I watched a gripping documentary this evening on the construction of a tunnel / radioactive waste burial facility. Onkalo is located on the west coast of Finland and is designed to store the country’s national nuclear waste until it is no longer harmful to life. This amounts to around 100,000 years.
If you think that human life has been around for a very small fraction of that (see the images above for a sense of the scale), and most of the designed ‘things’ have never lasted that long, this makes the design and implementation of such a storage facility a really huge proposition.
The tunnel and related storage areas will only be completed post-2100, but the design team take into account things like their assumption that there Earth will be due another ice age in around 60,000 years from now. They consider the various possibilities of new or different civilisations coming and going.
Into Eternity is a fascinating documentary. Find it online if you get the chance.