The arc of the covenant…. The Italians have to give it back to Ethiopia
“There is a black ichor in center of earth, made from the dying flesh from old beast. When using it you can reach ultimate power, but by using it you slowly doom the world”
Or you could hit these yellow rocks together and become death itself.
There are groups of designers who have the job of making symbols and systems that can survive for an extremely long time. One of their tasks was to design “signage” that might let generations thousands of years in the future not go poking around in nuclear waste yards. But the more crazy deadly and dangerous you make an artifact look, the more those future scientists are going to want to get into them.
Better off writing “this place is cursed and will kill those that enter”
This guy never watched Indiana Jones
The nuclear spike deterrent field has been a favorite of mine
This one looks cool, and I think that’s its biggest problem. It’s clearly a massive, man-made structure with no obvious purpose, yet with striking visual impact. To the hypothetical future civilization that is unaware of the dangerous nuclear waste, it basically begs to be investigated.
Some real Hyperion Shit going on here. Anyone from the web should prolly move on…😳
Oh man imagine jumping out of a plane and ramming one of those up your ass at full speed.
Sploosh.
Yeah iirc the absolute best solution proposed was to bury it deep enough that any future civilization advanced enough to get to it will probably realize long before they actually get to it.
I watched a documentary about that: Into Eternity
What I thought was interesting about the film was the balance between entertaining a fantastical vision of some future explorer stumbling across the radioactive site, and the mundanity of most of the actual work.
One of the engineers said something like: “When we seal this up with so much concrete, there’s no way you’re getting in here without machinery. We should be more concerned about a future civilization that comes back here for radioactive materials when they’ve exhausted all other natural sources”
And then there’s a whole section of the film about rules-lawyering the storage site. The dump was chartered by the Finish government to seal waste “for all time”, and the engineers were mad that nothing is truly permanent.
I was thinking about this and their thinking was way too complicated. The symbol you need is bones. Bones are always associated with death and decay because after death, bones are the thing that’s left.
And yes I know they thought of it but I think their dismissal of it is wrong. Their counter argument that it was once a symbol of something else by some culture, therefore. But again by its very nature it’s associated with death. Any society capable of this excavation is also capable of thinking “hmm what did they mean? outside of our own culture of course” and will quickly figure out it’s bad.
Yeah, Carl Sagan was like “skull and crossbones”
But of course everyone else wanted to over-engineer it, so you get proposed solutions like encoding messages in the DNA of plants, and color-changing cats with an accompanying viral song that no one’s ever heard of twelve years later… 🤦♀️
Like, guys, if people today can’t even figure out what it means, then it’s not a universal and enduring message.
And then some of the suggestions would only serve to make it a glaringly obvious archaeological dig site.
Skull and crossbones is about as universal as you can get. Maybe some atomic diagrams and radiation symbols, and written warnings in as many languages as possible, just in case people still understand them. And a giant slab that someone could only drill through deliberately, requiring heavy equipment.
I can’t believe these were supposedly some of the smartest people in the world, and yet they made the mistakes of assuming that future civilizations would be hyperintelligent and thoroughly inquisitive, while also not understanding any symbols from our era and being likely to avoid areas designed to seem ominous. As if egyptologists today respect the warnings on ancient tombs.
And yet they overlooked the skull and crossbones because it seemed too obvious. The whole point is that it’s supposed to be obvious!!!
Atomic diagrams would be good for advanced societies, but societies in the bronze age or middle age advancment are the ones that we have to worry about. They won’t understand atomic phyiscs but they are capable of excavation. Any fancy symbols might just intrigue them.
I think they underestimated the intelligence of possible future societies. Any society advanced enough to excavate this will be intelligent enough to ask “what does this symbol logically mean”. They won’t be limited to the ‘bad-vibes’ that the current ideas are heavy on (language aside).
They were really counting on a middle-age level of advancement when they suggested making a new religion with a priesthood and its own mythology…
There was a conference about this and Carl Sagan was invited, but couldn’t come. He sent a letter suggesting to do just that - skull and bones symbol.
What about when the time of Mammals is done, and the next inhabitant has a chitinous exoskeleton? I’m not sure they’d recognize bones as a sign of this place being dangerous.
That’s just bones of a different nature. Any society capable of large excavation will quickly figure it out.
Technically yes, but in the context of symbols (which is what this is about) it doesn’t work.
If you stumbled upon a sign with a bug exoskeleton, you’d think “ah yes, this means death”?
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Take a scull-and-crossbones. It might be taken to mean danger or poison. Or it might be taken to mean pirates or treasure. And if the future explorers did connect it with danger or poison, why wouldn’t they also just think it was maybe a superstition meant to keep outsiders from getting “the good stuff,” like the curses that were sealed into ancient Egyptian tombs?
Why did pirates use it? Because it’s “give us your shit or you die.”
I think your fear is more likely with the current ominous but doesn’t tell you why message (if the language part is lost).
Yeah, a future civilization finds a field covered in spikes. “I wonder what that’s guarding. Must be something good!”
Man this would be such a killer start or premise for a sci fi book
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
They gonna put a concentration camp on it.
There’s also a song to accompany genetically-engineered cats that change colors when exposed to radioactive material
Early nuclear scientists were batshit crazy deranged lunatics. Louis Slotin was researching the criticality of a plutonium core by lowering half a sphere of beryllium over it using the tip of a screwdriver and not a single piece of safety equipment.
It did not end well.
You could say he was Slotin the screwdriver in there
They sacrificed their lives so we could know both the power and danger ofthee subatomic world. They are accidental heroes. Now, someone who did that shit today with full knowledge of the consequences - they would be batshit insane.
For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a “cowboy” when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.
Maybe, but Slotin knew exactly what kind of dangers he was dealing with. He just chose to be a nuclear cowboy instead.
Sounds like a classic cursed artifact, read this and you will learn great knowledge, but die slowly…
Well did someone take pictures first before sealing them up??
original post:
Why am I cross-posting .ml content?
I cross-post from .ml to the nearest relevant non-.ml comm to reduce the influence of .ml comms and indirectly, the instance as a whole, to make it an easier decision for other instance admins to defederate because one key reason I identified that admins don’t want to defederate is because .ml still has some very large comms and some niche comms.
Some highlights from the link:
"Don’t worry guys, the Uyghur Genocide was REALLY just birth control! ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/30580167
“See! nobody died IN Tiananmen Square, just AROUND it, so it doesn’t count!!” ~ Davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/30673342
.ml admin, Nutomics continued transphobia https://lemmy.world/post/29222558 The original transphobic Comment from Nutomic: https://lemmy.world/post/18236068
“NK is actually good and anything counter to that is Western propaganda!” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/31595035
General negative sentiment to other instances who haven’t “seen the way” yet ~davel, .ml admin https://lemmy.world/post/27426510
“If you don’t support Russia then you just don’t understand geopolitics” ~dessalines, .ml admin, dev https://lemmy.world/post/27352415
And so so much documentation on clear heavy handed censorship and bias also on the link. So much I can’t even put them all here because this comment would be really long.
I believe the behavior of its admins (the main admins are Lemmy devs) does harm to the overall growth of the Lemmy-verse and maybe even the Thrediverse (since Lemmy kinda kicked off the Thrediverse) because of its association with the devs of Lemmy and their insistence to use .ml as their personal political platform to spread harmful propaganda
On the outside, bringing up Lemmy frequently leads to comments like “Lemmy? Isn’t that the place with a bunch of tankies?” Or “Tried Lemmy, but found it full of pro Russia crap so I left”. The best way forward from that I see is to either widely defederate from .ml like the rest of the Triad, or pressure them to put a fair and unbiased as possible admin team.
