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  • Jim Roothamjrootham@mastodon.acm.org
    Jun 30, 2026, 8:14 PM

    @PavelASamsonov I get the joke, but anybody capable of digging that deep will be able to protect themselves. Dangerous radiation, has, just about by definition, a short half life.

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  • CanageekCanageek@wandering.shop
    Jun 30, 2026, 9:12 PM

    @jrootham @PavelASamsonov So it depends on how much you have and it's really non-intuitive how long it will linger. So all of your really short stuff like I131 will go away quickly, but even something with a relatively short half-life like Cs137 could be dangerous for centuries if you have enough of it.

    Now couple this with history is a lot shorter than most people think: 10 half lives of cesium-137 ago and the US hasn't been founded yet

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  • CanageekCanageek@wandering.shop
    Jun 30, 2026, 9:14 PM

    @jrootham @PavelASamsonov So you have stuff that is spicy enough to cause a lot of problems, they could very easily still be heinously dangerous 100 years after a societal collapse.

    Plus in previous technological regressions, it's been very uneven. You actually had a lot of metal working and agricultural advances during the collapse of the Roman Empire, but large-scale understanding of construction techniques was lost.

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  • CanageekCanageek@wandering.shop
    Jun 30, 2026, 9:15 PM

    @jrootham @PavelASamsonov So it would entirely be plausible that knowledge of nuclear physics was lost, because it's not relevant to day-to-day life, whereas mining techniques stay the same or advance, because they're needed and used on a day-to-day basis

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