/remind me 200 years. curious to what the people in 2223 have to say about us.
When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage, doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of years into the future etc... Such projects today are most certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Where baby animals come from.
How to make beer and bread.
The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no causative understanding of what was happening.
> The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and tides.
Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides actually work (there is no oceanic "tidal bulge"). It took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed. The ancients were unable to predict tides except by repeated observation of a specific location.
> Where baby animals come from.
There was zero understanding of biological reproduction before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do" is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells, nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
> How to make beer and bread.
Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
The ancients understood none of the things you mention even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been unchanged for a very long time.
You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course. Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a far cry from the directed breeding done even at small farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at larger ones.
Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too. But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know people who like tv shows about guessing if something is made out of cake or not. We’re as weird as ever.
If you think their work was trivial, you might not understand how competent and insightful they were, or how little so many aspects of this knowledge and these theories have changed in thousands of years.
They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air, at that place and time.
Future science is going to have a field day.
A couple of well established air samples from when scientific glass blowing first happened have also been found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of known provenance.
I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.
You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software development is representative of software development in general.
Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will happen.
And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is mostly how we (the average human) lives.
"This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the ancients have inexplicably built here ?
One of the potential options for this project was very brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same functional effect which is they stop living there and don't return.
The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what they need to know.
The most sensible way to deal with the waste, after burning up transuranic waste in nuclear reactors (common sense), is to put it somewhere that the effort to find and retrieve it is so great that only people who already knew what they were doing could manage to get their hands on it. The most obvious candidates for such a method are dumping it into the ocean. If you want to get fancy it could first be dissolved into water, or instead vitrified and sealed. Either way, it could be placed directly on the sea floor in deep parts of the ocean, or dropped into subduction zones, or buried beneath the sea floor. Any of these would be adequate. Another option is horizontal boreholes a few kilometers deep, but that's a bit less practical.
Of course people today lose their lids at the thought of a little tritium getting dumped into the ocean; this is the result of the same sort fear mongering campaigns that "this is not a place of honor" comes from. But this is a sociological problem deliberately created by activists, not a technological problem. A great deal of nuclear waste, including spent fuel and reactor components, was dumped into the ocean in the 20th century and nobody crying about Japan's tritium loses much sleep over that waste. China pretends that Japan's tritium will ruin fish for China, but they're not acting concerned about the several hundred TBq of nuclear waste the Soviet Union dumped into the Sea of Japan. Their objections to Japan dumping their tritium are political theater. The impact this oceanic dumping has had since it was done decades ago can be studied, and the answer is that it's not an issue. Water is a really great shielding material and very deep water is really good at keeping meddling idiots away from things. Much better than any spooky monument or deliberately poisoned land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_...
I don't see what the major issue is with burying radioactive waste inside a mountain and then dynamiting and sealing the entrance so it can't be accessed without serious excavation machinery. (Finland is doing this). Uranium is naturally occurring, we've just condensed it a bit. The civilisation that encounters it would need decent technology to dig it up, and if they've gone backward to the point they don't then not much semiology is going to reach them.
We also have a reasonable grasp of some of the meaning and motivations inherent in rock art from Aboriginal cultures and Lascaux. Much of that is 10,20,30 thousand years old. Communicating at that distance isn't some impossible task of semiology, but the more one tries to abstract a message into symbolic meaning, the greater the chance of it being misunderstood which is why I'd stand by my point of writing it in English and other languages to give a key. Could carve it into granite alongside a well-rendered image of humans dying and in pain. Humans are pretty smart particularly when determined to understand something. If they're completely illiterate it might even inspire them to realise that language can be encoded as symbols, but I don't know what would have to come about whereby we'd lose that ability now. And if it's got that bad, then a mountain full of uranium is going to be the least of their problems.