Some kid in 4019: Hey, look at this weird construction of an ancient civilization. My universal translator says it reads something like “This is not a place of honor.”…?
Some other kid: Oh yeah I’ve heard of this. It’s a dank meme from the 21st century
First kid: What does it mean?
Second kid: Fuck if I know, let’s go inside.
oh no
Honestly the whole system is doomed to fail there is nothing u can say or do that will prevent humans from looking inside a locked box. Even w people knowing what is inside nuclear containment areas people today would still go inside to look if we werent here actively preventing them. Pandoras box is not a moral tale its just a description of what humanity is like. The only way to stop people from going somewhere u dont want them to is to make it physically impossible for them to get there and thats a lost cause if youre working on a scale of 10s of thousands of years.
Pandoras box is not a moral tale its just a description of what humanity is like
Exactly.
“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”
- Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time
“‘And there’s the sign, Ridcully,’ said the Dean. ‘You *have* read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says “Do not, under any circumstances, open this door”?’
‘Of course I’ve read it, said Ridcully. ‘Why d'yer think I want it opened?’
‘Er… why?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘To see why they wanted it shut, of course.’*
*This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.
–Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, “What happens if I do this?”
-Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times
Pterry had a lot to say about humans being Like That. (And for a while he worked as a Press Officer for an electric company that had several nuclear power plants, right after the whole Three Mile Island thing - bringing us full circle to the original post.)
I do feel obligated to point out that this isn’t some sort of clever gotcha–the people behind the nuclear waste warning project are ACUTELY AWARE of the fact that making the warning anything interesting at all will attract future explorers by making it a mystery to be solved.
That’s actually explicit in any in-depth summary of the project!
The thing that makes it HARD isn’t finding a way to convey the messages–that can be done with pretty simple stick-figure symbols, honestly. Literally, the reason the Yucca Mountain Project is a project with a capital P is that they know how humans treat warnings to stay away from an interesting area. Finding a way to make the area inherently hostile such that future generations instinctively just Don’t Want To Be There is therefore the only way to minimize the risk, hence why it’s such an in-depth problem that hasn’t been solved yet. Because most of what they’ve thought of to make it Bad also makes it Interesting.
Basically, they’re trying to make it into the future equivalent of wasp research. Research on wasps is really important! There is a small but fervent community of biologists DESPERATELY trying to raise interest in that research! But because people just Don’t Like wasps, it’s very hard to get new researches interested and nearly impossible to acquire funding, which means new research is very limited and rare.
So, if we can recreate that sense of “ew I just really hate that place why would anyone want to go there” about something that GENUINELY SHOULDN’T be studied, we may avert disaster.
