury it again after they realize the predictions are accurate.
And what exactly do you make the comic book out of?
Because "pages" denotes paper and paper will disintegrate long before this place becomes safe
You carve it into the walls. Make the walls out of quartz or something that's not materialy valuble, but very hard to destroy and impossible to steal.
Yeah, Carl Sagan was like "skull and crossbones"
But of course everyone else wanted to over-engineer it, so you get proposed solutions like encoding messages in the DNA of plants, and color-changing cats with an accompanying viral song that no one's ever heard of twelve years later... 🤦♀️
Like, guys, if people today can't even figure out what it means, then it's not a universal and enduring message.
And then some of the suggestions would only serve to make it a glaringly obvious archaeological dig site.
Skull and crossbones is about as universal as you can get. Maybe some atomic diagrams and radiation symbols, and written warnings in as many languages as possible, just in case people still understand them. And a giant slab that someone could only drill through deliberately, requiring heavy equipment.
I can't believe these were supposedly some of the smartest people in the world, and yet they made the mistakes of assuming that future civilizations would be hyperintelligent and thoroughly inquisitive, while also not understanding any symbols from our era and being likely to avoid areas designed to seem ominous. As if egyptologists today respect the warnings on ancient tombs.
And yet they overlooked the skull and crossbones because it seemed too obvious. The whole point is that it's supposed to be obvious!!!
Atomic diagrams would be good for advanced societies, but societies in the bronze age or middle age advancment are the ones that we have to worry about. They won't understand atomic phyiscs but they are capable of excavation. Any fancy symbols might just intrigue them.
I think they underestimated the intelligence of possible future societies. Any society advanced enough to excavate this will be intelligent enough to ask "what does this symbol logically mean". They won't be limited to the 'bad-vibes' that the current ideas are heavy on (language aside).
Take a skull-and-crossbones. It might be taken to mean danger or poison. Or it might be taken to mean pirates or treasure. And if the future explorers did connect it with danger or poison, why wouldn't they also just think it was maybe a superstition meant to keep outsiders from getting "the good stuff," like the curses that were sealed into ancient Egyptian tombs?
What about when the time of Mammals is done, and the next inhabitant has a chitinous exoskeleton? I'm not sure they'd recognize bones as a sign of this place being dangerous.
That's just bones of a different nature. Any society capable of large excavation will quickly figure it out.
Technically yes, but in the context of symbols (which is what this is about) it doesn't work.
If you stumbled upon a sign with a bug exoskeleton, you'd think "ah yes, this means death"?
If I know there was a message a more advanced civilization was trying to tell me, fucking yes that's the logical conclusion.
With other random symbols like spikes, who the fuck knows what they're trying to say. Guess they were spike worshippers. How long have we been trying to figure out what the Easter island heads mean? Weird symbols don't work. Something innately tired to death, like bones, works as a symbol and a message.
There was a conference about this and Carl Sagan was invited, but couldn't come. He sent a letter suggesting to do just that - skull and bones symbol.
There's also a song to accompany genetically-engineered cats that change colors when exposed to radioactive material
https://youtu.be/amn3kn0XPLQ