Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
It’s a nice thought experiment, but absolutely pointless.
Any warning about an unknown-to-us danger that is even just 500 years old or from a different culture is being treated like a superstition by us.
A good example of this would be the Yei River in South Sudan (and other areas along the equator) where the local tribes traditionally didn’t settle near the river because the river spirits didn’t allow it and brought misfortune and sickness to those who didn’t respect them.
Modern settlers disregarded that because it’s clearly unscientific, and rivers are great for trade and transportation.
And then the people living near the rivers started going blind, their children suffered from constant seizures and stunted development, and we still don’t have a cure.
Don’t you actually make a very good point for this effort?
The problem with the superstitious warning was exactly that it was aimed only at the people of the time. It had no way to preserve it’s warning beyond cultural and intellectual changes. Same as the radioactive symbol having too little inherent deterrent in its design so it caused radiation incidents by people who did not know what it means so we designed a new one that’s specifically meant to be intuitively “dangerous” to people without any prior knowledge.
So in a similar way, we need to have a way to create warnings about nuclear waste - or a river - that are not limited by the current generation and the way they understand signs and meanings.
Thats just proof that we have designed systems to pass this knowledge down through time and cultures, and can improve on it to be more resiliant to shifts in culture and time going forward.
Comparing modern civilization to tribes doesn’t make sense. We have computers, digital storage, steel, and many other things that will let us preserve and share knowledge in a way humans throughout history probably couldn’t even dream of.
It’s a nice thought experiment, but absolutely pointless.
Any warning about an unknown-to-us danger that is even just 500 years old or from a different culture is being treated like a superstition by us.
A good example of this would be the Yei River in South Sudan (and other areas along the equator) where the local tribes traditionally didn’t settle near the river because the river spirits didn’t allow it and brought misfortune and sickness to those who didn’t respect them.
Modern settlers disregarded that because it’s clearly unscientific, and rivers are great for trade and transportation.
And then the people living near the rivers started going blind, their children suffered from constant seizures and stunted development, and we still don’t have a cure.
Don’t you actually make a very good point for this effort?
The problem with the superstitious warning was exactly that it was aimed only at the people of the time. It had no way to preserve it’s warning beyond cultural and intellectual changes. Same as the radioactive symbol having too little inherent deterrent in its design so it caused radiation incidents by people who did not know what it means so we designed a new one that’s specifically meant to be intuitively “dangerous” to people without any prior knowledge.
So in a similar way, we need to have a way to create warnings about nuclear waste - or a river - that are not limited by the current generation and the way they understand signs and meanings.
Still worth the effort to try imo.
Thats just proof that we have designed systems to pass this knowledge down through time and cultures, and can improve on it to be more resiliant to shifts in culture and time going forward.
Comparing modern civilization to tribes doesn’t make sense. We have computers, digital storage, steel, and many other things that will let us preserve and share knowledge in a way humans throughout history probably couldn’t even dream of.