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We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice. Even assuming there is some sort of civilization ending event,
by dhruval 12y ago
We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice.
Even assuming there is some sort of civilization ending event, and specific knowledge of nuclear technology disappears.
People are certainly smart enough to recognize a pattern of distinctive symbolism and learn to associate it with danger over time.
A good example is cargo cults that sprung up in the Pacific Islands in WW2. Groups of people without much previous contact with modern civilization learnt to associated 'airplanes' dropping aid supplies with food. Despite having no previous knowledge of what planes are and how they function.
I imagine future primitive cultures would learn to associate the nuclear hazard symbol with illness in a similar manner. And would probably end up constructing their own mythical narratives around the symbols.
- justinpombrio 12y agoThe hope, I think, is to warn people off before they start getting sick. (I agree with what you're saying, though.)
- objclxt 12y ago> We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice. Symbols are far, far less translatable than words. We were unable to translate hieroglyphs with any real success until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and the pictograms used could be matched back with known writing systems. There are symbols today that you and I would instantly recognize but will be meaningless to a child born tomorrow (the floppy disk icon, for example). Symbols and pictograms can be repurposed and reused: indeed, the article gives the example of the skull and crossbones, which has significantly changed meaning over four hundred years. The cargo cults you're talking about have come about in years and decades, not millennia. The timescales being talked about here are far, far different. If anything, you're not giving humanity enough credit for its ability to evolve over the next 10,000 years.
- dredmorbius 12y agoAnd symbols in regular use for millennia can change meaning utterly in a few years. The swastika, for example, first used over 10,000 years BC, whose meaning changed utterly over 12 years in the first half of the 20th century.
- dhruval 12y agoYou have misunderstood. Once some individual humans get sick or die. Even very primitive human cultures in the vicinity of nuclear sites would very quickly notice a pattern. Any symbol that was used consistently near nuclear sites would be come to be associated with danger. In a very primitive cultures with no knowledge of science, visiting the sites with these symbols would end up becoming some sort of religious taboo. The argument isn't the the meanings of symbols can't change. But rather that humans are smart enough to notice patterns and communicate them with others.
- gfodor 12y agoIt also raises the interesting question of if humanity is all but wiped out, how ethically responsible are we to warn the next race of Whoevers that roam the Earth? Should we even care about beings whose society has no knowledge of the universal symbol for radiation from our time? We treat other species differently than ourselves, what about future descendants of ours who are not-quite-human? What if they are alien visitors? You can really go down a rabbit hole if you throw out the assumptions about who or what creatures may come across the place. I think we should just assume these future humans will have technology at least as good as ours and hence will have instantly searchable archives of information to determine the meaning of our symbols. If not, there are bigger issues for them then some radiation in the ground.
- seanflyon 12y agoWhat you are talking about takes more than ten thousand years.