• A Million-Year Hard Disk made out of sapphire
    74 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Lankist;36769710]The goal is to keep people from being hurt, not to keep them out at all costs. Nobody really cares if somebody finds a nuclear waste dump. The concern is that we don't want it to become a giant deathtrap for ourselves in the future. We want to warn people away because it's dangerous. That isn't accomplished by making it [I]more[/I] dangerous.[/QUOTE] The best option as far as I see it for keeping people out of such sites is making in invisible to people as feasible. Make so it's not detectible to anyone without the tech to safely dig it up and put it someplace that is unattractive to settlement. Warnings will just make people wonder why the fuck they're trying to tell us to 'keep out.'
[QUOTE=jediken21;36776895]Why don't they make it out of diamonds and then it lasts forever?[/QUOTE] Better yet, if you really want it to last forever, why don't we code the warnings into a ROM and leave it there in a Game Boy?
[QUOTE=Pierrewithahat;36779694]And there's a really good chance that at the very least fragments of English will survive for the foreseeable future, what with it being one of the biggest languages in the world and all.[/QUOTE] I don't think you quite understand how retartedly long Ten THOUSAND years is
[QUOTE=BLOODGA$M;36776548]Well 10,000 years ago we didn't exactly have any real reliable means of archiving things like that, and the people back then were probably more concerned with eating the bears before the bears ate them than they were with making sure people 10,000 years down the road would know how to read their stone carvings. Now we have stuff like electronics and these newfangled sapphire disc thingies instead of stone tablets, and I imagine along the way between today and AD 12,012 we'll do a better job at keeping our info around than our ancestors did. Assuming we don't first decide that blowing up the planet would be cool.[/QUOTE] Our means of recordkeeping (aside from developments like these) are still not survivable. Most CD's DVD's and hard-discs will decay to the point of illegibility within our lifetimes. Tape cassettes are already almost gone. In 10,000 years the only first-hand records left will be the ones literally carved into stone, and even those will be mostly gone. Shit, our electronic recordkeeping has a SHORTER longevity than older means. To save those records will be yet another game of historical phone-tag. [editline]15th July 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=latin_geek;36777556]10000 years ago they didn't have a way to document everything ever and make it incredibly easy for everyone to see, I seriously doubt we're going to be stupid enough to just forget the entirety of the internet/encyclopedias/books in general[/QUOTE] You underestimate how long ten thousand years really is. Shit is going to be [I]different.[/I] Humanity is going to be completely [I]unrecognizable.[/I] The 121st century simply won't understand fuck all about what they're looking at any more than we would understand them, and that's assuming records survive. With as little information that will survive such an incredibly long period of time, nothing short of the ultimate Rosetta Stone would make any of it legible.
The Long Now Foundation has already created the ultimate Rosetta Stone, called the [url=http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/]Rosetta Disk[/url], in case you didn't know. I'm not kidding when I say this is the most well-documented era ever. Sure, our digital media will disappear, and our books aren't quite as durable as they could be, but it was much worse at previous points in history. Seriously, the Long Now Foundation is incredible. They're the guys behind the [url=http://longnow.org/clock/]10,000 Year Clock[/url], a monument to the passage of time, which features a mechanical computer made of parts that won't decay for at least 10,000 years and is both powered and synchronized by the passing of the sun. The first one is located halfway up a mountain next to a commercial spaceport.
[QUOTE=TheDecryptor;36765563]Binary is pretty damn fundamental (true/false, on/off, etc.), but encoding the information is much harder. How is an alien civilisation supposed to know we encode our information in octects? (We could easily be using 2/4/8/16/32/64/128/etc.), even if they can decode binary into decimal, how are they supposed to map that to something usable (Guess what 01100001 stands for). That's what I kind of find funny about all these nuclear waste signs, a future civilisation with enough technology to decode these disks, should also have things like geiger counters, they'll already know the stuff is radioactive before decoding the disks.[/QUOTE] It could be possible to encode fundamental mathematic principles, like first few prime numbers, Pythagorean theorem, etc. If you can successfully convey one of those fundamental properties of math you could in theory from an entire communication process.
what about using the periodic table to convey the fact that it has radioactive materials inside? Surely it'd be more or less the same, even in 10,000 years.
[QUOTE=Sparkwire;36786214]what about using the periodic table to convey the fact that it has radioactive materials inside? Surely it'd be more or less the same, even in 10,000 years.[/QUOTE] The letters will be rendered arbitrary nonsense come 12012, and the arrangement might change with the arrival of some bizarre, unanticipated stuff, or maybe it'll be redesigned to be better sorted or accommodate more information. There's no telling what will happen.
Yeah, elemental nomenclature is arbitrary. By that point in the future, we'll probably either be using some other method of classification, or civilization would be in a decline and nobody would know what the fuck it means. Most people here are assuming amazing sci-fi civilization come 12012, but it seems far more likely at the rate we're going now that we'll be seriously struggling to survive by that point. One would need to account for both possibilities.
A nuclear labyrinth would be awesome in a video game.
A true gem of computer engineering.
I think a huge printout of Postal's ass would be more than enough to keep people out.
Seal the filled cavern with a giant stone slab, on which is engraved an incredibly detailed image of people opening the vault, walking up to the barrels, then falling over dead. I can't think of a more simple way to convey "DO NOT FUCKING ENTER."
[QUOTE=Zally13;36769810]Again, it's a joke. If I really thought using mines would be an effective way to keep people out from a dangerous place, I'd be insane.[/QUOte] idk, seems to be pretty effective on the DMZ
I recently watched an episode of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. This is the same dilemma that was discussed in the show. This language expert was studying the rate of usage of words in an intelligent language. He figured out that basically any intelligent language is going to have common words and less common words and when you graph all the words and how often they are used it should make a 45' slope. We can use this information to analyze information and determine if it is intelligent or not. In this situation I think we should treat humans in 10,000 years as aliens because of how vastly different it is possible for them to be. Another point brought up was that in order to provide information that will last a very long time an interesting solution would be to encode the information into unused portions of human genes because they we reproduce themselves and the information will last for an extremely long time if the species survive. I think that the premise of storing information over long periods in time is extremely intriguing. Some scientists theorize that aliens encoded information in unused portions of our genes to communicate with us, but there is no evidence to suggest that yet. I think that it is very possible that a civilization sent out pods of DNA to populate other planets because they came to the conclusion that transporting themselves would take to much energy so instead they just sent DNA to other planets that they knew would eventually evolve into intelligent life. That might be out on a branch to much but I think that it is very possible.
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