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How to build something that lasts 10k years

bbc.com

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Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#41

Post by ddxxdd »

phito wrote: post #39
vincnetas wrote: post #10

Finland is building nuclear waste storage facility which is planned to last for 100.000 years. There are quite few interesting design decisions to be made taking this lifespan in to account, for example if current civilization will be wiped out, what symbols you should put on a door to discourage someone in future to opening the door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... https://www.youtube…

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 was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it i…

Why not exploit human evolutionary psychology for the task? A lawnmower warning label would communicate more to future civilizations than a poem translated in several dozen languages. (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VJYAAOSw~xlaqj-d/s-l1600.jpg)

Gory imagery always gets the job done.

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#42

Post by wnkrshm »

ptah wrote: post #9

If you can somehow come up with a way to keep time using a forest, it would be way easier

You can count rings of a tree you cut down - if you have a system for relating/storing their planting time deltas then you can measure by cutting down a tree and planting new ones.

Edit: Apparently, together with climate data you can determine the year the tree was cut down hundreds of years after the fact [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#43

Post by oftenwrong »

"The Rosetta Stone didn't survive thousands of years in the desert because of some intrinsic cultural value. It survived because it's made of stone. ... The future disagrees about what is and is not important, and why. That's the defining characteristic of the future. No one today cares what the Rosetta Stone actually says, yet it is more important to us (as the key to hieroglyphics) than it was to the society that made it."

http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20171104052354/http://carlos.bue...

(I am a bit amused to realise, after reviewing the Internet Archive snapshots, that this article has changed quite a bit over the years.)

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#45

Post by adolph »

Snoopy may last that long:

After Stafford and Cernan docked with Charlie Brown and re-entered it, Snoopy's ascent stage was sent on a trajectory past the Moon into a heliocentric orbit by firing its engine to fuel depletion (unlike the subsequent Apollo 11 ascent stage, which was left in lunar orbit to eventually crash; all ascent stages after Apollo 11 were instead intentionally steered into the Moon to obtain readings from seismometers placed on the surface, except for the one on Apollo 13, which did not land but was used as a "life boat" to get the crew back to Earth, and burned up in Earth's atmosphere.) Snoopy's ascent stage orbit was not tracked after 1969, and its current location is unknown. In 2011, a group of amateur astronomers in the UK started a project to search for it. It is the only once-crewed spacecraft still in outer space without a crew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#46

Post by drjesusphd »

phito wrote: post #39
vincnetas wrote: post #10

Finland is building nuclear waste storage facility which is planned to last for 100.000 years. There are quite few interesting design decisions to be made taking this lifespan in to account, for example if current civilization will be wiped out, what symbols you should put on a door to discourage someone in future to opening the door. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... https://www.youtube…

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 was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it i…

These messages were listed in succession in an art installation as part of the Amsterdam light festival. An intriguingly dark contrast to the rest of the atmosphere.

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#48

Post by dsqrt »

drjesusphd wrote: post #46
phito wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it i…

These messages were listed in succession in an art installation as part of the Amsterdam light festival. An intriguingly dark contrast to the rest of the atmosphere.

Doesn't embedding these messages into art defy their very purpose of being a warning?

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#49

Post by gambiting »

ddxxdd wrote: post #41
phito wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it i…

Why not exploit human evolutionary psychology for the task? A lawnmower warning label would communicate more to future civilizations than a poem translated in several dozen languages. ( https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/VJYAAOSw~xlaqj-d/s-l1600.jpg ) Gory imagery always gets the job done.

I suppose it's because without any context a pictogram like this could be interpreted as a letter or a symbol, not an actual warning. It's not immediately obvious looking at this that it's a human hand being stabbed. Also it doesn't convey that the thing stabbing you is invisible. And if you figure out that the stabbing thing is burried then you might want to dig it out to use as a weapon against others.

Re: How to build something that lasts 10k years

#50

Post by masklinn »

oftenwrong wrote: post #43

"The Rosetta Stone didn't survive thousands of years in the desert because of some intrinsic cultural value. It survived because it's made of stone. ... The future disagrees about what is and is not important, and why. That's the defining characteristic of the future. No one today cares what the Rosetta Stone actually says, yet it is more important to us (as the key to hieroglyphics) than it was to the society that m…

> "The Rosetta Stone didn't survive thousands of years in the desert because of some intrinsic cultural value.

I get the point but the reference is pretty crummy, the rosetta stone is a very young artefact on the scale of long-term preservation (most extant bog bodies are older).

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