Comic Genesis Forums

so, I was fooling around on tvtropes, and found a link to http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160.
scroll down, and it's pretty interesting. it's an article about putting markers on nuclear waste, weeing as how the markers have to be understandable long past any current language or symbology.

what are your thoughts?

We'll have to hope future civilizations invent Geiger counters, because symbols for "The atoms in this slowly degrade sending harmful particles and rays everywhere" which can stand the test of time are hard to come up with. Even the skull and crossbones could, given enough time, lose it's meaning.
Especially if their skulls are, you know, different.

It's an old article, but it still brings up a good point - five thousand years from now a nuclear waste dump will still be hazardous. And there is no guarantee at all that we'll have the means to directly communicate with whomever lives atop it or near it. You need something to indicate DANGER in some universal manner.

This sounds like the back story to every monster movie ever made.

• Ancient society buries something really dangerous
• Puts big "DO NOT ENTER, DEATH LIES WITHIN" sign on it.
• Someone on the future finds it.
• Guy 1 points to the sign and says "Hey, maybe we shouldn't open this thing."
• Guy 2 says "But we must! For science/discovery/money/fame/hot girls"
• Guy 2 opens it.
• OMG GIANT ANTZ!!!!

I guess it's worth a shot though.

Rkolter wrote:It's an old article, but it still brings up a good point - five thousand years from now a nuclear waste dump will still be hazardous. And there is no guarantee at all that we'll have the means to directly communicate with whomever lives atop it or near it. You need something to indicate DANGER in some universal manner.

Landmines

Killbert-Robby wrote:

Rkolter wrote:It's an old article, but it still brings up a good point - five thousand years from now a nuclear waste dump will still be hazardous. And there is no guarantee at all that we'll have the means to directly communicate with whomever lives atop it or near it. You need something to indicate DANGER in some universal manner.

Landmines

landmines will lose their e3xplosive potential long before the radiation becomes a negligable threat.

Dracomax wrote:

Killbert-Robby wrote:

Rkolter wrote:It's an old article, but it still brings up a good point - five thousand years from now a nuclear waste dump will still be hazardous. And there is no guarantee at all that we'll have the means to directly communicate with whomever lives atop it or near it. You need something to indicate DANGER in some universal manner.

Landmines

landmines will lose their e3xplosive potential long before the radiation becomes a negligable threat.

Well yes
But its not a humorous concept if I tack that on at the end

Killbert-Robby wrote:

Dracomax wrote:

Killbert-Robby wrote:
Landmines

landmines will lose their e3xplosive potential long before the radiation becomes a negligable threat.

Well yes
But its not a humorous concept if I tack that on at the end

we should breed some form of deadly watchdog then. a razerbacked pitbull.

Erect a giant statue of a skull, fifty feet to a side, and etch the words Danger, No, and Death in every known language on every square inch of the skull.

It sounds funny, but I'm mostly serious. It's very likely that such a skull would survive, in pieces if not in whole. And any civilization that can bother with archeology will work out what the pieces are. As for the wording, there will be a word for Danger, for No, and for Death in any human language in the future, and they are words of great meaning in every language now - it's likely that if any language is known, those three words will be known, or at least one of them will be. The fact that it's a small number of words, repeating, on a human skull fifty feet in diameter, can't be lost on another human civilization either.

Plus honestly, it wouldn't be that expensive to do. A cube 50' to a side of cement, probably in blocks, carved to a skull with words on it? Under a million bucks - chump change compared to some other ideas.

Rkolter wrote:Erect a giant statue of a skull, fifty feet to a side, and etch the words Danger, No, and Death in every known language on every square inch of the skull.

It sounds funny, but I'm mostly serious. It's very likely that such a skull would survive, in pieces if not in whole. <snip>

Plus honestly, it wouldn't be that expensive to do. A cube 50' to a side of cement, probably in blocks, carved to a skull with words on it? Under a million bucks - chump change compared to some other ideas.

unfortunately, from whqat I've read, there are a couple of problems.
1. if you use any kind of metal reinforcement, it will fall apart
2. if it is unkept, the chances of erosion and natural forces reducing it to unrecognizability within 2-3 thousand years approach 100%

Rkolter wrote:Erect a giant statue of a skull, fifty feet to a side, and etch the words Danger, No, and Death in every known language on every square inch of the skull.

It sounds funny, but I'm mostly serious. It's very likely that such a skull would survive, in pieces if not in whole. And any civilization that can bother with archeology will work out what the pieces are. As for the wording, there will be a word for Danger, for No, and for Death in any human language in the future, and they are words of great meaning in every language now - it's likely that if any language is known, those three words will be known, or at least one of them will be. The fact that it's a small number of words, repeating, on a human skull fifty feet in diameter, can't be lost on another human civilization either.

Plus honestly, it wouldn't be that expensive to do. A cube 50' to a side of cement, probably in blocks, carved to a skull with words on it? Under a million bucks - chump change compared to some other ideas.

I've seen enough movies to know that they'd still pop the hood on those containers <_<

Especially if they interpret the skull to mean "Pirate treasure buried here."

or possibly "lots of dead people."
archeologists are suckers for any site with that kind of imagery.

hell, they might just think is was some primitive taboo, and dig anyway.

That's tomorrow's problem. It's none of our concern.

The structure could be metal reinforced, but it may not need it - the sphinx managed to hold together pretty well. Ditto the Pyramids. then again, those structures had the benefit of the weather where they existed.

And of course, we dug into them. Maybe a big lion means there's treasure!

Ok, how about this then - Skull 2.0:

10-meter skull, made out of aluminum. Cast as a single piece. The words NO, DANGER, and DEATH along with appropriate pictograms of people dying after digging are repeated regularly across the entire object.

Aluminum has the advantage of being easy to work with and not quickly corroded (Well, technically it corrodes VERY quickly, but the surface oxidation prevents lower levels from oxidizing).

We're talking about a billion cubic centimeters of material at 2.7 grams per cubic centimeter. that's 2.7 million kilograms of aluminum. At just under $3 per kilogram, that's about 8 million dollars per skull.

Now, strip a meter of soil off the site, and put down a plate of aluminum a centimeter thick over the entire site - also emblazoned with words and pictograms. Then put the soil back on, and put the skull on top, at the center of the site.

Total cost maybe 15 million? Still cheap.

You can't make it out of aluminium, it'd get carted away the moment it's discovered. Imagine if Victorian Britain had discovered a 2700 ton aluminium skull. It's an incredibly hard metal to extract and refine, in the middle of the 19th century it was more valuable than gold. But once it's refined it's much easier to work, the melting point is much lower than iron. They'd have it hitched up and on a journey back to the homeland before you can say "hey, maybe it's a warning".

The Sphinx is along the right lines, but not strong enough. The Egyptians were limited to materials in the area and the tools that were available to them. We have far fewer limitations. Start thinking along the lines of huge great blocks of granite carved into skulls. Granite is a common form of rock and very hard to work without modern tools. Unlike aluminium, anyone with inferior tools to our own would be unable to cut it up and move it.

We could, of course, leave a towering obsidian monolith.
In the shape of War's bust.
They'll understand.

Now I know how ancient Egiptians felt when they were putting signs "WARNING, WHOEVER ENTERS THIS TEMPLE WILL BE CURSED!" on their doorways. Oh how foolish were they to think that their pictoral letters would be understandable to this day!

Dracomax wrote:

Killbert-Robby wrote:

Rkolter wrote:Landmines

landmines will lose their e3xplosive potential long before the radiation becomes a negligable threat.

Nuclear Landmines. Sorted.

Everytime someone brings up skulls, I just think of Meso-American temples and archeologists walking into them saying "SCORE! Artifacts!"

You know what would work really well? Comics. GOOD comics. I mean, you'd run into HUGE problems creating them in a format that won't biodegrade or fade away, but if you make comics in which people find the contents, then react in a way that clearly says 'oh no! Poison!' (ordinary poison is gotta be easier to convey than radioactivity), and have it detailed enough that when people read the comics then find the containers, they'll go "Heeey, those were in these pictograms we found!" then, well . . . that'll be the best message you can give across language barriers.

Of course, if the readers have different visual senses or vastly different storytelling conventions, that may not work either.