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That makes sense though. I can hardly imagine any effort put 10.000 years ago that would be valuable now, with the technological difference.
by Levitz 3y ago
That makes sense though. I can hardly imagine any effort put 10.000 years ago that would be valuable now, with the technological difference.
- reactordev 3y agoYeah humans can measure progress afterwards but are terrible planners for anything beyond ourselves and next of kin.
- bobthepanda 3y agoI mean, how would you even do maintenance over 10,000 years? At some point your descendants will be too far to remember the reason but not far enough to need it and they’ll stop wasting resources on a nothing activity.
- withinboredom 3y agoPeople still do some maintenance on the 8k year old Afghanistan water system (underground aqueducts) because they are still used today. I’m failing to find some good sources, but when I was there in 2008, it was something the Army Core of Engineers was investigating on my base.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThat solves an immediate need though, not a once in a few ten thousand year disaster.
- kaz-inc 3y agothis[1] places them at 3k years old: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat
- withinboredom 3y agoThat sounds more right to me than a memory of some random conversations from nearly 20 years ago.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoYou could write exactly what this is and what you’re supposed to do with it on a big stone plate outside… Then in 10,000 years, find that an entire religion, culture, and wars were built around the simple maintenance instructions.
- bobthepanda 3y agoOutside, on Mars. So we have to assume we will maintain the ability for human Mars travel in ten thousand years, that anyone can read English or whatever in ten thousand years, and that the supporting religion didn’t lose any of its wars. To put this in perspective our first evidence of any human agriculture was 12,000 years ago.
- hattmall 3y agoYeah, maybe, ever heard of the Georgia guidestones? They lasted ~ 30 years...
- blamestross 3y agoProgress is exponential until "surprise it is a sigmoid!" I'd argue we are there already, but even if we aren't planting seeds is rarely a waste in the long term.
- dehrmann 3y agoOnly 5,000, but look at the pyramids. They're cool to look at, and the construction is fun to think about, but they're utterly useless. For any sort of 10,000 year space project, there's little (1%) harm in having a 100-year cool-off period to see if it still makes sense and how far technology has come.
- pchristensen 3y agoRoad networks in cities are probably the most durable creations.