so, tumblr user notaplaceofhonour, what is your personal favourite possible solution to the long-term nuclear waste warning conundrum? and, if it's different from your favourite, what do you think is most likely to work?? tbh i keep coming back to maintaining separate sites with maps of where nuclear waste has been stored, with plenty of carved stone and metal linguistic warnings THERE in, y'know, all the languages we can muster sort of thing, and clearly explain that there are no such artifacts to be found at the sites themselves, but if they're really that curious they can go there once the stars look like *this* [picture]. which ofc doesn't address the problem of what if they don't understand any of the languages but DO follow the maps directly, but i feel like it's the most likely to work??? idk
My favorite, which is also probably the most impractical and just generally A Bad Idea, is the atomic priesthood. I don’t think it’d work and there’d be a lot of unintended consequences as the religion develops. But it’s a fun idea lol. very Fallout.
I like the star map idea!
What’s most likely to work imo is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and leaving warnings in as many different forms of communication as possible, all paired together. Boring answer, but probably most effective. If one fails, they have the others, and putting them together gives enough context clues to get the gist.
But one I don’t know if I’ve seen explored that I think could be effective is pairing the other messages with actual images of the potential destructive effects of radiation and nuclear technologies. Radiation poisoning, burns, photos from Nagasaki & Hiroshima and Fukushima & Chernobyl, etc. It’s more visceral and direct than the foreboding architecture, and it’s something a layperson who doesn’t have to be, like, an archaeologist or linguist to decode, can look at and recognize as an undesirable thing they wouldn’t want to happen to their body.
