Finland’s nuclear-waste repository is trying to protect humans from contacting the waste over the next 100,000 years. A filmmaker making a documentary states that that far in the future “all knowledge” will have been lost.
Presumably, he makes this statement because we have little from 100,000 years before our time. There is an obvious reason for that, however: 100,000 years BP is pre-history. It is pre-writing. There were humans around, but they weren’t leaving behind any of the written records (or, for that matter, huge cities that span tens of thousands of square kilometers) that we produce prolifically today. I think that something of that will be left 100,000 years from now.
Regardless, accepting the premise, is there any solid archaeological evidence from humanity of 100,000BP?
I don’t have the background knowledge to answer your question, but I’d like to add that there’s a section in Umberto Eco’s excellent book “The Search for he Perfect Language” about communication with our very distant descendants in tens of thousands of years from now, when presumably knowledge of our time, languages, and nuclear technology will be lost. What is needed is a way to warn these people not to get too close to sites which we designate as nuclear waste repositories.
After discussing sign languages, a modern specifically designed Rosetta stone etc., Eco argues (on the basis of a serious study conducted on behalf of some government agency) that the best way would be to install a sort of priest-like caste or society - a group consisting of people guarding the knowledge that these sites are taboo, perpetuating the existence of the cult throughout the millennia through cooptation. While the precise knowledge of what is so dangerous about these sites might well get lost over time, the idea that there is something special about them and that one should stay away might survive.
It sounds like sci-fi stuff, but it has seriously been contemplated, and I find the idea just fascinating.
With respect to the idea that in the far future all knowledge of today’s world will be lost and we must therefore find some way of warning people hundreds of thousands of years from now to stay away from nuclear dumps, I think the rationale was that sometime between now and then civilization will be destroyed either by a man-made holocaust or an astronomical event and that a new civilization will slowly develop which may have no specific knowledge of what preceded it. Such a civilization may not be able to read our warnings to stay away from nuclear waste dumps and therefore some graphic, pictorial, non-culture-specific warnings should surround the dumps.
Science-fiction speculation about future disasters wiping out all knowledge aside, I’m more interested if all we have left from 100,00 years ago is the stone tools Colibri mentioned.
The Statue of Liberty will still be sticking up out of the desert sand far into the future. Don’t count on humans or those damn dirty apes to understand the significance until Charlton Heston shows up though.
Humans probably used lots of plant material, but that decays very easy. We do have some remarkably well preserved wood spears in Germany from about 400k years ago. We also have lots of fossilized bones of humans (well, lots in an archeological sense). We have shells made into beads from about 75k years ago.
Evidence of campsites/shelters goes back to 500,000 years ago, and of the use of fire to 300,000 years ago, or possibly much earlier.
The only materials durable enough to have much chance of surviving that long were stone and bone. Humans no doubt used many other materials, including wood, plant fibers, animal skin and fur, etc. but none of that is normally preserved over such long periods of time.
But 100,000 years ago there simply wasn’t much material culture to be preserved. There were no permanent settlements, only campsites. There was no agriculture, no pottery, and no art work. Humans did not alter the natural environment in very significant ways.
Frank Herbert described something similar in the Dune series. The Missionaria Protectiva of the Bene Gesserit order implanted superstitions in different cultures that would protect their members.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I’m not sure why there’s much concern about keeping sites protected for so long. The most radioactive isotypes will be long decayed after 100,000 years. Only the low-level radio-isotypes will remain by then, with greatly reduced risks to the environment. Perhaps the risk of contamination in 100,000 years is not worth the cost of protecting the site for that length of time.
Another thing to consider. If a site is marked by objects that are durable enough to last 100,000, it’s possible the durability of those objects may make them valuable in themselves. And thus attract their own looting.
For example, we could make gold alloy plaques and markers to warn future people. They would easily be durable enough to last the duration, but not the greed of intermediate people. Perhaps any marker that can last that long could become similarly valued, either for the material itself or the ancient artifact.
I think the best protection, if we truly wanted it, would to make the cache permanently inaccessible. Probably some sort of ceramic containers dropped into oceanic subduction zones.
I would imagine that it’s a given that Yellowstone will blow its top sometime soon (for geological values of soon). That would almost certainly wipe out all human life in North America and eliminate the growing season for a couple of years resulting in worldwide famine and a serious population drop. Would civilization survive this? I don’t think so. I could be wrong, though.
This is the key problem in my mind and I’m in total agreement with your points.
The Egyptians put warnings and curses all over their tombs, including an active priest caste, and it did nothing to dissuade people from looting the tombs both in the time of ancient Egypt and continually to the modern period. The only tombs that survived were the ones so hidden that no one knew they existed.
Proposing a religious cult that could even last 100,000 years is either stupid or naive in the extreme. How many people are still worshiping Marduk, Isis or Zeus? Abraham’s God has had a remarkably good run of it, but even he’s been morphed into a trinity with that upstart Jesus guy. If you go much further back, the most we know about religion is that people liked figurines of well-endowed pregnant ladies.
In an idyllic Utopia, people 100,000 years from now will know enough to understand the warnings, and should have nanotech perfected sufficiently to make radiation damage negligible anyway. But in the aftermath of any kind of catastrophe we’ll have hungry biker gangs or warlords who will take the steel for salvage and the waste for dirty bombs regardless of the risk. Either way, the warnings will not matter.
So… yes… the only way to keep people 100,000 years from now away from nuclear waste is to bury it so deep and so inconspicuously that they simply do not know it exists, and cannot just stumble across it. Or instead of burying it, throw it out into space. Space is too expensive now, but might be simple in 50 or 100 years.