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Comment by jamesdf | Hacker News Reader

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”

Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem

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I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that would survive deep time.

not just sci-fi! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

The things listed there are completely worthless though. In case of system collapse I'd want to know practical things like agriculture and simple power plants.

There was an interesting article online a few years back, can't find it now. It claimed that humans can't make anything that will last more that 16 million years. This includes any kind of nuclear pollution. Sure we might get lucky like Jurassic fossils, but not intentionally.

I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance. They could get really unluckly and hit a star/planet, but it's not at all likely. Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.

We've also certainly... redistributed... many metals and other things around earth. Perhaps "large concentration of iron over what use to be new york" doesn't count, but arguably it should.

> I haven't seen the article, but I don't buy it, there's no likely events that will harm Voyager 1 and 2 in that time period, for instance.

Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever again.

Things we put into heliocentric orbits are likely to be forever, too.

> Along a similar vein many of the satellites that we put in graveyard orbits around earth at the end of their useful life will also plausibly last that long, though there is a lot more debris for them to collide with.

While they won't decay from drag in a few million years, tidal forces and photon pressure become significant over time.

> Sure, but nothing will encounter or observe them ever again.

like trees falling silently in desolate forests?

More than that. There are plenty of atoms and photons and other particles observing those trees, much less for Voyagers.

While we're on the topic of nuclear pollution, "nuclear semiotics" is an interdisciplinary field of research focused on creating a "warning message intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years."

While 10K is a few orders of magnitude greater than 500, I imagine the problems may be similar... if not more extreme.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...

My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis," which states that our industrial revolution was not the first. There are some events in sediment that look like what our industrial revolution will look like. (many millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)

Yes.

Trying to grasp a time span of one million years feels impossible, in the context of development of culture and technology.

It seems quite unlikely to me that we are the first such development on this rock.

Seems likely to me that we are, given the age of the oldest fossils.

I don't think it's necessary to go into all this trouble. Tablets made of the much, much cheaper clay are still accessible today—4000 years after they were created.

But it wasn't just the act of creating some clay tablets - those particular clay tablets happen to have run the probability gauntlet successfully and came out the other side - just making a clay tablet and putting it in your closet is unlikely to produce the same results. The place you put the tablet is more important than the fact that it's a clay tablet in itself.

Mass production.

Eschaton in Singularitys Sky?

"You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"

"Thou shalt not violate causality in my historic light cone," I believe.

Ah yes, that was it.

Isn't it actually the case that diamond isn't the strongest material? Just scratch-resistant if memory serves. Not that it's weak either, of course, but I'm curious if it's the best choice.

The claim is usually that diamond is the hardest material, which for the most part it is.

Strength is usually defined by the application and usually focuses on tensile / compressive strength. This is also why rebar is used in concrete, concrete has excellent compressive strength, but poor tensile strength.

There's lots of metrics for strength, also resistance to fatigue is often an important metric.

Diamond has excellent hardness, and compressive strength (diamond anvils), it's very poor in most other metrics of strength and evaporates above 450 degrees, so it's not good for anything hot.

Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.

without context would it's pretty meaningless imho

Tbf, as someone who's never read or heard of the book, it just seemed like an interesting quote about a hypothetical future for humanity. Definitely didn't occur to me it might be a spoiler.

I haven’t read any of them, but from what I’ve heard of the plot of the first, it seems reasonable to want a spoiler tag here

Ive read all 3 books, though a while ago. I have to think hard about what this could be referring to.

I remember, now, but it wouldn’t be a spoiler for me.

Worse, the past tense of "begot" is "begat."

> Past tense of beget is begot or begat

https://pasttenses.com/beget-past-tense

These were such legit books. This description, in context, being like... the 5000th reason why.

Uuugh, I just finished reading them and, while the first one was pretty good, the second one dragged a bit and the third was interminable! It felt like the author had a laundry list of ideas that he hadn't fit into the story yet, and with the third book was on a mission to cram in every last one. It's something like 2-3 times longer than the first one and by the end I was only reading out of determination to finish it.

There were also a lot of odd assumptions/conclusions about how people would behave but I put that down to a different cultural mindset (and in this sense it was pretty interesting), however some of the recurring social themes stretched credibility a bit. Also for a book that's generally held up as being hard sci-fi, the actual science aspect had some glaring flaws in pivotal events which really strained belief. (Well, either that or my understanding of astrophysics is way off...)

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