Friday, May 19, 2006

Look! Look! Something Fabulous Buried Below!

The U.S. Department of Energy has been grappling with what type of warning signs to use at Yucca Mountain and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) nuclear waste storage facilities. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has mandated that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be.

Plans for the Yucca Mountain site include twenty-five foot monuments, intended to be inscribed with text and pictographs warning visitors of the dangers below, as well as a series of nine-inch markers embedded in the earth. Surrounding the area will be several large information-center monuments in the shape of the universal radiation symbol.

What freaking morons. Build a structure guaranteed to attract future attention. It would be like the pyramids... something GREAT has just gotta be inside!

What they need to do is just fill the shafts with rock and dirt and at about a hundred feet down from the surface, or far enough down so that any ground penetrating radar we can imagine wouldn't spot it, pour a ten to twenty foot thick (or fifty foot... pick a number) slab of reinforced concrete, leave a few human and animal skeletons on top of the slab (that's a really good clue), and then finish filling up the hole with soil and dirt indigenous to the area.

If civilization survives for the next ten thousand years they'll have exact co-ordinates of where it is and what it is -- no need for sign posts -- and will know not to mess around there.

If civilization does not survive, whoever and whatever is wandering around 10,00 years from now will not have the technology to drill thousand foot deep wells, or to dig up the place out of curiosity... if we leave NOTHING on the surface. Not a sign, not a clue. Nothing that would attract a future caveman or grave digger to the spot.

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