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Their stated aim is to encourage long term thinking. It appears they scored a bullseye with your response.
A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
91–100 of 124 posts
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's an interesting point, and i don't think it can be resolved quite so neatly. to the people building such monuments, or writing such texts, the activity may have been closer to what we now refer to as "history" or "natural philosophy" (or even "civic infrastructure"). the fact that _now_, we have independent traditions referred to by those terms, and so categorize the ancient practices under "religion" is quite co…
> i would be quite offended if, some thousand years from now, the aesthetic decision is dismissed as primitive superstition. Why? I can't imagine being offended if people today , ignorant of the true motivations, dismissed it as primitive superstition, let alone a thousand years from now when I'm long dead.
look on my works, ye mighty, and dismiss them as mere superstition.
did the use of the word "offended" trigger this comment? fine, then i would not take offense. my point is this:
i prefer to be remembered by a future that feels it can learn something from the past. it would be sad to me to find out that the people of tomorrow do not regard my contributions.
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#93And to think we're all here building b2b SaaS
Those ad impressions won't optimize themselves!
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#94The fact is; this kind of knowledge are mostly pursued by people called "lunatics" and this is taking science held back in fringe cases. But sometimes lunatics are right too
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just, stop. Why do you mind what others do? > A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero". Nor does it anywhere say that it means that or that it should mean that. To me the the leading zero in front of 1931 means “Do you think a thousand year is long? Think on a longer scale.” It is a vibe. > Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant…
> The sentients of 101931 won’t be confused because they will know that 01931 refers to our time. They may well be confused, because by then this silly "long now" stuff will be long since forgotten.
Consider that every culture's predominant method of writing has undergone significant changes over a given millennia long period. I'm not about to confuse the date on a photograph of a wax tablet for a modern one.
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#96[flagged]
> Leading zeros don't do what you think they do It's has been pretty normal for clocks with digital displays to include leading zeros for seconds, minutes, hours and/or days for about a century. Doing the same for years, while unusual, doesn't seem particularly confusing. And of course, there is precedent with things like ISO86011 - where 0400 is the year 400 CE. I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation…
> I'm not sure why one would assume it was a truncation of 101931.
For the same reason one assumes that 03 refers to 2003 rather than 1903 (or 1803, or ...).
Of course, it's the surrounding historical context that resolves such confusion.
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#97Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#98I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
Graham Hancock the fraud?
I think author and journalist is how he presents himself. Or pseudo-scientist according to Wikipedia. But yes Graham Hancock.
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#99>It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Kinda sus of this.
It can be hard to recognize the heaps of dirt on the riverbanks. The internet claims the Hoover Dam could last 10,000 years, but I don't believe that for a second.
Dams are not permanent structures without maintenance. If they are holding back water or if water is flowing through them, they will eventually erode and their foundations will collapse.
Because the main structure lacks rebar , it will last longer than most modern structures, but it won't last nearly as long as 2,000-year-old Roman structures made with volcanic ash and lime because it uses Portland cement.
There is bigger and more immediate problem. Hoover Dam ends with siltation long before concrete erodes. The Colorado River carries massive amounts of sediment. Eventually, the lake behind the dam will fill with mud, turning the dam into a giant waterfall. Once water starts flowing over the top of a arch-gravity dam rather than through controlled pipes, scouring at the base will undermine the foundation.
Re: A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it a bit silly. When we refer to 70 CE or 500 CE we don’t add zeros in front.
It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
It’s so arbitrary. We have at least a few hundred million years before Earth is entirely uninhabitable. Why not use 000001931, then? Not ambitious enough, I guess.
Our written history already goes back over 6,000 years. We can actually understand what people back then wrote. We don’t need unbroken year numbering, or leading zeros, to understand that. The calendar has been reset and changed multiple times. It seems like a mis-focus on something that doesn’t really matter.