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.
Don’t you actually make a very good point for this effort?
The problem with the superstitious warning was exactly that it was aimed only at the people of the time. It had no way to preserve it’s warning beyond cultural and intellectual changes. Same as the radioactive symbol having too little inherent deterrent in its design so it caused radiation incidents by people who did not know what it means so we designed a new one that’s specifically meant to be intuitively “dangerous” to people without any prior knowledge.
So in a similar way, we need to have a way to create warnings about nuclear waste - or a river - that are not limited by the current generation and the way they understand signs and meanings.
Don’t you actually make a very good point for this effort?
The problem with the superstitious warning was exactly that it was aimed only at the people of the time. It had no way to preserve it’s warning beyond cultural and intellectual changes. Same as the radioactive symbol having too little inherent deterrent in its design so it caused radiation incidents by people who did not know what it means so we designed a new one that’s specifically meant to be intuitively “dangerous” to people without any prior knowledge.
So in a similar way, we need to have a way to create warnings about nuclear waste - or a river - that are not limited by the current generation and the way they understand signs and meanings.