4 ms·

Care to explain a little? The link in the discussion is a broken error page.

• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• tofof 8y ago
  "This place is not a place of honor" is the first line of the most basic signage created by a Sandia National Lab project aiming to keep future explorers/archaeologists/looters/settlers unharmed by a nuclear waste dump. The problem space is very difficult - it'll be something like AD 12000 before the waste is effectively harmless. That's further in the future than all of civilization[1] is behind us. The earliest surviving language specimens are proto-heiroglyphics that are less than 5000 years old. It's difficult to craft a message that won't be taken like all the myriad curse-promising looter-deterrents guarding e.g. plundered tombs throughout the world. It's especially unconvincing when the hazards we're trying to protect future humans from include things like a hundredfold increased risk of cancer.....after inhabiting the site for twenty years. It's further difficult to attempt to ensure that the message survives that massive amount of time. The designers came up with a linked system where elements are supposed to reinforce and index each other, with redundancy of information and presentation at multiple levels of complexity, with written and pictographic forms, attempting to avoid overstatement, attempting to ensure that protective structures cannot be usefully scrapped and re-used for new construction, ensure that the communications resist deliberate vandalization, etc. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world#Rise_of_civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_world#Rise_of_c... claims "Though early 'cities' appeared at Jericho and Catal Huyuk around 6000 BCE,[32] the first civilizations did not emerge until around 3000 BCE in Egypt[33] and Mesopotamia.[34]"