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Comment by carlmr | Hacker News Reader

>1. So you start digging and find huge concrete cylinders with clearly marked "radioactive" warning signs. Hilarity ensues, people sue each other, and cylinders get moved somewhere else.

The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.

Now just imagine the symbols we used today, what we think is obvious might not be obvious in 100 years, 1000 years, 10000 years, much less in 100000 years.

These are time spans that aren't imaginable to us. Creating a symbol that's intelligible throughout that time is a task we dont know we can do.

Can you decipher the symbols in Göbleki Tepe reliably? There are some hypotheses around these. But if they're warning you about something that warning is hard to decipher, much less obvious. And this is only 10000 years ago.

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> The radioactive symbol (trefoil) was invented in 1946. In 2007 a new supplementary symbol was created. Sure it still includes a trefoil, but it's smaller.

ISO 21482:

> On February 15, 2007, two groups—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—jointly announced the adoption of a new ionizing radiation warning symbol to supplement the traditional trefoil symbol. The new symbol, to be used on sealed radiation sources, is aimed at alerting anyone, anywhere to the danger of being close to a strong source of ionizing radiation.[12] It depicts, on a red background, a black trefoil with waves of radiation streaming from it, along with a black skull and crossbones, and a running figure with an arrow pointing away from the scene. The radiating trefoil suggests the presence of radiation, while the red background and the skull and crossbones warn of danger. The figure running away from the scene is meant to suggest taking action to avoid the labeled material. The new symbol is not intended to be generally visible, but rather to appear on internal components of devices that house radiation sources so that if anybody attempts to disassemble such devices they will see an explicit warning not to proceed any further.[13][14]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol#Ionizing_radiati...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_21482

First, people that far in the future will still know about the previous civilizations. So it's highly unlikely that they'll forget all the languages.

Sure, every random Zakjsnd, Joe and Yelaldto won't know English, but archeologists certainly will. And they'll be able to read it.

But even if we suppose that a nearby supernova explosion resulted in a burst of magic rays that somehow wiped all memories, people will either:

1. Know what radiation is, and they'll test casks for it.

2. They won't be doing digging down for at least tens of meters.

You really need a very unlikely confluence of factors: a very developed, but still pre-technological civilization, that is somehow interested in digging way down (why?) in that particular spot.

I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

If that knowledge somehow gets lost, which over such a long timeline seems almost likely, people will die from radiation poisoning without knowing what hit them.

> I'm pretty sure that pre-Curie Europeans did a lot of digging tens of meters in the ground.

In pre-industrial era? Not really. There was more digging after the steam engine invention, as suddenly people started looking for coal and ore. But that's what, 400 years out of 10000+ years of European culture?

We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years. Even without that, you could give the information visually in cartoon form.

>We can read Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Only because we found like one stone hundreds of years ago, if that was not the case we probably could not have done it.

>Anything written in simple English will be understandable even by an alien species in 100,000 years.

[Citation needed] This seems like quite an assumption.

Anyhow, the situation he sketched was that some random guy develops a fields with cylinders 300 years from now, how reasonable is it that he somehow understand the language or goes through the effort to translate it? I would wager pretty slim, I can barely understand text in my own language from 100 years ago.

I think the best thing we can do is bury all the nuclear waste. And to avoid any future generation excavating it, mark it's location, and to stand the test of time, build a massive stone pyramid on top of it. In 5000 years people will be able to figure that out.

Surely nobody would dig under a 10ky-old massive stone pyramid out of curiosity.

> This seems like quite an assumption.

The issue with hieroglyphics is that we only had a relatively small sample. If full books remain, it's going to be much easier to recover meaning from scratch. It's very close to what we already do with LLMs.

What books last 10000 years? What writing is performed today on a medium that will last that long? No one is carving into clay any more

The one in text files. Data is already extremely cheap and there are many horders and archivists. I would bet that if advanced civilisation still exists in 10,000 years, they'll have an archived version of Wikipedia from around this century.

(And probably quite a few weirdos will still keep replicating the bible)

We have no way to know, either way, what humanity will look like 10k years from now.

We might have disassembled every planet within a few thousand light years to englobe each corresponding star within a Dyson swarm.

We might have suffered a cataclysm that almost wiped us out, and have only just returned to the equivalent of the early industrial age, and the occasional remaining patch of carved rock writing from our time is as unreadable to those living in that new world as 𐘃𐘅𐘈𐘊 𐘌 𐘍𐘎𐘑 𐘖 𐘗𐘂𐘆𐘋𐘐 𐘇𐘆 𐘊 𐘑𐘉𐘂𐘆𐘊 𐘇𐘆𐘋 𐘐 𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐𐘅𐘋 𐘐 𐘏𐘏𐘈𐘊𐘑 𐘉𐘂 𐘏𐘏𐘈 𐘊𐘏 𐘏𐘐 𐘐𐘅𐘊𐘍𐘈 𐘇 𐘆𐘑 𐘐𐘅𐘊 𐘍𐘈𐘇𐘆𐘑𐘐 is to us.

We could only read Egyptian hieroglyphics several centuries after several tombs had been raided by early grave robbers. They would make a killing on a magical stone with funny pictures.

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