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Comment by asimpleusecase | Hacker News Reader

We still have remote tribes who have very little interaction with nuclear technology. We could test some of these communication methods and see how they interpret them.

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The British tried that already in '56 and '57

https://youtu.be/KHY13PCeSxc?t=46

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maralinga#Nuclear_tests_and_cl...

They needed to do much better.

I don't think a series of nuclear explosions of 10, 8, 1, 6 and 25 kilotonnes should be considered "communication methods".

It's more about visual markings.

How about the warning signs about posted about the sites of the intended tests and the signs posted about the tests sites after the explosions.

Do you consider those signs to be "communication methods"? They used visual markings.

Sorry, it's hard for me to understand your sentence, but are you refering to the fact there were actual physical signs placed, but unreadable to natives?

Didn't realize it. The wikipedia page doesn't seem to cover that and youtube link is broken.

They put out signs before and after - the challenge was to convey a message to people with rich oral language skills but no written lnaguage traditions at all - so yes, they used pictures | graphics to convey danger - not with any real success.

That challenge aside some would say it was a cursory and very much token effort as at that time in history indigenous Australians were considered to be part of the fauna of the unihabited Terra Nullus with no rights other than some use as test subjects for the effects of the new toy.

Probably worth mentioning they also dusted Adelaide with fallout including a young Tony Blair, a future UK Prime Minister.

But very much worse near ground zero.

Re: youtube link - that's just to a 1986 song about the testing from Gossip by Paul Kelly - I dare say it's "broken" due to geo-locking (it works fine here in AU) - https://www.paulkelly.com.au/lyric/maralinga-rainy-land/

Thanks, nice background to the whole event. I wonder why so little of it is part of wiki.

Yes, song is likely geo-locked, but youtube just gives vague "video not available". Weird, it's usually more generous on error messages.

Those tribes also have no idea how to dig hundreds of meters down into those hard rocks in the first place.

So pretty useless overall.

I think it would be better to leave these tribes alone instead of interacting with them.

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