I agree with a little of it. For the most part, however, I think it's dumb, and, to me, it's an excellent study in the so-called "experts" not understanding the liberal sciences they study.
Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system...This is the report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist (who is at home with different, but contemporary, cultures), an astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence), an archaeologist (who is at home with cultures that differ in both time and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for implementing our marking system concepts).
Our efforts focused on making it understandable while providing minimal incentive to disturb it. We also consider a public information effort a necessary part of the marking system design. A system that is not understood today has no chance of being understood in the far future.
This is very wrong. One of the interesting things about ancient history is that it is often the facts and ideas best known to ancient civilizations which are the the most irrecoverably lost to future civilizations, because ancient civilizations never bothered to write the information down because it was presumed to be obvious and was well-understood by contemporaries.
By contrast, we know ancient civilizations in many ways far better than they knew themselves. We often understand their strengths and weaknesses, and the values and causes driving their approaches, better than they did, and because we have a wider perspective on cultures, we often formalize and document approaches to problems that, to them, were obvious and without alternative.
Modern people can read many ancient languages fairly well. However, simple epigrams are often very difficult for us to understand - for example, we understand complex books by Caesar and Cicero much better than we do Roman street signs and graffiti - even though the ancients meant for even foreigners who did not understand their language to understand them clearly.
I don't see any reason to be sanguine about our ability to make a sign that future people who do not think as we do, will understand any better than we do that of ancients who tried to do the same. A communication-based approach is doomed to failure.
"These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is ... by ... kilometers (or ... miles or about ... times the height of an average full-grown male person) and the buried waste is ... kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.
Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area.
Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site when it was closed in ..."
People have been doing this sort of thing since the beginning of time: inscribing curses and warnings and such on tombs and sarcophagi and temples, in the hopes of discouraging looters: "if you break this seal, bad things will happen to you."
The problem is...it never works. Humans are by nature curious and audacious creatures. They want what they cannot have. Putting a sign like that on something just says, "There's something here that was important to the ancients. Dig here if you want to find out what it was."
A big problem - and it says a great deal about how stupid these "experts" are regarding the material they're supposed to understand - is the particular wording they chose. The wording emphasizes that the danger cannot be seen or smelled or heard; it is supposed to be taken on faith. Problem is, it is human nature to reject a claim based on faith framed in terms outside their own culture.
Modern people have great reverence for places of worship in their own world and regard the desecration of churches and temples as despicable even if they are not religious (also see: Sim City 2000), but they totally disregard similar warnings in ancient tombs. And even those ancients had no regard for the curses uttered by contemporaneous cultures that were serious business to those who uttered them - for example, the Pharaoh cursing the Israelites on pieces of commemorative pottery.
The wording is also bad because it lends itself to a superstitious interpretation and consequent dismissal as external to any future belief system: emphasizing natural elements such as water and earth, and naming a specific time period in which a curse is supposed to endure.
Humans are pragmatic, and the best way to dissuade future civilizations from opening a dangerous seal would be to give them a taste of what lies in store - I think it would be best to make the door to the facility, and much of the entry area, have intense, localized radiation that gets even more intense further in. If intruders realize the danger is real - and not just provided in the form of warnings and booby traps, but a constant that scales in a predictable way - they will avoid the area for fear of their lives and the greater dangers that no doubt dwell deeper within.
Booby traps would not work towards this end because future civilizations would approach them just as we do today: as a challenge to be overcome, protecting something powerless but important deep within.
Everything on the site is conceived of as part of the message communication...from the very size of the whole site-marking down to the design of protected inscribed reading walls and the shapes of materials and their joints. In this report, the various levels of message content are described, as is the content of each level, the various modes of message delivery, and the most appropriate physical form of each.
Ancient civilizations did this all the time - almost invariably, in fact - and those messages, although desperately intended to be pervasive and obvious, are almost always lost on us. (Also see: Pyramids and UFOs) The purpose of cardinal facing on many monuments, for example, is still a mystery, as is the actual intent of Stone Age cave art.
We decided against a large radiation symbol prominently displayed on a marker lest the potential intruders take a quick reading, find nothing more than background radiation, and ignore the rest of the message. We did decide that the incorporation of a radiation symbol was approriate within the larger context of the message. As a symbol, it could provide a link between textual and pictorial information.
This is very wrong. A symbol combined with words creates one of the most cryptic messages possible.
Example: an ancient tablet featuring a picture of a cow with a block of text, it's impossible to know if the text is about the sale of cattle or the worship of a cow god. It might be neither; it could be some sort of satire or narrative. This sort of thing happens often - for example, we have many tablets written in poorly understood languages like Linear A/B, where the topic is clear, but the meaning is not.
Symbols, by contrast, are very easy to understand, as is writing, provided the language is well-understood (and it is highly probable that future civilizations will learn English as readily as we learn Koine Greek or Classical Latin or Aramaic or Hebrew). If the Eye of Horus is seen on a door, it is a clear sign that whatever is beyond that door is meant to be protected by its power. If a mezuzah is seen on a door, it is clear the door leads into a dwelling. If a weapon is planted atop a grave, it's clear the grave contains the remains of the wielder.
We decided against simple "Keep Out" messages with scary faces. Museums and private collections abound with such guardian figures removed from burial sites. These earlier warning messages did not work because the intruder knew that the burial goods were valuable. We did decide to include faces portraying horror and sickness (see Sections 3.3 and 4.5.1). Such faces would relate to the potential intruder wishing to protect himself or herself, rather than to protect a valued resource from thievery.
Missing the forest for the trees. This is the ultimate fallacy perpetuated by the morons who call themselves anthropologists: that all human behavior is dictated by economic advantage or the desire for gain. If humans see an image of something macabre that they do not relate to or empathize with, they will be curious, and try to investigate further.
...this system of markings should represent an enormous effort and investment of resources on our part...
....this panel member recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines. To put their size into perspective, a simple berm, say 35-m wide and 15-m high, surrounding the proposed land-withdrawal boundary, would involve excavation, transport, and placement of around 12 million cubic meters of earth. What is proposed, of course, is on a much greater scale than that. By contrast, in the construction of the Panama Canal, 72.6 million cubic meters were excavated, and the Great Pyramid occupies 2.4 million cubic meters. In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history.
This is the dumbest part of the whole proposal. Basically, the designers are approaching the project as if they're building a child's toy - that the ultimate audience does not share their level of intellectual and emotional capacity but will stand in dumb stupefaction of whatever they create.
History consistently shows that, when confronted by massive or inscrutable monuments, natural or artificial, humans are invariably fascinated, doubly so if the monument represents potential danger. It's as true of the Great Pyramids as it is of Mount Everest. And certainly both were designed to keep people away with threats, implied or real.
Such efforts to discourage human exploration by way of intimidation have never succeeded. Look at space travel, which serves no economic purpose other than to satiate the human desire to confront danger and to do the impossible, just as it was true when Westerners forced open the doors to China and Japan. Agricola invaded England just as Alexander invaded Afghanistan before him, despite those regions being some of the most hostile and resource-poor on earth.
This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines...
5.3 Personal thoughts (WS)
Working on this panel, always fascinating and usually enlightening too, has led to the following personal thoughts:
We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste?
In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.
...So-called "experts" can of course make important contributions, but they must listen carefully to all other people who represent those who might encounter the markers. In the course of working on this project, I received excellent ideas from a wide range of undergraduates, colleagues, friends, and relatives...
This is why committees of experts are dumb. Everything gets watered down to the level of the most overstuffed, pretentious Ph.D on the panel even if some people have the common sense to know it's all a load of shit. Then, of course, mistakes are made, and the world is irreparably damaged.
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The best approach is that which has historically proven to work best at hiding things of enormous value...whether that value is economic, like deep sea squid, or cultural, like the lost tombs of Imhotep and Scipio. The approach consistently proven most successful at keeping intruders out is simply to place the tomb in an obscure, isolated, unmarked area, situate it far below ground level, keep few records of its location, and remove all nearby human settlements and roads leading up to the monument.
But of course...that would be too logical.
What did Helen Caldicott MD tell us?
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