A Monument to Outlast Humanity | Hacker News Reader

A Monument to Outlast Humanity

newyorker.com

37 pointsprismatic25 comments

I was expecting this to be about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant[1]. They're disposing of radioactive waste from weapons production there, and it will remain dangerous for 10000 years.

It happens to be in the Permian Basin, which has deposits of oil and gas. Also, the area has salt and potash that can be mined. WIPP itself is in salt. So there will almost certainly be people digging for one reason or another in that time.

The problem is how to place a message that will be understood as a warning to humans over that long of a time scale. The last thing you want is future archaeologists digging there because they think it is a tomb or monument.

Gregory Benford also talks about it (and some other interesting topics related to communicating over long time intervals) in his book Deep Time[2]. It's an interesting read.

[1] http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-Mil...

Is WIPP back in use? They had an accident (used artificial kitty litter as packing material instead of natural, caused a storage malfunction) about 2 years ago.

My understanding is that the clean up will run around $2 billion.

Don't know if the clean up needs to be complete before use restarts...

I don't know if they're actively receiving waste shipments yet. The facility itself is running, though. I used to work on a science experiment there, and some of my former colleagues have been able to get underground starting earlier this year.

And here it is on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/qLSZxPZaATM2

Looking at it from space, I'm much more interested in the small circular clearings of regular size that are everywhere in the surrounding landscape. Each one looks the size of a truck. What are those all about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation

I suspect the question was about these, which are MUCH smaller: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0316037,-115.4345986,129m/da...

Yup, exactly.

I don't think they're a source of materials used in the project (my first guess) because they can be found quite far away from the site, are present across varied terrain, and lack road access and indicators of work (eg tailings). Such uniformity in natural features always piques my interest. Will just be one of those endless mysteries of the desert, I suppose.

Those look a lot like creosote rings [1]. Creosote's native to southern Nevada and grows in clonal colonies that end up looking like rings, and that looks like a nice wide place where water would gather.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrea_tridentata

Looks like natural phenomenon they are all over the place could be this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18855020/

Or could be simply natural water drainage pools the middle dark spot in the middle kinda suggests that.

Too many of them and they are all over the desert for it to be man made.

I thought this was going to be about the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock.

slowly but surely we'll get the first Math built.

It's interesting trying to compare this to Long Now. The article mentions his 'Double Negative' from ~1970 and that it's already badly decayed (a look on Google Maps supports this) after barely 40 years. It doesn't give much detail about the City, but the illustration (photo?) suggests that its most prominent features are mounds of unreinforced concrete. The famous Sandia study on long-term building that Long Now and Steward Brand often cites finds that unreinforced concrete does very poorly over the long run, and that to last, concrete needs to be reinforced and mixed extremely dryly with tons of manual labor (one reason Roman concrete has lasted so long); Heizer is doing this with a skeleton crew and must take shortcuts.

So it sounds like the depressions are going to fill in quickly on a 10,000 year timescale and the exposed concrete is going to break down on the order of centuries. It might last a relatively long time in a buried form like Mayan pyramids, but not as an artwork with integrity, and I doubt much will be left at all by 10,000 years.

And in a few thousand years people will wonder about it and say that it was used for ritualistic purposes, presumably.

What an ugly work of art. This is the long lasting record of humanity?

I'm afraid so. We can only hope aliens get the gist of it and don't catch "humanity".

I personally find it compelling and inspiring the lengths that Heizer went to for this monument.

We're all ready to admire the single-minded devotion and amount of work that goes into TempleOS and I view this monument the same way.

There are lots of crazy people that obsessively build monuments.

http://inhabitat.com/incredible-cathedral-built-by-one-man-w...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle

Weird coincidence, tuberculosis was involved in both cases.

I think the admiration of TempleOS is dumb. The whole phenomenon is a tragedy and the guy needs help.

You can find it inspiring and still think it's ugly.

So how long is your work going to last?

Ugly that lasts is still ugly. In fact, in a way it's even worse.

not to worry. some taggers will probably beautify it soon.

I think the real monument to outlast humanity will be in the infrastructure we build in space. That's the real long game.

That's _Seveneves_, not _Anathem_ ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com