Dr. Conca asks the question - How will STAY OUT!! be written 5,000 years from now. When we have had some kind of apocalypse, all society is gone, no one remembers America even existed, let alone how to read English. But we are still drilling for minerals.
This science fiction notion of how to warn future humans about buried radioactivity has resurfaced now that
- the defunct nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is back on the lips of Congress as,
- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said interim storage for spent nuclear fuel is fine for over a hundred years
- the Senate is trying to pass new laws on nuclear waste disposal based on a Blue Ribbon Commissions recommendations,
- President Obama has authorized Secretary of Energy Moniz to move forward with planning for a separate repository for nuclear weapons waste, and
- our existing nuclear waste repository in New Mexico is getting ready to open up again.
More than 60 years of study has provided scientific consensus that subsurface disposal - or storage - is the best place for nuclear waste. So if we are going to bury it for thousands of years, many people think we have to warn future generations to stay away from the material.
With nuclear waste accumulating at the surface at the various plant sites around the U.S., society needs a repository in the next century or so, but we have much more time than that to decide on the messages.
Or, to decide there should not be a message at all, except maybe a cartoon showing radiation.
Languages evolve fast. English of the 11th century bears scant resemblance to the English of the 21st and places of human settlement also come and go, shaped by war, climate change and other forces. Words not only change, they also die out. Today, dead languages include those that, in their halcyon days, belonged to the most advanced civilizations. It took decades to unlock the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs only a few thousand years old, and Mayan symbols as well since 700 AD.
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