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Symbology and Language: How to say "STAY AWAY" 10,000 years from now
Alpine
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Wiki) near Carlsbad, New Mexico is going to hold nuclear waste with a half life of 10,000 years to cool down after being used for energy production, with waste dumping scheduled to continue until 2070.
For the next 100 centuries, this area will be unusable land. Digging and excavation will be dangerous. Linguists, anthropologists, scientists, even Sci-Fi writers and futurists have been asked to create a way of warning future generations that this area is hazardous, and have settled upon a bunch of pillars and a wall.
Given that no language in the history of the earth has lasted in the same state for longer than 10,000 years, they needed a symbol that seems foreboding and gives off that "stay away" sense of looming.
I think that the monolithic pillars out in the middle of a desert is going to seem more of a wondrous oddity like Stonehenge, the moai of Easter Island or the Pyramids. They're going to pique curiosity in a few thousand years, rather than strike fear.
So, D&D, how would you keep people of the future out of your backyard if you had a few tonnes of nuclear waste buried under the yard?
For the next 100 centuries, this area will be unusable land. Digging and excavation will be dangerous. Linguists, anthropologists, scientists, even Sci-Fi writers and futurists have been asked to create a way of warning future generations that this area is hazardous, and have settled upon a bunch of pillars and a wall.
Given that no language in the history of the earth has lasted in the same state for longer than 10,000 years, they needed a symbol that seems foreboding and gives off that "stay away" sense of looming.
I think that the monolithic pillars out in the middle of a desert is going to seem more of a wondrous oddity like Stonehenge, the moai of Easter Island or the Pyramids. They're going to pique curiosity in a few thousand years, rather than strike fear.
So, D&D, how would you keep people of the future out of your backyard if you had a few tonnes of nuclear waste buried under the yard?
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Can someone explain to me the problems with using nuclear energy to create energy, using nuclear waste to create Hydrogen effectively for free, and then using the energy released from fission to store the Hydrogen and Oxygen as free, portable, clean energy cells?
I don't see the fucking problem.
I mean, OK, lots of nuclear waste producing flammable gas, fine. Forgive me for the gross generalization, but if this guy can rig up something that involves boiling gasoline out of scrap metal in his back yard in his free time I'd think the collective intelligence of our planet could figure something out.
You are silly.
They didn't have computers for those 10,000 years. In 10,000 years, if we're still alive, they will still know how to translate English and how to read our present signage. Who knows what they will speak, but the requirements for that knowledge to be lost are little short of "Jesus Returns and Erases Language"
And by the way, if the resulting fuel cells are going to be irradiated, feed it to fungi.
Especially since it's so hard to overcome human curiosity. I mean, put skellingtons up and they'll think they've stumbled upon a gravesite.
Edit: Man, there might be intractable issues in mechanical language translation.
And hey, the Computer? It makes keeping information harder. Everything we have is much more ephemeral. Carving shit into stone made sure that shopping lists lasted 10,000 years. Putting it on a floppy makes sure it lasts 5.
And anyways, say the future isn't Star Trek. Say it's Fallout. What then? Assuming a continuous evolution towards the Singularity or whatever is a bit narrow-minded.
Then the very water itself would be poison, and we need not worry about a single site filled with glowing green slag.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
So. Yeah. Gotta agree with electricitylikesme, records- and translating those records- are critical. We do a hellishly bad job of that as-is; look at the number of unmarked open-pit mines the western US has around, for crying out loud.
Some of those are radioactive. Bonus. :P
To me the point isn't the actual protection, it's the thought experiment of how to deal with accurately presenting an idea to a foreign culture that doesn't share any reference points beyond a similar planet.
Really, this isn't that different from the First Contact thread.
It's a very strange choice.
As is narrowing it down one possible symbol which is, by itself, pretty damn arbitrary.
I bet they all looked at each other, thought "Governments eh" came up with pillars took the money and bunked off for dinner.
Swhat I would have done, it's not like they'd listen to a real objection.
So you honestly think we'll have a harder time holding on to English than to Egyptian?
In this dire future have all things made of paper and silicon been evaporated in one fell swoop?
Do you honestly think that, even though we have managed to retain this: http://earthsci.org/aboriginal/Ngadjonji%20History/external/The%20Ngadjonji%20Tribe.htm
We will fail to retain the Shakespeare?
I'm sorry, but if the world has gone through that much, we'll have evolved to feed off of uranium anyways.
No the assumption has to be mostly like us but with history forgotten.
I really think there's no symbol in the world that could do that so I guess a big wall is as good a choice as any.
Well, we can carve into substances far more dense than the romans ever could.
It should be made out of some superdense stone or metal, buried at least 100 feet into the earth and rising at least 200 feet out, and the message should be carved in all the world languages roughly in line with each other.
This would not only serve as a thing that could survive anything short of a head-on nuke, but would also act as a modern day rosetta stone in the offhand chance all out data goes corrupt.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Nothing says "go away" like a big fuckoff pyramid.
I like syndalis idea. Someone really should make a physical universal rosetta stone, since languages are probably going to start dying out with the increase of globalisation.
I especially expect any archeologists who might be wandering around such a site would have read up on such.
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Morning: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/world/asia/11tribal.html?ref=asia
Languages are being hunted down and recorded like crazy right now, world-wide.
People do actually plan for this stuff already.
Earth magnetic poles flip, temporarily reducing earths magnetic protection.
We run out of energy to power the computers on such a wide scale?
Ten thousand years is a very long time.
#2 Memories
#3 How the fuck do you run out of energy.
To act like this time, we're immune to civilization-wrenching change, because we've invented computers and crap, at a time when something like 50% of the planet hasn't even got a fucking telephone, is to simply not understand the lessons that history has taught us.
We are not immune to catastrophe. Hell, things are changing so fast nowadays that it's even less likely that a civilization 10,000 years from now will have any idea what the fuck was going on now.
Books barely last 500 years. Especially modern books printed with crap paper. Not to mention the digital to paper discrepency.
Humans live for 80 years and memory is completely unreliable in any useful way. Not even going to last two hundred years or more without a physical representation, that's just completely invalid. And you can't write down everything.
Lose the "top of the food chain" arrogance and actually think guys.
Mike said what I was thinking but better.
We have 12,000 year old stories still.
We have fucking paintings from cavemen still.
And, unlike back then, we have the written word, and we have written the fuck out of that word.
If every computer on the planet was erased tomorrow, we would still have insane amounts of information on hand, a rather large amount of it written in English, and a good portion of it in varying levels of protection. Not to mention that language 10,000 years from now will still be chock full of words from thousands of years ago.
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Again, the kind of disaster you guys are talking about would have to be mass extinction-level.
I dunno, some dumbshit far-future hippies would probably just start worshipping it. Won't they be surprised!
It could happen.
So?
Big big rocks hurtle through the sky and Bruce Willis in a space shuttle probably wont be able to stop it. That's not unreasonable, or even untrue or unlikely!
The point is survivors.
If the world just continues as it is for 10000 years then the point is moot isn't it.
Or, depending on if they are in a dark age of history with vastly diminished technology... they may see the loss of hair and teeth as a sign from the gods.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Actually the suggestion was intended to be a way of convincing a government to put heavy thicknesses of dense material over the site well in excess of any non technological culture to uncover.
Tricking the money pinchers to be responsible for once.
I'm pretty comfortable with assuming a culture that could dig through a huge thick solid pyramid would be able to detect the radiation.
So, this is one of those absurd hypotheticals along the lines of "what if everyone becomes allergic to meat?" or something. I mean are we talking about like "What if a bunch of tree people are the last survivors of the human race?"
If I was some fantastical ruler of a dark age/wild west/mad max country, and I found a god-plate in the desert I couldn't dig through... I would commission my slaves to dig a tunnel under the plate.
But now this is getting silly.
I stand by my pillars-o'-awesome suggestion... and maybe a plate of the same material over the ground between the pillars to make excavation difficult.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Yeah? A very real possibility is a pandemic, a fucking asteroid, since it happens and I consider it absurd to dismiss it, or the magnetic poles shifting which may or may not be due soon.
Assuming the world wil continue as is because the monkeys can use lightning is, to me, just as absurd as tree people. Do we have to fight now?
We really, really don't know that much about what life was like in the civilizations 10,000 years ago. Really. We have limited writing but it's very hard to separate truth from allegory from metaphor from fiction from whimsy. There's little frame of reference. That was around the time agriculture was invented. Agriculture, as a concept.
Right now, in the west we value knowledge and learning and so seek to preserve books and study archaeology. That wasn't always the case, and it won't always be the case. Look at Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamyan, the 1400 year old statues that were bold statements by a beautiful and multicultural kingdom of Ganhara in sixth century Bamyan. Utterly destroyed because the powers in charge did not in any way value the past or its lessons and artifacts.
What you're doing is you're looking at the relatively recent Western techno-intellectual hegemony of the modern age and both A)Assuming cultures over the next ten thousand years will have the same priorities, and
All we need is a few centuries of anti-intellectualism, fear, and mistrust and you could easily see much of our progress reset. Odds are there will be pockets of enlightenment but how are we to assume they retain and preserve enough of our culture, language, history, philosophy, and technology for people 10,000 years ago to understand enough of it?
10,000 years is a long fucking time.
"It's a pointless hypothetical" is baseless arrogance, and irrelevant anyway.