[timewizard]

> a lot of our technology is sheer accident , serendipity, the way the cards happened to fall

What an absurd ahistorical fallacy.

> but thanks to mindwarping science fictional yellow-covered literature

Thanks to this you seem to have a confused and fantastical idea of the past and of our future.

> Imagine the pleasure of discovering one of these nice radioactive time-bombs six thousand years from now. Imagine the joy of selfless, dedicated archaeologists burrowing into one of these twentieth-century pharaoh's tombs and dropping dead, slowly and painfully.

Nonsensical. Uranium is part of the Earth's crust. There are plentiful natural deposits that already exist.

Aside from that it's not as if archaeology of ancient kingdom sites is perfectly safe now. There are various airborne health and physical hazards in doing this work.

> Shouldn't we give some thought to leaving them a legacy a little less lethal and offensive than our giant fossilized landfills and the radioactive fallout layer in the polar snows?

Peace requires prosperity. I'd trade all the land wars in history and those to come for some nuclear waste.