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The hard part of this challenge is not necessarily just the titanium but also communicating the rules of the game. Even if the game board is intact, how will a
by mherdeg 13y ago
The hard part of this challenge is not necessarily just the titanium but also communicating the rules of the game. Even if the game board is intact, how will a future civilization know what to do with it?
One of my favorite "designed to last thousands of years" document is the alternately dry and scintillating 1980s/1990s Sandia Labs report on how to communicate with future generations about nuclear waste after the collapse of the U.S.
The well-known part is http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%... . The part that's gotten some recent press is this language, which was not an actual written message anyone suggested be used at a nuclear waste site, but was instead the panel's consensus on the message that the site should somehow communicate::
""This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward acenter...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.""
But there's quite a lot more good stuff in there about how to communicate with future people who might not speak English, or any language at all. Some cool, detailed descriptions (with pictures!) of a "spike field" type landscape to keep people from inadvertently using the nuclear waste site as a shelter.
And one panelist writes: "A marker system should be chosen that instills awe, pride, and admiration, as it is these feelings that motivate people to maintain ancient markers, monuments, and buildings."
It's very cool stuff to read — you get to watch a panel of very smart people think very far into the future about how to talk to people they'll never meet.
- nnq 13y agoAbout the Sandia Labs report... imagining myself as a future archaeologist, such a place would only attract me! even if I were a bronze-age post-apocalyptic culture "wise man", if I could somehow figure out that there is a poison in there, I could only think "cool! we can use this poison against our enemies in the next battle! maybe some of our slaves will die digging it up, but boy, we'll sure make a killing with it!" ...and most other things they assume seem wrongly optimistic about human nature: something that instills pride and owe would only communicate that there is probably something of value in there, therefore something that is worth getting or stealing! (most ancient tombs were robbed, you know!) ...imho the best bet for such a place would be to make it inconspicuous and hard to open: for example, after properly cloaking everything, you could make the actual storage rooms for the dangerous stuff be part of some "stone"/concrete "walls", with no entrance, and have "dummy rooms" with "dummy content" (for whoever actually digs beyond the cloaking and warning signs) surrounded by these "walls" - no modern archaeologist would, for example, consider smashing what seems like a solid granite wall to look for a hidden chamber inside it if there is no sign of it.
- supergauntlet 13y agoAssuming that this future civilization is sufficiently advanced, wouldn't they have the ability to detect what's inside the ground without actually digging? I know we can through (I believe) echolocation, why wouldn't they? Then they would see a cavity that's been sealed on all sides by concrete. However I suppose by this point they would have also discovered radiation and nuclear reactions so it might be a moot point.
- delinka 13y agoI believe the assumption is that a future civilization will be less advanced. Should society collapse, you can expect knowledge to be lost and advancement to cease. Sure, we hope that our civilization will continue to advance, but we plan for the worst and leave the message in simple language in the hope that the last remnants of mankind will survive by avoiding a serious threat left by their ancestors.
- lotu 13y agoIf the future civilization is advanced then the warnings are unnecessary. They already have the technology to deal with radiation, in fact it is possible that a future civilization would want to mine one of these sites for fuel. This is actually why I feel the whole exercise is pointless.
- johnchristopher 13y agoThere is a really nice documentary about finland future-proof attempt to store nuclear waste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmWadizC8AQ - Into eternity. that deals with the same topic. It shows how they are building it and how they thought about how to prevent future generations to go there.
- wpietri 13y agoRegarding communicating the rules: One way is to write them in basic English, and then bury one of these with it: http://rosettaproject.org/ http://rosettaproject.org/ It's a disc, meant to last thousands of years, that contains parallel texts for thousands of languages. The theory is that if they speak something descended from any language today, they can use the parallel texts to decode the rules.
- Svip 13y agoSurely, just leaving a French-English dictionary should do the job. People will likely speak either French or English in the future, surely!
- outside1234 13y agoI think you mean English or Mandarin, since nobody (probabilistically speaking) speaks French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...