151–160 of 287 posts
No warning works (even if an explicit one), when met with a curious being. See: Eve and the Tree of Knowledge (from Genesis) or Pandora and her box.
And when the beings are not curious, it is unlikely that they would develop technology, or be tempted to new, alien places.
I like the comic where the happy man has successfully plundered the nuclear waste. It contaminates him and he is observably less happy, though still exhibiting signs of above-average satisfaction with life. Then in the final frame, his beloved treasure stolen, he sadly dies of what appears to be thyroid cancer. His dying thought is that the person that robbed him of his ill-gotten plutonium squeezings will soon be su…
I imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks! Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?
That was my thinking too. The decision to label it as "waste" for the next 10'000 years seems so narrow-minded to me!
It's really interesting to me to see architecture used for its typical antithesis. It is typically used to bring a sense of bring out positive emotions, to inspire, to bring facility to humanity, to sanctify. Here it is being used to desecrate, to decrease utility, to ward away. As a hacker, I'm used to the thought of "what is the worst possible way I can make this UI", but it's cool to see it applied in an entirely…
I don't have to think too hard to make a bad UI. It comes naturally.
If a child draws like a child, that's probably not worth mentioning.
If a brilliant artist draws like a child, that's pretty damn impressive.
Honestly, reading this, I kept thinking to myself, "Man, this is just waiting to be turned into science fiction short story." It could go in different directions, future humans discover such a site, humans discover an alien analogue of such a site on $planet, aliens discover such a site crafted by humans on $planet, etc. Either way, there's potential for a good story there.
I like the comic where the happy man has successfully plundered the nuclear waste. It contaminates him and he is observably less happy, though still exhibiting signs of above-average satisfaction with life. Then in the final frame, his beloved treasure stolen, he sadly dies of what appears to be thyroid cancer. His dying thought is that the person that robbed him of his ill-gotten plutonium squeezings will soon be su…
I imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks! Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?
So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Additionally, I don't think the "no marker, anonymous patch of ground" plan is sound. 10000 years is a long time, which will hopefully be inhabited by peoples more advanced than us, and they could do a lot of digging in that time." If these people are more advanced, there's no point to teach them the dangers of radiation as they will be well aware of that already.
Society can lose information as time progresses. Modern medicine is only just starting to re-discover how important state of mind is when packaging, describing and using drugs. That's the case despite the fact there haven't been any large-scale catastrophes that caused the information to be lost. In 10,000 years who knows what we might have forgotten?
I like the comic where the happy man has successfully plundered the nuclear waste. It contaminates him and he is observably less happy, though still exhibiting signs of above-average satisfaction with life. Then in the final frame, his beloved treasure stolen, he sadly dies of what appears to be thyroid cancer. His dying thought is that the person that robbed him of his ill-gotten plutonium squeezings will soon be su…
>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 a center...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.
Alright! I'm getting close to the superweapon!
I did notice that "video game designer" was not part of the multidisciplinary team.
Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it.
You could even tier the messages, and use words that would likely be common and thus more likely to have been recognised based on discovering whatever other shit we've left around.
DEATH.
THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.
THIS MATERIAL WILL KILL YOU.
And progressively more complex and complete messages, etc translated into Chinese, Spanish, Braille, French, pictograms, what the fuck ever.
And if they're too lazy/careless to try and decrypt any of the fucking obvious messages, fuck 'em.
I'm never understood this marker system. Graves have been marked in a threatening manner so that they would not be plundered. It doesn't work. The point is to hide the waste. The system should be designed to progressively unveil warnings if some future man starts digging. Otherwise, you're just asking for them to dig it up. Another thing not mentioned is to design the container so that anyone who plans to excavate wi…
I thought it was pretty interesting that they weren't really talking about making the site "threatening", but making it "repulsive". Poor craftsmanship, ugly terrain, uncomfortable heat, low value materials, etc. Some of their design photos were very different from what I'd assumed, and pretty much immediately triggered my "eww" response. Not intimidating exactly, just uncomfortable.
Contrary to many of the comments here, I think they did a good job of considering what it takes to make something foreboding without sounding like "here be treasure." The pseudo-mystical messages sound hokey, but they're effectively a backup system in case the straight-up "This is atomic waste, here's a description of atomic waste" descriptions are incomprehensible to future generations. And the more primitive commun…
Wow, so maybe the Egyptian pyramids were indeed built (or at least - planned) by aliens, so to cover a dangerous site... let's dig under then to see if it's true!