63 ms·
When you bag your trash and bring it out to the curb for pick-up and eternal storage in a landfill somewhere you normally think it's just that: eternal. But the
by superkuh 5y ago
When you bag your trash and bring it out to the curb for pick-up and eternal storage in a landfill somewhere you normally think it's just that: eternal. But there's no reason to think that the landfills of today will be inviolate in the future. They're absolutely jam packed full of useful rare metals and materials. I think eventually garbage mining will be a common practice.
In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" they have this book scanning machine that just shreds the books then scans all the sheds super fast as they fly by and reassembled computationally the documents (like how DNA is read). Sometimes I worry about a future where this is possible with garbage and garbage mining is happening. Not only would a garbage mining company be able to sell the materials but the vast amounts of detailed very personal information stored discretely in each person or family's bag would also be invaluable. There would be economic motives to automate information retrevial from landfill garbage mining.
Depending on how far in the future this happens it could either be a privacy nightmare or a cultural treasure.
- acwan93 5y agoIt’s like that Futurama episode where Fry had to teach the future how to generate trash in order to build a garbage ball to save the planet. In the future, everything was recycled, including Bender. They thought Fry was the weird one of having the concept of “throwing things away.”
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoOxyrhynchus could happen all over even today, with things we've lost as recent as the early 1900s I'm sure. It's incredible to try and search for, say engineering practices we've lost, that happened only one or two generations ago. I'm sure there are buried textbooks that would uncover such practices that someone in academia thought, "Well it's probably time to throw this out." There are buildings today constructed with materials processes that are exceptionally difficult to find information on.
- rendall 5y agoThat's interesting. Are any of these buildings famous?
- underseacables 5y agoReminds me of how the USPS scans the front and back of every piece of mail; I think they may do this with packages. If machine reading is anywhere near current levels it would be trivial to create a map of you, and every person, organization, etc that you get mail from.