The internet is a fun place. If you're like me, sometimes you hear about a thing and you go look it up, and suddenly it's four days later and your finger tips have blisters and you have a beard and your girlfriend has moved out but damn if you don't know everything there is to know about shoelaces.
This is a thread to post and talk about things that make you say
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In 2006 I read an article that I really loved about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. A massive nuclear waste facility designed to store hazardous material that will continue to be hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. Specifically, the article was about a project manned by multiple linguists, archeologists and sociologists hoping to design a warning system to tell people, 10,000 years in the future, that this place is dangerous and will kill you if you don't leave.
It's an interesting problem to solve, because you can't just write a message or put up radiation symbols because the meaning of that stuff degrades and evolves over even just a hundred years or so. Humans 10,000 years in the future would be completely impossible to understand and probably even difficult to recognize as humans.
Today's episode of 99 Percent Invisible (possibly the best non-comedy podcast in existence and something you should be listening to) was also about this project (It's a long project - the facility isn't due to be sealed and these markers installed until 2038) and it reminded me about it, and it's still really fucking interesting.
Seriously, they had ideas like shaping the landscape to be impassible and ominous
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and they floated an idea
no shit
about genetically engineering cats that change colour in the presence of radiation, and trying to proliferate culture-wide stories and warnings that basically say "when the cat changes colour, get the fuck out."
SO INTERESTING
This is a thread to post and talk about things that make you say
In 2006 I read an article that I really loved about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. A massive nuclear waste facility designed to store hazardous material that will continue to be hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years. Specifically, the article was about a project manned by multiple linguists, archeologists and sociologists hoping to design a warning system to tell people, 10,000 years in the future, that this place is dangerous and will kill you if you don't leave.
It's an interesting problem to solve, because you can't just write a message or put up radiation symbols because the meaning of that stuff degrades and evolves over even just a hundred years or so. Humans 10,000 years in the future would be completely impossible to understand and probably even difficult to recognize as humans.
Today's episode of 99 Percent Invisible (possibly the best non-comedy podcast in existence and something you should be listening to) was also about this project (It's a long project - the facility isn't due to be sealed and these markers installed until 2038) and it reminded me about it, and it's still really fucking interesting.
Seriously, they had ideas like shaping the landscape to be impassible and ominous
and they floated an idea
no shit
about genetically engineering cats that change colour in the presence of radiation, and trying to proliferate culture-wide stories and warnings that basically say "when the cat changes colour, get the fuck out."
SO INTERESTING