Marbles (2016)
erasmatazz.com
erasmatazz.com
I just finished reading "Motel of the Mysteries" [1] and the Treasures section of that talks about the sacred seal of "Do Not Disturb" & the pendant made or rubber (it's a tub stopper).
At best, this is just going to confuse the hell out of every archaeologist who interprets this as a "religious act".
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...
David Macaulay's illustrations are fantastic.
I remember reading a piece about a decade ago about how the last trace of human civilization that will (likely) survive, for BILLIONS of years, are our satellites. Actually, just found it: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/the-last-pictures/
This isn't to detract from a great piece. Just adding this thought.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_b...
Debris from satellites breaking up, causing a very slow Kessler-type syndrome—over these time scales there will certainly be millions of close encounters with random objects
Kinetic changes from similar gravity perturbations, leading to highly eccentric orbits which then decay into the atmosphere
Solar flares—I imagine in the next few hundred million years we'll get some doozies, with similar kinetic effects
Solar expansion—in about a billion years, the Sun will have expanded enough that liquid water can't exist on Earth's surface anymore. Won't that massively expand the atmosphere and drag satellites down a lot faster, even at geosynchronous orbits?
I can definitely see "millions," but "billions" feels hyperbolic.
Perhaps a solar orbit—I didn't consider that when I wrote my first comment. But the plates described in the article aren't going there, they're going to GEO.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Dynamics_Observatory
[1] https://phys.org/news/2020-09-earth-oxygen-rusted-moon-billi...
His outlook on modern videogames and life in general seems pretty pessimistic.
Even if we manage not to destroy ourselves in the next hundred thousand years, we still have to deal with some "soft" and "hard limits".
First we have comets/asteroids impacts. I guess we might have the technology to deflect them in the next 5000 years or so, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Gamma ray burst, close super nova explosions and glacial periods would severely damage half of Earth, but, again, as long as this doesn't happen in the next 5000 years or so, I think we will develop the technology to recover from that also.
Let's fast forward to 600 million years where things start to get interesting: the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain photosynthesis... So no more plants. But if we are still around here by then, I guess this should also not be a problem as we will be able to synthesize whatever chemical we need.
In 1000 million years the solar luminosity will be 10% higher than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans. Hmmm... 1000 million years is enough for us to come with a solution for this, but who knows?
In 2500 million years Earth will lose its magnetosphere.
In 4000 million years the surface of Earth will melt from heat.
In 7500 million years the Sun will absorb Earth.
So... if we want to preserve man kind I would say that, in order to "play it safe" before things get more complicated, we have around 500 million years to escape Earth and ten times that to escape the solar system.
I'm quite convinced that we will manage to do both. I'm also pretty sure we will be there to witness it: we just have to hang on for ~50 years or so until we get functional cryogenic chambers; from there it is just a matter to tell the operators to wake us up in 5000 years once immortality is achieved.
Who is with me? :)
This is an interesting discussion point. There are things worse than death and if you're frozen then you won't have a chance to escape them. Basically if you think I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is possible then you need to consider cryogenic freezing somewhat more carefully.
Yet, it makes me think: are we being trolled by past generations? What inexplicable wonders of archeology might just be someone thinking "whoever finds this will be so confused they'll go crazy".
Why do we think she created a museum? When the palace was excavated, dozens of neatly displayed artifacts from widely different eras and places were found. That alone wouldn't be conclusive, except for the fact that the artifacts had labels detailing their origins. In three languages.
Ennigaldi-Nanna lived in the 6th century BCE.
We hunt gazelles here. Do you have any experience hunting gazelles?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer#/media/File:Thagomi...
The more effort something obviously took, the harder it is to suspect it's just a troll.
And this is why I think our generation of Internet people are perfect for the job.
(Recommendations of a good fake skull that’s not too expensive are welcome.)
When I renovated behind my kitchen cabinets I wrote my email address and "clue 9 of 11. You've almost found the $5000. Email a photo of this clue to this address for the next clue!"
If someone ever does I'll ask them for clue 8 and then wonder if they destroy the house looking.
What’s the motivation in causing suffering for a person you don’t know?
You won’t even see them go through it. Is the fun in imagining them searching high and low for these clues made more pleasurable because it might actually happen?
I understand traditional revenge. An eye for an eye and so on. But why does someone want to create trouble presumably for the nice young couple who bought your house with the slightly tired kitchen?
I don't know. However I think I know the reason it's permitted to exist: because it makes its victims more resilient. The troll knows this at some level so his conscience is relatively untroubled.
Yes there's also a kind of troll who is basically just an internet asshole.
What’s the thrill of the practical joke?
To share my POV, I never really found the banana peel or the pie in the face amusing. Guy fell down. She got hit in face. Seems bad. I wouldn’t enjoy receiving it.
This joke seems 99% invisible. Like most likely overwhelming likely, no one sees it. In some rare cases they find it and take some action. Maybe look for the money. Maybe email you.
If they look for it without contacting you, you never know.
Are we playing for the tiny corner case where they contact you?
Or the pleasure of telling people we did this funny thing?
There's an archaeological site near here, vaguely described in most publications. If you can get your hands on some of the original field reporting, you learn that one of the finds was a burial site where the head of the deceased was replaced with that of a canine.
Not a known practice, apparently.
Then the Martian equivalent of Giorgio Tsoukalos, the Ancient Aliens guy with the crazy hair, would be right.
It was comforting to realize that none of my mistakes are likely to be preserved for the next few millennia.
Also, pessimism is so lazy.
“There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.”
― Mark Twain
;)
Optimism takes faith or creativity, but both are pretty expensive.
Isn't this a wildly misguided assertion? As any antique bottle collector will tell you, bottles underground WILL corrode, and the corrosion is very obvious in less than a century, depending on soil conditions.
Granted that's soda-glass, and there are many types of glass, but just because a bottle can hold sulfuric acid for a few decades doesn't mean all glass will last centuries.
In otherwords, learn some hobbies that might just be a fun thing now, but makes you invaluable when civilization collapses.
I wouldn't put even money on the chances that homo sapiens will go back to pre-modern times within ten thousand years. However, the probability of some civilization-ending event within that time (nukes, viruses, aliens, a giant asteroid) are certainly not zero either.
(I can't even figure out how to phrase the question to google for the article.)
> But the longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.
Here's the article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...
At a minimum, I would expect it to look quite thoroughly sandblasted after 16 million years.
The number is indeed low, though the size can be anything from a molecule to full-sized planet.
On the other hand, 16 million years is a very very long time, and 17 km/s (the current velocity of Voyager 2) is a respectable velocity.
Even small particles will take the "new" right off something at that velocity. By comparison, the velocity of a 5.56 mm rifle bullet is only about 1 km/s.
NASA talks about space dust here [1] and how it literally tore apart Mariner. But maybe that is just dust orbiting the sun and not something interstellar.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watchtheskies/meteor_cl...
I can attest to this as I've torn out an entire front lawn and topsoil from a 1964 tract home, sifted every square inch of it through 1/4" hardware cloth to build raise beds for vegetables. The findings were, in order, so many marbles, over half dozen keys, little plastic dinosaurs or other toys, two 9mm slugs (likely from people shooting up into the air as they were not deformed.)
I wonder if keys are a blip in the timeline, like analog radio transmissions, which gradually are replaced by high-information signals that are akin to random noise.
That's much more optimistic than Steinbeck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pearl_(novel)#Summary
(edited with shortlink I found -- thanks to whoever made it!)
hn discussion about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11851871
If no big new innovations are made (e.g. finding a way to exploit previousely unused raw materials), how long will the current earth reserves allow technology to last?
Bonus points if I can simply make a glass CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.