You can't solve this Design problem. The future of semiotics.
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- Опубліковано 19 чер 2020
- How can we ensure that future humans, or whatever species becomes the next dominant inhabitants of earth, understand our messages of danger from the past? It's tricky, that's for sure, and you can't solve this problem. Let's have a look at #semiotics. Correction: The WIPP is in New Mexico, not Texas.
Let's have a look at how linguistics, pictorials and even attitudes towards architecture can aid us in designing a warning system that can be understood for generations to come.
Links:
More on the WIPP: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste...
How to send a message 1,000 years into the future:
www.theatlantic.com/technolog...
Music By: Quincas Moreira and Causmic
Produced By: Chris Kernaghan
Support: Jill Kernaghan
Imagine the year is 7020. As part of a distant future society, you and your team stumble across signs while exploring uncharted lands. The signs are difficult to understand, and you and your team spend months researching their possible meanings. The signs were placed there by humans in the late 21st century, but as a warning. Will the warnings be understood?
Imagine that the signs, whatever form they come in, are presented in English. How can we be sure that future civilizations be able to understand it? We can’t. For a start, look at how English has evolved over the last 1200 years from Old English to Middle English to the "modern" variant we now use.
What if the signs were designed in such a way that all UN recognised languages were used? It’s unlikely that this would work either, these languages are likely to evolve substantially over the course of the next 5000 years.
This is a design problem the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, in Texas, has been trying to solve since 1983, and as you can imagine, it's a difficult problem to address given the long periods of time involved. Is there a "solution"? A cross disciplinary effort, involving linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, materials scientists, science fiction writers, and futurists to determine a warning system that will be understood.
The team working on this plan to deliver their final submission by 2028. Let’s focus on the work carried out so far, and discuss the challenges that remain.
So we know there's a risk that any form of linguistics will not be understood. What about the addition of pictograms? There might be issues here as well, as even now, interpretation of pictograms varies from person to person, location to location. The purpose of pictograms, or iconography as used on the web, is to transcend language or work in conjunction with simple language statements.
As a UX Designer that has conducted multiple usability tests with participants all over the world, their interpretation is often surprisingly different - especially when the iconography is non-standard, and seen for the first time in a novel situation.
So neither linguistics nor the use of pictograms are guaranteed to spook future visitors away. What about the actual architecture of the storage solution that houses the nuclear waste?
The WIPP shifted their attention to the design of the actual storage facility. Could some sort of information centre be built? Possibly, but this might again be dependent on future generations understanding of language and understanding of symbolism.
One suggestion was to design the housing in such a way that passing wind created a guttural, howling effect in the hope of creating some deep-rooted Paleolithic fear.
Vilmos Voigt, author of suggestions of a theory towards folklore, suggested erecting warning signs using the most used languages of the time, with additional signage that could be updated as years passed. The signs were to be arranged in a concentric pattern around the storage solution.
Weirder, more twisted structures were also suggested. Landscapes made out of thorns, fields filled with spikes, spikes bursting through grids, black hole. Much like designing the building in such a way that it creates a sound when wind blows through it, the hope here is that it will trigger primitive fears in those that stumble across it.
The theory of generational memory, the passing on of memory, or folklore, from generation to generation. Enter, the atomic priesthood.
Consider the messaging of the Catholic Church from the past 2,000 years. Much of that messaging, a singular God exists, that takes interest in individual beings, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, has existed from inception, with little deviation from the original message.
Could the same be done with an atomic priesthood? The priesthood would exist solely to preserve the "myth" of radioactivity, and the dangers of coming into contact with dangerous waste.
Bizarrely, but not without merit, is the potential of altering cats genetically so that they "glow green" when they get too close to radioactive material - perpetuating the myth.
The harder the dungeon, the better the loot.
Imagine being a human living in a post apocalyptic world and then one day you and your tribe find an entire valley filled with spikes/forbidding architecture
I'd totally dig there.
Makes me wonder what places like Stonehenge could have been meant to tell us. lol
@Calvino Kristanto broken atom
@@star7communicator434we didn’t dig up Stonehenge so let’s hope they don’t
A: Put some actual harmful radioactive material somewhere on the surface, people in the future will recognise dead animals in the area or will soon come to the conclusion that this area is harmful and bad and they will avoid it. "The forbidden zone were even the air itself makes you sick"
B: (My favorite) Create some kind of organisation whose only task is to guard the place, with quasi religious foundations. Combine this with the effort to store modern knowledge in physical form and you get guardians of knowledge combined with guardians of the "Forbidden Zone".
Nah for real, put it in some kind of reinforced concrete, steel, carbon whatever. Put 30 ft. of soil on it and on top some big boulders. Then make sure to erase all traces that a someone ever was there, no garbage, no soda cans or bottle caps, nothing.
Fun fact! Thomas Sebok coined the term "nuclear priesthood" (I think this is the case, but i may be wrong! Its always good to do some fact checking based on youtube comments lol) back in the 80s, referring to the concept of creating an atomic cult that would use cult-y tactics to scare people away from these sites for (hopefully) generations upon generations after us.
EDIT: lmao I commented before finishing the video and it's covered in the vid 😅 sorry about that
If you try to make a nuclear religion i guarantee you that within 10~ generations they will be encouraging their followers to chug down plutonium to gain the powers of the ancients
I don't know why the solution they seem to have come up with is 'make it look cool as shit'
Idea: make an artificial desert
Not only are deserts unassuming and bland, but dangerous and unwelcoming. An artificial Sahara, absolutely sweltering and uncomfortable that it would be miserable to be there, even without radiation.
The danger of heat and fire are things you can physically feel, unlike the invisible radiation below.
Any future man would see it as a wasteland with no point, of course someone may try to eventually dig through to find “oil” so it’s important this desert is built over a large layer of bedrock, making it as difficult as possible to simultaneously be there and dig there
Super interesting and thought provoking stuff. I never really stopped to consider how much effort goes into design until I watched a few of your videos. Keep up the good work!
How can you have only 700 subscribers, It's incredible to me, all your videos are of incredible quality.
I would leave warnings, but only after hiding the facility incredibly well
Why don’t they have great chasms of rock monoliths with carvings of fear, skeletons and death increasing to the centre.
one of the official ideas is a big square, with scary lightning bolts around it, and then we build hills around that so future people can see it from above
What if they see skeletons and think "wow, this must be a burial site"
Apparently the spikes would have screaming human faces carved into them.
“The simplest solution is almost always the best.” Truer words were never spoken.
Great video! super insightful!
This is a lovely way of succinctly saying (part of) what I’ve been trying to explain for 2 years now. Thank you.
You bury it deep and forget about it. Maybe put a few very basic picture images (say of someone dying) very far below the ground level. Any architecture at the ground level will make people really curious. If the people in the future are able to understand what we are saying they still will not understand our motives and may think that we are lying to preserve a grave or treasure or a weapon or something like that. If the society has no technology they will not be able to find the structure most likely. A high technology society would likely have high tech devices that could detect radiation easily. We would want to prevent a society with a low level technology (but still some digging tools at least), from seeing the site and trying to investigate it. So basically we should do everything differently from what we are doing.
Yes nations can build bombs in secret using tunnels.
They may have some technology from the past. However the earth is really big. Even with a very advanced civilization like ours we have only mined certain areas of certain parts of the globe, and only to a certain depth. If there was an alien structure under the earth we would be extremely unlikely to find it anytime soon. If there are only tribes with a low population density they are less likely to need to dig deep mines. If there is a high population density on earth and they have the capacity and drive to dig lots of deep mines....they are more likely to have advanced technology.
What if civilization gets to a point where they can drill again and they start drilling deep in that area?
@@mythos1623 It is not 100% totally fail safe. Still drilling deep takes special machinery and it is extremely expensive and requires lots of coordination (and such a society would likely be able to detect radiation). There is no point in drilling deep except for one or two wells for scientific purposes or something like that. Also you wouldn't want to bury it right under the middle of an oil layer. Even if you hid it in the middle of an oil layer though most likely they could extract all the oil without even knowing it was there. If they did hit it they might wonder why their oil was glowing green though....
THE CENTER OF DANGER IS HERE
You have the exact same logo design as Krashed, i was confused for a second there
I would somehow make the area unbreathable or require special equipment to investigate, while also making the site itself discrete and hard to find.
build a series of three pyramids just like Egypt, engrave all the oogga boogaa curses on the walls. when they drop dead after 10 minuets of being there , sure they will be curious as hell but, they will die.
Its in New Mexico, not Texas
Yes, I added a correction in the description right after uploading the video.
My own thoughts are that the simplest solution would be to abandon nuclear power so we don't produce nuclear waste in the first place. Or to launch it into space onto a collision course with the Sun, expensive but effective.
But this problem that people 10,000 or 100,000 years in the future may not be so certain.
I get the problem, if the ancient Egyptians has a nuclear waste site we wouldn't have known until we found and translated the Rosetta stone. But using the past as a way to predict the future is not 100%.
language, writing and symbols have changed or been lost over the millennia but does that really mean it's certain to happen to ours? Yes other civilizations have collapsed and their language lost but none of them were like ours in many ways. So thinking exactly what happened to the Egyptians will happen to our civilization is flawed reasoning.
What if Stonehenge was a nuclear waste site ?😮
Transmute it, so that the radioactivity lasts for hundreds of years, not hundreds of thousands of years. However, this should be done in such a way as to not create excessive risk by way of accidents or the generation of more waste. Is all this possible? I don't know. I'm not an expert in all things nuclear. I do know though that it can be transmuted.
The problem here is that many of the more active waste from mixed-oxide reactors and disassembled nuclear weapons cannot be easily transmuted into any safe element without outputting that energy in some manner (1st law of thermodynamics). So even if we transmute it, that potential energy can't just dissappear, it must be spent in some way.
@@1lovesoni The idea isn't to transmute the fission products, just the transuranics, especially plutonium, reducing their half-lives so that the waste is dangerous for a shorter period but still radioactive (actually more radioactive). Also power would be produced in the process via fissioning of plutonium, etc. The fission products are, however, a "rather hot topic". That said, it is obvious that significant risks remain no matter how you "split it" so nuclear weapons and power are Faustian bargains by nature and that is unavoidable.
Ray cats
broken weel...
why dont we put it on the moon?
I thought the moon was made of cheese?
@@pspolygons it tastes better that way
The actual answer is that putting anything in space is exorbitantly expensive by the pound so any solution that involves space is impractical and exorbitantly expensive due to the extreme cost.
@@hunterscrazychannle oh ok. but in a few hundred years, when space travel costs go down and we (hopefully) have bases on the moon and mars, wouldnt that be the best option?
@@lincolnisnamedlincoln The problem is overcoming a the atmosphere, conceivably given the existence of a space elevator, yes, I think space would be an adequate disposal site as thre really is a lot of radiation up there from the cosmos with no atmosphere to block it, essentially it would be like a drop in a bucket. The most important aspect is to ensure it can never return as particles raining into the atmosphere would be terrible, the moon, in this hypothetical senario would be a decent place to store waste as the moons gravity would ensure it never returns. There is a better solution though. Creating less waste to begin with, which we can achieve now, through using thorium over uranium. I will link a great video on the topic.
Why bother with all this in the first place? Just dump it in the ocean.
The impossibility of ensuring the safety of future generations should be a strong enough reason to abandon nuclear energy and weapons. People say its clean and safe - how can it be if it causes problems like this one? And buried Uranium will be dangerous for 240,000 years - not just 10,000.
That's 10 half lifes, the standard for it to be utterly harmless. Likely it wouldn't be significantly dangerous after just 24,000 years though (it'd be at less than a quarter of it's current output by then, and steadily decreasing).
"Atomic Priesthood" is the worst idea i have ever heard, why would anyone believe in this? Only a real nerd would suggest this as a serious suggestion.