Christ almighty. You could use that script in the intro to Tomb of Horrors.
So you’re saying that people aren’t going to continue to measure time by the day and the year? Those two are the most… self-evident of time measures. One rotation of the planet around its axis, and one orbit around the sun, easily measured at the equinoxes/solstices.
The rest are more or less arbitrary, but I’m not seeing how ANY human civilization born on earth is not going to at least measure years (even if as roughly as from Spring-to-Spring) and days. Most have also used lunar cycles as well.
That’s my point- it’s not like we use the movement of Arcturus in the sky, and some other civilization might use Aldebaran, and a third might use Betelgeuse. They all are on Earth- days and years are pretty much ubiquitous.
If the nuclear waste is valuable, why not extract the uranium, plutonium, and other good stuff before burying it in long-term storage? That way nobody has to dig up high-level waste.
As for the notion that time might not be measured by the day and year, hard as it may be to believe, that has already been seriously proposed at reasonably high levels. Replacing civil time by atomic time would completely decouple clock time from astronomical observations. And who knows what will happen over millennia?
Because terrorists.
No, really, that’s about it. The valuable stuff is valuable because it can be used in a breeder reactor, and breeder reactors can be used to make bomb materials, and so the political powers that be are afraid that if anyone anywhere ever makes a breeder reactor, the terrorists are going to make a bomb.
But we’ll eventually come to our senses and build breeder reactors (with appropriate security) anyway, and when we do, we’ll be happy to have that stuff.
Won’t they have super intelligent, telepathically linked dogs to tell them this shit anyway?
This marvel of Soviet technology appears to be fully operational…
That’s funny! Because I just pulled that “15 IKEA languages” out of thin air.
Didn’t even think about it.
We know a lot about the Romans because a) they wrote a lot of stuff in stone, metal and bone ; b) people throughout the course of human history have spent a **lot **of time and effort transcribing, translating and just plain copying Roman text. We know next to nothing about Carthage, by comparison (but then the Romans bear some of the blame for that…).
We write our shit down on paper, plastic and electronics. Paper’s archaeological value is almost nil - the woodworms and rats will get whatever doesn’t just rot away. CDs from the 90s are already decaying past readable, 80s style magnetic tape isn’t much better. I strongly doubt much will be left even 500 years from now.
So long as - like the monks - we keep copying stuff to new storage mediums, and so long as we don’t see a complete collapse of civilization, we won’t lose any data. CDs from the 1990’s may have decayed by now, but how many 1990 albums have been lost to history? None. Every single one is backed up on some computer somewhere.
And even if civilization collapses, we have so much data stored today that if future archaeologists manage to dig up 0.001% of the computers that currently exist, and can only retrieve 0.1% of all the data on each computer, they’ll have access to far more information than we have on Rome.
So here’s the thing : we already produce too much data for that to be realistic. We already produce too much data *daily *for it to be feasibly copied and stored for posterity. We’re already losing stuff that should be archived, but can’t because there’s not enough time or money to archive it on this generation of storage media.
And I’m not talking about cat videos and your cousin’s YouTube mixtape (although that does make up the bulk of daily data. That and pics of your dick, which is slightly less bulky but nothing to be ashamed at, you’re doing fine buddy). I’m talking administrative memos and government paperwork ; I’m talking day-to-day statistics, speeches & conferences & debates & census data & inventories etc… You know, the stuff historians jerk off to.
I don’t know about there being any 1990s albums lost - there might not be. I do know there is only **one **recording of French/Belgian 1960s music hall star Jacques Brel performing his most famous song (Le Port d’Amsterdam) going around. He sang it a million times maybe, but there’s no studio version, no album version, no recording session, no TV appearance, no radio play, nothing else left. Just the one live performance. And though yeah, he’s an old timer and he probably isn’t all that famous on the world stage ; he still is a household name 'round here. That’s just one example I’ve been made aware of recently and that made me sad because the guy was a fantastic human being.
There’s information archival triage going on **today **already. And we already know there’s plenty of stuff we’re just not going to get around to copying before it’s irretrievably lost.
But that’s just the thing : even if all of the computers we have today were perfectly preserved (we’re already far into science fiction), nothing will be retrievable a mere 50-100 years from now because hard drives and solid state drives just don’t keep. It’ll just be gibberish and white magnetic noise. And it’s a lot worse than the Roman stuff ; because if you find a fragment of a stella or half a page of a hand-me-down manuscript you can still make some words out, maybe guesstimate a sentence and whatnot. What do you do with 0.0001% random characters of a given text file in no particular order ? “Weeeell we can say this Lincoln fellow did like him some Es. Used quite a few of 'em, that he did. Yup. Yup. We can say that for sure.”
I think thats the point. In some weays we have a huuuuge amount of data on Rome, and also Egypt including some very mundane stuff. Like administrative records, personnel letters between nobodies, hell we even have a report on purchases for the Great P
Pyramid Construction.
But as a fraction of was produced; we have very little, probably less than a fraction of 1%. The problem is not that nothing of our era survives to their time, but we can’t be sure that this particular information survives.
Your example of Monks is instructiuve. Monks only saved what was perceieved to be valuable. How do we know in 3000 or 4000 CE, this is whats chosen as being worthy of being perserved.
The thing is, storage capacity is increasing faster than we produce data. We’ll reach a point in the near future where storage will be effectively infinite, and when that happens, my guess is that people will simply stop deleting things. Why bother? If a storage medium starts failing, just copy everything on it to a new one. Assuming civilization doesn’t collapse, 2000 years from now every piece of digital information we have now will still exist, buried deep in the bowels of some eldritch quantum network.
I saw someone lose a disk full of extremely valuable data just a few weeks ago. And, no, they didn’t learn their lesson, so it is only a matter of time before it is guaranteed to happen again.
My, aren’t we optimistic! LOL
I have the feeling that, if by some miracle the human race actually survives to reach that point in time, it will have done so only because it had already solved that problem along with many, many more.
But there’s a bottleneck there - the copying part. As I’ve said, we’ve already hit the analog => digital bottleneck. We just can’t digitize old records or old novels fast enough. Or newspapers for that matter. And it’s not like we don’t have the physical means to scan every piece of paper we print - or rather, we could… **if **we dedicated some money and effort and manpower into doing so. We don’t, by and large. So there’s some loss. And there’s also loss of digital information stored on obsolete tech, using obsolete file systems.
We’re getting better at standardizing all of that and ensuring backwards compatibility… to a point. And then we go the other way around too. Fewer and fewer PCs have CD or even DVD drives any more. Disk drives have all but vanished. Everybody now uses USB thumb drives - and those really don’t last at all. Who’s to say what form the next generations of storage will look like, and how easy it’ll be to copy/paste the whole of human knowledge on it ?
Obviously we manage to keep on keeping on - but we lose plenty on a daily basis. You mark my words : you want your dick picks to last until strange aliens rummage through the bones of human civilization, you save 'em on granite :D.
How many recordings of famous Roman musicians survive today, copied onto indestructible stone tablets?
If every CD and every spotify playlist on every hard drive is wiped out due to that solar flare that’s gonna happen in the next few decades, and we lose all recorded music except a copy of that gold record that was sent out on Voyager and a couple of was Edison cylinders, then we’ll still have more recorded music preserved for future generations than the ancient Romans.
Thing is, if a couple of people set up shop on a contaminated nuclear dump site 10,000 years into the future, and they all get cancer and die, then that’s what happens. They should consider themselves lucky they didn’t wander into a grey goo nanite site, or that island full of genetically reconstructed dinosaurs.
The other side of the equation is that super dangerous nuclear waste is very short lived, and long lived nuclear waste is not super dangerous, simply because that’s the way half-lives work. Yeah, if you drink tea laced with Polonium you’re going to die from radiation poisoning in a few days. That’s because Polonium has a very short half-life and is therefore extremely radioactive. However, because it has a very short half-life that means it is destroyed very quickly, and very soon almost no Polonium is left, and in 10,000 years you’d be lucky to find a few atoms of it. That’s why when you need Polonium to poison a defecting general, you can’t just dig it up in a mine, you have to manufacture it in a nuclear reactor.
All the Polonium that was created in the supernova that formed the nebula that coalesced into our solar system long ago decayed into other elements. And that’s why there are no naturally occurring radioactive danger zones. Sure, there are places that have more naturally occuring radionuclides than others, but not enough for governments to fence off those places with warning signs. Just places with slightly higher background radiation levels than others.
So low level nuclear waste will be a long term low level problem, while high level nuclear waste will be a short term high level problem.
Sorry, I really can’t get all that bothered about what is going to happen to the occasional explorer 10,000 years from now. We aren’t talking about talking about a global catastrophy like climate change, we are talking about a localized phenomena, that in on a grand scale will be irrelevant.
If we keep our civilization going that civilization is going to have Geiger counters, and will know that its there. If we lose civilization whatever caused the loss of civilization is going to be a much bigger hazard than a few plots of high radiation. The villagers of that time are going to have a lot more things to worry about than some strange zone that causes illness to those that travel there, be it the cybertnetic cockroaches from the year 3682, or the nanotech gravity wells circa 5467, or else famine, war and disease that is the standard lot of primitive peoples.
These signs are really more about making people today feel good about things, than actually having any real effect, much like the Golden record on the Voyager space craft which has basically 0 chance of ever encountering intelligent life but makes for a good PR stunt.
Those things you describe are all textual. Textual data takes up approximately zero space. If you break down hard drive usage by data type, all text combined is a rounding error. Now, maybe there’s still some textual data getting lost, but it’s not getting lost for lack of space to store it in.
Every time I’ve gotten a new computer, I’ve hooked up the old hard drive and just copied everything over, wholesale, because storage expands so quickly that it’s easier to do that and take up 1% of the space on my new hard drive than it is to actually go through the old data and be selective.
Obviously. But there’s some value in that, too. Serendipity being what it is, I was just now closing my video player on an old West Wing episode that featured NASA funding as a B storyline, and there was a great little speech about Voyager. I’ll try and transcribe it (but really, it loses much when not delivered with Bradley Whitford’s candor) :
As uplifting and soul-feeding messages go, timeless warnings about radioactive dumps are hardly on the same level as music in a space bottle ; but they still implicitly carry that same nugget of meaning : We Were There. We Mattered. We Left Our Mark On The Universe. And no matter how stupidly we end up destroying ourselves (and I guaranfuckingtee it’ll be over something positively retarded that could have easily been solved), nobody can take that away from us.
Plus it’s a fun thought experiment, and y’all can pry *those *away from my cold, dead neurons.
Seems to me there are two distinct problems here: communicating across millenia, and keeping the future intelligent beings safe from the nuclear waste.
For communication, as others have said any type of simple warning can be lost in translation. Just take the scientific approach and explain clearly and concisely the nature of the dump site. But how to teach them to read a lost language? A Rosetta Stone type is fine, but why bother with the cryptic, give them the same tools we use, a series of relevant “textbooks” starting with one of those pre-school books that associate pictures and words. “Books” would be some material that lasts millenia, and the pictures shouldn’t be apples or elephants cause they might not exist anymore. I think it’s best to put the explanatory text/diagrams on top, that’ll pike their curiosity and urge them to take all the material home and learn the language.
For safety, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Humans or visiting aliens that have no concept of radiocativity find the dump site, exclaim “ooh shiny! I wonder how it tastes,” then they go home and die in a week or 10 years. It won’t start a plague that’ll wipe out civilization though, and apparently they won’t travel back in time and punish us. At worst they’ll take out chunks and use them like we did with Radium, but we survived that and so can they. So do what my uncle does when he leaves the house unattended for long periods. He puts the electronics and some cheap jewelry right near the front door, thieves take those and leave the rest of the house alone. So put a small pile in the front chamber, unsuspecting future archeologists take those, get sick, and learn to leave the rest alone, perhaps adding their own warnings for future future generations.