13 ms·

/remind me 200 years. curious to what the people in 2223 have to say about us.

by w-ll 3y ago

notbeuller 3y ago
“What does “this is not a place of honor” refer to?”
- ggm 3y ago
  Some 20th century hazing ritual, involving massive amounts of plutonium.
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    Pretty hopeful that humans make it back with reading and writing in just 200 years after a big nuclear war.
  - whoopdedo 3y ago
    Clearly the ancients worshiped plutonium.
- boppo1 3y ago
  Nuclear waste storage site.
  - asah 3y ago
    Social media. /S
- Tao3300 3y ago
  "What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us... Wow they must have hid the really good stuff here!"
- notbeuller 3y ago
  It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That was one of the sentiments they were trying to express - through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
  - gizajob 3y ago
    I keep thinking that if you didn't want outsiders to dishonour your place of honour, that's what you'd write at the perimeter...
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      It's not about writing, this isn't like "Hey if we write in big letters surely they can read it" because there is no reason to think people will have English or even writing at such a distance in time. These are NON-LINGUISTIC messages. Their expression as written text is for our convenience in assessing the project, which is to deliver that message without language. "This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ? One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
      - gizajob 3y ago
        Yeah, I have a master's in philosophy and semiology, I know exactly what they're getting at, but at the same time almost any kind of message of warning is going to be misconstrued and inverted anyway. One may as well write: "Extremely radioactive waste" in English and a few other languages - the future culture will either be able understand that because they're still at our level, or they won't at all and have to work it out for themselves. Virtually everything we've found with an ancient curse we've completely disregarded, same for dynamiting our way into the Great Pyramid, and also "honour" isn't what it used to be, and as a concept regarded wholly differently by almost every society on earth, even between individuals in the same society, so I wouldn't even bother invoking a concept like that in a warning. The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.
p-e-w 3y ago
I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century people did or could have come up with. When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000 years ago understood quite well, and didn’t have much worse of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they yield are the vast majority of improved understandings. There’s a lot otherwise that maybe we haven’t made much progress on.
  - solveit 3y ago
    What are some examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us?
    - ggm 3y ago
      The rise and fall of the Nile. The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides. Where baby animals come from. How to make beer and bread.
      - p-e-w 3y ago
        > The rise and fall of the Nile. The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening. > The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides. Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location. > Where baby animals come from. There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA. > How to make beer and bread. Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on. The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.

/remind me 200 years. curious to what the people in 2223 have to say about us.

by w-ll 3y ago

/remind me 200 years. curious to what the people in 2223 have to say about us.

notbeuller 3y ago

“What does “this is not a place of honor” refer to?”

ggm 3y ago
Some 20th century hazing ritual, involving massive amounts of plutonium.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  Pretty hopeful that humans make it back with reading and writing in just 200 years after a big nuclear war.
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  Clearly the ancients worshiped plutonium.
boppo1 3y ago
Nuclear waste storage site.
- asah 3y ago
  Social media. /S
Tao3300 3y ago
"What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us... Wow they must have hid the really good stuff here!"
notbeuller 3y ago
It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That was one of the sentiments they were trying to express - through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
- gizajob 3y ago
  I keep thinking that if you didn't want outsiders to dishonour your place of honour, that's what you'd write at the perimeter...
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    It's not about writing, this isn't like "Hey if we write in big letters surely they can read it" because there is no reason to think people will have English or even writing at such a distance in time. These are NON-LINGUISTIC messages. Their expression as written text is for our convenience in assessing the project, which is to deliver that message without language. "This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ? One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
    - gizajob 3y ago
      Yeah, I have a master's in philosophy and semiology, I know exactly what they're getting at, but at the same time almost any kind of message of warning is going to be misconstrued and inverted anyway. One may as well write: "Extremely radioactive waste" in English and a few other languages - the future culture will either be able understand that because they're still at our level, or they won't at all and have to work it out for themselves. Virtually everything we've found with an ancient curse we've completely disregarded, same for dynamiting our way into the Great Pyramid, and also "honour" isn't what it used to be, and as a concept regarded wholly differently by almost every society on earth, even between individuals in the same society, so I wouldn't even bother invoking a concept like that in a warning. The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.

p-e-w 3y ago

I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century people did or could have come up with. When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.

steve_adams_86 3y ago
At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000 years ago understood quite well, and didn’t have much worse of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they yield are the vast majority of improved understandings. There’s a lot otherwise that maybe we haven’t made much progress on.
- solveit 3y ago
  What are some examples of things people 2000 years ago understood almost as well as us?
  - ggm 3y ago
    The rise and fall of the Nile. The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides. Where baby animals come from. How to make beer and bread.
    - p-e-w 3y ago
      > The rise and fall of the Nile. The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening. > The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides. Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location. > Where baby animals come from. There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA. > How to make beer and bread. Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on. The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.