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Admittedly, I haven't read the article, but the tone of the message suggests that it's not meant for future generations of our civilization, but for future gene
by periphrasis 10y ago
Admittedly, I haven't read the article, but the tone of the message suggests that it's not meant for future generations of our civilization, but for future generations of whatever cultures come after our civilization is gone.
There's a pretty remarkable old English poem that survived from Dark Ages Britain, in which the author marvels at the ruins of Roman Britain, wondering what giants must have once inhabited the land in order to build such things. From the sounds of it, these markers are targeted towards people like that, not our own immediate descendents who will already know it's a nuclear waste site.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago...and as such, any large monumental works are more likely to attract attention than to repel it. May even become a cult place of worship. More effective to bury and obfuscate the site entirely?
- yellowapple 10y agoIf it becomes a "cult place of worship", then that's probably Mission Accomplished; the faithful have a tendency to defend holy places against those seeking to defile them (read: dig into them and expose the world to nuclear waste). If they can be convinced that such sites are "God's Temples" and that defiling them will unleash all sorts of plagues (which they very likely will), then the current generation's job is done.
- stared 10y agoReligion in the service of natural selection? A nice twist. (E.g. all cultures without worship of holy places eventually perish.)
- periphrasis 10y agoMaybe. On the other hand if the place is visibly menacing, and anyone who visits it gets sick and/or dies, then wouldn't a culture otherwise ignorant of the dangers of nuclear waste quickly put two and two together and stay away from the haunted, evil place? Shrug I don't have the expertise to judge whether this will be effective or not so it's all just supposition on my part.
- phpnode 10y agoDo you have a link to that poem?
- periphrasis 10y agoSure, it's called The Ruin, and is available in the following collection: https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonnorsep00chadrich https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonnorsep00chadrich It had been a while since I read it, and on rereading it, I'm not convinced the narrator was ignorant of who built the ruins he is looking at. Nevertheless, it's a pretty amazing artifact of someone looking at the ruins of collapsed culture, imagining how grand it must have been in comparison to the bleak present.