A cursory google search tells me our modern version of booty descends from multiple sources and that is the reason for its various definitions. I wonder if this sign went through a similar journey.
Also, you should also listen to "The Ark Before Noah" by Irving Finkel
the reason why you should listen to him read his own book, is because he is a one of a kind academic that _lives_ his craft. its infectious as it is informative.
it gives a background about how Sumerian and Akkadian was decoded.
Thankyou for the reminder of that book. I've been a big fan of Finkel's for a long time, for exactly the reason you describe and his playful humour. I've been trying to find something on Audible to listen to and this sounds right up my street.
I heard this point made a while back about how design choices and/or technical limitations led to different parts of ancient cultures being preserved:
- Some civilizations wrote on clay but built with wood/straw. We know a lot about their writing but almost nothing about their structures.
- Some civilizations wrote on papyrus but built with stone. We know a lot about their structures but not a lot about their writing (unless it was written on a building). The ancient Egyptians are the classic example here.
All examples of how ancient script can be understood nowadays are due to some connection to modern living languages or side-by-side translations which are connected to some currently used language somehow. Kinda defeats it's own argument. No script survives complete collapse of the culture around it.
I'm reading a book, fictional but using a lot of real-world concepts, where they send messages to aliens at first in a self-encoding scheme or something (it's been a while since they needed it, I might misremember the name). I figured this can be real by starting like
1 |
2 ||
3 |||
1+2=3
1+1=2
And building up the language further from there. Draw triangles and label the sides for Pythagoras theorem, repeat a couple times to generalize the concept for the word theorem, etc.
Nobody did that in ancient times as far as I know, so you're right, but couldn't we make this work without needing context of our culture to survive?
One real one I can think of is the Arecibo Message (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message), which starts with an encoding for the numbers one through ten, followed by the atomic number (in that encoding) of the atoms that make up DNA, then the formulas of the chemical compounds in DNA, etc.
What if they did? There are various theories about how ancient Egyptians had a strong preference for using highly specific ratios in their architecture.
There is an excellent short story from the 50s, "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper, that explores deciphering a literally alien language. It is mercifully in the public domain because it was written before copyright became infinite in the 1970s. You can read it here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445
I would be interested to read the book you're talking about, if you have the title!
(Your math example reminds me a bit of Lambda Calculus, but I guess you'd have a hard time making a real language out of it.)
Or, you know, we just accept that just as humanity had a beginning it will also have an end. Our species, and the current civilization iteration, are most likely completely inconsequential and nothing more than a blip over the history of the universe.
We are all going to die eventually, our civilization will fade into nothing and all our thoughts and knowledge will be forgotten forever. So what? It's kinda relieving to be honest.
But this doesn’t have to be so unless we want it to be. Modern humans are unlike all others in the sense that we have the capacity to extend our species to the end of the universe.
The civilization that doesn't want to survive indefinitely, will indeed die out sooner or later. Whether we're one of those, only time will tell. It's not really a choice or vanity thing; wanting to survive is innate because otherwise we'd already be beaten by those who want it more badly.
I don't want to presume anything unnecessarily based on a simple comment, but if
> It's kinda relieving [that we'll all die and be forgotten] to be honest.
is your true opinion, you should know that people care that you're doing okay. I don't know what the best website is to list for suicide prevention unfortunately but, truly, if you're feeling down as a general state of being, there is no shame in seeking help to become happier!
Lol thanks for caring. But I was raised a Christian and growing up to see the Hubble Deep Field and all advances of cosmology and realize we're likely not on some sort of divinely ordained trial for our souls but just existing for a bit and then gone has been a great realization for me.
I very much enjoy being a human monkey and wanna see how it plays out for me.
Clay tablets send messages in time and are more reliable in that way. The message is broadcast continously on a short distance (as far as reading distance), it does not require any form of energy and if no other circumstances are completely destroying the artefact (it could still be pieced back together if broken) it could last a really long time, well beyond any modern technology
I love the fictional idea that I have that some billionaire will create multiple underground caverns around the world in geologically stable places, each containing the knowledge of the world - engraved onto aluminum plates. A vast cavern of tunnels and chambers and catacombs built only to preserve the worlds knowledge.
I imagine in 10,000 years some future explorers making their way into such a cavern and finding all of the knowledge of the present time like some sort of treasure.
Perhaps with a big engraving of the God Jeff Bezos engraved in the stone wall for eternity.
Cue AWA, which is where GHACV is stored (IIUC on film, not aluminium though)
> For greater data density and integrity, most data was stored QR-encoded, and compressed. A human-readable index and guide found on every reel explains how to recover the data.The 02/02/2020 snapshot, consisting of 21TB of data, was archived to 186 reels of film by our archive partners Piql and then transported to the Arctic Code Vault, where it resides today.
Whenever I read something about leaving messages for future peoples, my mind drifts back to this Mistborn quote, "I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
There's a few projects like that already happening, like Github's code repository on Svalbard.
That said, I think one big reason why the artifacts mentioned - Sumerians, Mayans, Egyptians, or even Vesuvius - were preserved was because they were lost; buried in the desert, overgrown in dense jungles, buried under volcanic rock and ash, etc.
For something to stand the test of time, it has to be lost. Al-Quaeda and ISIS have destroyed visible historic monuments and documents, for example, and some people in the US are advocating for the removal and burning of certain books as well.
So yeah, underground caves and hidden monuments would probably be best, although the collapse of society may take care of that as well.
Another option: Time capsules of data sent out into space in
containers that can survive re-entry in thousands of years. Ideally with a lot of flashy light effects and a persistent smoke trail on re-entry.
The space container idea could make for a really interesting book plot. It starts in modern day where they send the capsule up. Then skips forward several hundred years to society collapsing. Then skip forward a few hundred more to see how the myth of knowledge falling from the sky is being passed down. Then it keeps skipping ahead to see how the myth evolves. By the end you just have some super cryptic prophecy like "god will descend from the heavens to bring about heaven on earth" and then it actually happens.
You say that as a joke, but it would say a lot about contemporary American culture.
Just think about the gender roles on display, a women attacks her husband and gloats that society will side with her. Not to mention the meta-layer, the celebrity worship that would compel someone to preserve this particular document of all things.
That's a joke, but real time capsules often aren't as interesting as they could be because the makers of them put things that they think are important (like a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt if he was President of the US at the time) rather than details of what their daily lives were like which they didn't think of including.
>>Another option: Time capsules of data sent out into space in containers that can survive re-entry in thousands of years. Ideally with a lot of flashy light effects and a persistent smoke trail on re-entry.
Interesting idea indeed! How to solve the issue that there is a ~70% chance the capsules will re-enter and fall into an ocean area?
If it’s not a projectile, we have the tech already. Landing on Mars is done autonomously today but making a robot/computer to last more than 1000 years isn’t in our wheelhouse yet.
>>making a robot/computer to last more than 1000 years isn’t in our wheelhouse yet.
Yes, exactly my point - we can very nicely control landings to within a meter today. How can we make a craft land with any precision say 2-5000 years in the future? It'll require a power source good for 5000 years, a computer that still operates flawlessly for 5000 years, fuel that doesn't evaporate or degrade for 5000 years, and a rocket engine system that will operate properly in 5000 years. Even reduce that spec to 1000 years, or just a 500 years, and I don't see how we get there with today's tech.
Making millions of them would likely also make all the other problems go away. Wit a million copies, we can forget about the controlled re-entry. While around 700k of them will sink in the oceans, there should still be 300,000 that will fall on land.
As long as the initial orbits, drag profiles, heat absorbtion profiles/patterns, etc. are sufficiently randomized so they all truly re-enter in a random pattern, there should be no need for propellant, engines, power, or controlled re-entry.
Perhaps, rather than have it orbit the earth for thousands of years, you could send it on a single, long trip. By having the projectile far away from earth, other satellites, and other gravity sources, you could improve precision and aim for exactly the center of the largest landmass. Or you could intentionally land in the ocean and make it float.
I like the message in a bottle approach! Maybe just flood the Earth with thousands of "bottles" which are shaped/constructed in a way as to not burn up on re-entry, land gently enough in the ocean and then float in salt-water for decades until they are found.
> For something to stand the test of time, it has to be lost.
I agree. Some of the people quoted in the article advocated writing on a monumental scale in order to preserve it, but I don't think that gives particularly good odds of preservation. To add to the examples you cite, the Georgia Guidestones were pretty much a modern experiment in preservation through monumentalism; they painted a monumental target on their backs right away, and ultimately ended up being destroyed this year.
The way to go is probably massive replication in a compact, durable medium.
This reminds me of a method to develop time travel:
A thousand beautiful stone tablets are buried and sunk all around the world in multiple languages. The tablets announce the purpose of the experiment and share a series of dates and precise locations. In those places and times, a set of extremely sensitive sensors are set up to listen. If one is reasonably confident that the tablets will be discovered in a 1000 years, and if there is some unknown physics that enables sending information back in time, then a communication channel could be set up allowing the flow of future tech into the past. And worst case, we are left with a bunch of beautiful stone tablets for future generations to ponder over.
> I love the fictional idea that I have that some billionaire will create multiple underground caverns around the world in geologically stable places, each containing the knowledge of the world - engraved onto aluminum plates.
You mean the knowledge that said billionaire deems important, and/or makes them look good.
There's a sci-fi book 'The Mote In God's Eye' that touches on this concept.
Spoiler Alert...
Humans discover an alien planet/race and eventually realize they've destroyed and rebuilt civilization many times. They've learned to build 'museums' for future civilizations to discover that house a roadmap to all of their advanced technology, but biological constraints (they have to reproduce or they die, ensuring extreme population pressure) mean that global war is basically inevitable. So they're stuck speed-running this cycle where they start from the stone age, rapidly rebuild an extremely advanced society based on guidance from the 'museums', experience extreme population growth, bomb themselves back into the stone age, rinse and repeat. There's a hope that if they can just push technology a little bit further each cycle, they might be able to reach a point where they can resolve the underlying issue, but it's unclear if that's a pipe dream.
Interesting take on the "pre-tech society discovers keys to future tech" trope. Does advanced technology actually solve all problems, or just it just let us skip ahead along the timeline to the same conclusion?
The problem with all the proposals I've seen in those articles about earnings is that basically all of them are guaranteed to get someone even more interested in what's behind the curtain. A strange fellowship keeping the population fearful of what's hidden in the caverns? Let's try and sneak in and see what they're hiding!
In 10,000 years most the the really dangerous nuclear waste would have decayed. In addition, nuclear waste is a local problem. It won’t magically spread to a large area.
Cadmium, lead, arsenic would probably all be more dangerous than 10,000 year old nuclear waste.
> How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time
You don't need to, because long before that it will have become economical to reprocess the "waste" (much of which is not "waste" at all, it contains usable fuel), and what is left over after that is only dangerous for a much shorter time.
I genuinely believe the people working on this problem are looking at it the wrong way. Instead of trying to make the waste repository into something highly visible, or mystical, they should instead choose a remote and inhospitable location where attempting to access the repository is economically nonviable for any future civilization.
Assuming civilization collapses or regress to pre-industrial levels where the concept of radiation is lost, any future group trying to extract this mythical energy source would have to first discover the location of something buried so deep underground, and then have to develop the logistics to try and access it with manpower. If the repository is placed in the middle of a desert, the challenge of providing water to the workers would be substantial. If they placed it in Antarctica, simply getting there and keeping the workers from freezing to death would be so monumentally expensive that it would bankrupt any civilization attempting to do so. Even if industrialized capacity does return, it would still be economically monumental to try and get to the waste repository. There is also a decent chance that a future civilization with said capacity would rediscover the concept and dangers of radiation.
When I talk about expense, I also like to highlight this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure
Here is a project to dismantle a pyramid that was canceled because of how expensive it was and because of how little of a return on investment the endeavor appeared to be.
We have to keep current day expenses in mind as well. It's true that noone in the future would be dragging waste back from Antarctica, but noone now wants to drag it there either. Same with shipping it across a continent or ocean into a desert. And if we're talking 10k years into a post apocalyptic future, your deserts may no longer be a desert.
It's a fair point, but if the thought exercise is that we must do as much as we can to prevent a future catastrophe, I feel like the cost of an antarctic vault would be manageable compared to the cost of some military projects, moon missions, or even megaprojects in American cities.
You may not be giving them enough credit. Last ice age was roughly 10,000 years ago. At these time scales it's difficult to predict what's going to happen... Of course lets not forget the costs either. Someone has to pay for this.
Seems to be highly irresponsible to leave poisonous garbage around no matter what.
Tom Scott has a great video[0] about the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland[1], in which he talks about one of the reasons that they decided on the particular area - why would anyone dig there? Skip to 4:29 in the video for the relevant info.
I developed a process of printing/embossing on heavy-gauge aluminum foil with dot matrix printers (sans ribbon). The metal can be coiled into a stainless steel, sealed cylinder (a canoptic) and inserted in a deceased's coffin or cremation ashes urn.
73 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadSo kind of similar to "booty"?
the reason why you should listen to him read his own book, is because he is a one of a kind academic that _lives_ his craft. its infectious as it is informative.
it gives a background about how Sumerian and Akkadian was decoded.
- Some civilizations wrote on clay but built with wood/straw. We know a lot about their writing but almost nothing about their structures.
- Some civilizations wrote on papyrus but built with stone. We know a lot about their structures but not a lot about their writing (unless it was written on a building). The ancient Egyptians are the classic example here.
1 |
2 ||
3 |||
1+2=3
1+1=2
And building up the language further from there. Draw triangles and label the sides for Pythagoras theorem, repeat a couple times to generalize the concept for the word theorem, etc.
Nobody did that in ancient times as far as I know, so you're right, but couldn't we make this work without needing context of our culture to survive?
I would be interested to read the book you're talking about, if you have the title!
(Your math example reminds me a bit of Lambda Calculus, but I guess you'd have a hard time making a real language out of it.)
We are all going to die eventually, our civilization will fade into nothing and all our thoughts and knowledge will be forgotten forever. So what? It's kinda relieving to be honest.
I don't want to presume anything unnecessarily based on a simple comment, but if
> It's kinda relieving [that we'll all die and be forgotten] to be honest.
is your true opinion, you should know that people care that you're doing okay. I don't know what the best website is to list for suicide prevention unfortunately but, truly, if you're feeling down as a general state of being, there is no shame in seeking help to become happier!
I very much enjoy being a human monkey and wanna see how it plays out for me.
At least the form factor has held up well.
Who knows, some bots or digital calendars might stand the test of time.
I imagine in 10,000 years some future explorers making their way into such a cavern and finding all of the knowledge of the present time like some sort of treasure.
Perhaps with a big engraving of the God Jeff Bezos engraved in the stone wall for eternity.
> For greater data density and integrity, most data was stored QR-encoded, and compressed. A human-readable index and guide found on every reel explains how to recover the data.The 02/02/2020 snapshot, consisting of 21TB of data, was archived to 186 reels of film by our archive partners Piql and then transported to the Arctic Code Vault, where it resides today.
https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
https://arcticworldarchive.org/
That said, I think one big reason why the artifacts mentioned - Sumerians, Mayans, Egyptians, or even Vesuvius - were preserved was because they were lost; buried in the desert, overgrown in dense jungles, buried under volcanic rock and ash, etc.
For something to stand the test of time, it has to be lost. Al-Quaeda and ISIS have destroyed visible historic monuments and documents, for example, and some people in the US are advocating for the removal and burning of certain books as well.
So yeah, underground caves and hidden monuments would probably be best, although the collapse of society may take care of that as well.
Another option: Time capsules of data sent out into space in containers that can survive re-entry in thousands of years. Ideally with a lot of flashy light effects and a persistent smoke trail on re-entry.
Just think about the gender roles on display, a women attacks her husband and gloats that society will side with her. Not to mention the meta-layer, the celebrity worship that would compel someone to preserve this particular document of all things.
Interesting idea indeed! How to solve the issue that there is a ~70% chance the capsules will re-enter and fall into an ocean area?
Yes, exactly my point - we can very nicely control landings to within a meter today. How can we make a craft land with any precision say 2-5000 years in the future? It'll require a power source good for 5000 years, a computer that still operates flawlessly for 5000 years, fuel that doesn't evaporate or degrade for 5000 years, and a rocket engine system that will operate properly in 5000 years. Even reduce that spec to 1000 years, or just a 500 years, and I don't see how we get there with today's tech.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-b...
Making millions of them would likely also make all the other problems go away. Wit a million copies, we can forget about the controlled re-entry. While around 700k of them will sink in the oceans, there should still be 300,000 that will fall on land.
As long as the initial orbits, drag profiles, heat absorbtion profiles/patterns, etc. are sufficiently randomized so they all truly re-enter in a random pattern, there should be no need for propellant, engines, power, or controlled re-entry.
I agree. Some of the people quoted in the article advocated writing on a monumental scale in order to preserve it, but I don't think that gives particularly good odds of preservation. To add to the examples you cite, the Georgia Guidestones were pretty much a modern experiment in preservation through monumentalism; they painted a monumental target on their backs right away, and ultimately ended up being destroyed this year.
The way to go is probably massive replication in a compact, durable medium.
I had never heard about this before. What an odd tale. It's a real-life story of people falling into FUD over something pretty innocuous.
Diamond would be even better. Maybe we are wearing the messages of an ancient civilization in the form of diamonds?
A thousand beautiful stone tablets are buried and sunk all around the world in multiple languages. The tablets announce the purpose of the experiment and share a series of dates and precise locations. In those places and times, a set of extremely sensitive sensors are set up to listen. If one is reasonably confident that the tablets will be discovered in a 1000 years, and if there is some unknown physics that enables sending information back in time, then a communication channel could be set up allowing the flow of future tech into the past. And worst case, we are left with a bunch of beautiful stone tablets for future generations to ponder over.
You mean the knowledge that said billionaire deems important, and/or makes them look good.
Spoiler Alert...
Humans discover an alien planet/race and eventually realize they've destroyed and rebuilt civilization many times. They've learned to build 'museums' for future civilizations to discover that house a roadmap to all of their advanced technology, but biological constraints (they have to reproduce or they die, ensuring extreme population pressure) mean that global war is basically inevitable. So they're stuck speed-running this cycle where they start from the stone age, rapidly rebuild an extremely advanced society based on guidance from the 'museums', experience extreme population growth, bomb themselves back into the stone age, rinse and repeat. There's a hope that if they can just push technology a little bit further each cycle, they might be able to reach a point where they can resolve the underlying issue, but it's unclear if that's a pipe dream.
Interesting take on the "pre-tech society discovers keys to future tech" trope. Does advanced technology actually solve all problems, or just it just let us skip ahead along the timeline to the same conclusion?
How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-n...
In 10,000 years most the the really dangerous nuclear waste would have decayed. In addition, nuclear waste is a local problem. It won’t magically spread to a large area.
Cadmium, lead, arsenic would probably all be more dangerous than 10,000 year old nuclear waste.
You don't need to, because long before that it will have become economical to reprocess the "waste" (much of which is not "waste" at all, it contains usable fuel), and what is left over after that is only dangerous for a much shorter time.
Assuming civilization collapses or regress to pre-industrial levels where the concept of radiation is lost, any future group trying to extract this mythical energy source would have to first discover the location of something buried so deep underground, and then have to develop the logistics to try and access it with manpower. If the repository is placed in the middle of a desert, the challenge of providing water to the workers would be substantial. If they placed it in Antarctica, simply getting there and keeping the workers from freezing to death would be so monumentally expensive that it would bankrupt any civilization attempting to do so. Even if industrialized capacity does return, it would still be economically monumental to try and get to the waste repository. There is also a decent chance that a future civilization with said capacity would rediscover the concept and dangers of radiation.
When I talk about expense, I also like to highlight this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Menkaure Here is a project to dismantle a pyramid that was canceled because of how expensive it was and because of how little of a return on investment the endeavor appeared to be.
Seems to be highly irresponsible to leave poisonous garbage around no matter what.
Given how distributed knowledge now is, it's pretty ridiculous to think that nuclear will be completely forgotten.
[0]: https://youtu.be/aoy_WJ3mE50
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
(thanks, tineye, for 'sort by oldest' and keeping 404ed results)
But they didn't. There had to be a point when digging into a stone slab became something else, right?
longnow.org
https://longnow.org/ideas/02017/06/07/how-can-we-create-a-ma...