Experts are trying to come up with the best way to warn Earth's future inhabitants — whether 10,000 or 100,000 years from now — what precisely lies under their feet.
The idea here are very interesting to read, but I think I’m leaning most favorably towards the last group’s idea to bury it with as little marking as possible. The plans modeled on Stonehenge seem odd to me. Stonehenge is famously a monument whose origin and purpose was a mystery, and that mystery enticed people from all over the world to travel to the site and excavate it. It seems more like a good reference for a method that would not work. How many people would have toyed around at Stonehenge if the monument weren’t there?
At the same time, we have events with contaminated materials being used in construction within a matter of months or years, so it’s not like these are abstract problems. E.g., look at the 1983 Ciudad Juárez Cobalt 60 incident. We have the technology to identify contaminated materials, but we’d only use them if we have reason to believe we should. It’s probably fair to assume the same of future societies, so it makes sense to want to make sure they have reason to believe they should test the area.
The idea here are very interesting to read, but I think I’m leaning most favorably towards the last group’s idea to bury it with as little marking as possible. The plans modeled on Stonehenge seem odd to me. Stonehenge is famously a monument whose origin and purpose was a mystery, and that mystery enticed people from all over the world to travel to the site and excavate it. It seems more like a good reference for a method that would not work. How many people would have toyed around at Stonehenge if the monument weren’t there?
At the same time, we have events with contaminated materials being used in construction within a matter of months or years, so it’s not like these are abstract problems. E.g., look at the 1983 Ciudad Juárez Cobalt 60 incident. We have the technology to identify contaminated materials, but we’d only use them if we have reason to believe we should. It’s probably fair to assume the same of future societies, so it makes sense to want to make sure they have reason to believe they should test the area.