maybe nothing of value to you is here

That is legitimately a massive problem that the nuclear waste warning projects are aware of and trying desperately to counteract.

Like, every post about them on tumblr going “lmao let’s be real, if I saw this shit I would stop at nothing to explore it” is highlighting the central conceit of the yucca mountain project.

The project is VERY aware of humanity’s tendency to explore, and the people involved are tormented constantly by the fact that ANYTHING they do to indicate “this specific place is extremely deadly and there’s nothing valuable here, GO AWAY” is going to become a fucking MAGNET for treasure hunters, explorers, adventurers, mystery enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists…like, the MOMENT it’s discovered, people will flood that place.

That’s what makes the project so fascinatingly difficult! There’s so much they have to convey, but at the same time, they have to do so without making the site itself interesting in any way, and without making it significant. Many possible warnings don’t incorporate a message at all, focusing instead on simply making the site as ugly, inconvenient, and unimportant-looking as possible so that it’s just never disturbed because nobody is interested in getting close. (It’s why seemingly crazy ideas like the color-changing cat priesthood are actually more viable than the seemingly “practical” example above, which still depends on written warnings guaranteed to be extremely interesting to future humans AND depends on the idea that those future humans will be able to decipher any of our languages. The most viable ideas focus on exploiting superstition and the subconscious, rather than LITERALLY trying to communicate “This place is not a place of honor” etc in as many words. Those are general ideas to be gotten across, not a script.)

The impossible catch-22 of the nuclear waste warning projects is that they absolutely MUST communicate the level of danger and the importance of keeping your distance…while also being acutely aware that warnings on the walls of ancient burial sites about the horrible curses that would afflict anyone who disturbed them did jack-fuck all to dissuade archaeologists.

Anything we do to make the warning seem important will guarantee it’s disregarded, but if we fail to make the warning unmistakable enough, we’re responsible for whatever happens to the humans ten thousand years in the future who suffer from our mistakes.

The idea of a total cultural disconnect- the loss of knowledge and language and oral tradition and written history to this extent is nearly unimaginable to us as modern people, but we know that civilizations have been utterly lost before, leaving behind only vague memories as myth and a writing style that can’t be deciphered (Google Minoan Civilization and Linear A for an example of this.)

Humans LOVE to explore. We love mysteries. We love finding hidden civilizations of the ancient past. Any *anything*, even a single stone tablet with a few sentences on it will make a site IRRESISTIBLE to future people if they have lost all records of how to decipher our language.

The best bet for how to house deadly amounts of radiation so that it will never be disturbed is to bury it deep in the middle of fucking no where totally unmarked and hope no one ever puts anything interesting within 100 miles of it.

Hey, um, what the HECK is color-changing cat priesthood??????

One of the proposed solutions is to breed genetically modified cats that change color in the presence of significant ammounts of radiation, and then fabricate myths and fairytales about how your cat changing color is a signal of terrible danger, and then hope that these myths stick around in the collective consciousness through songs, poetry, paintings, oral tradition, etc.

Another solution proposed the creation of a priesthood similar to the Catholic Church tasked with preserving the knowledge about these nuclear containment sites for thousands of years.