[HN Gopher] Marbles (2016)
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Marbles (2016)
Author : aphrax
Score : 120 points
Date : 2021-04-13 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.erasmatazz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.erasmatazz.com)
| neilv wrote:
| > _But one day in the far future, I hope, somebody will notice
| one of my little marbles, pick it up, and wonder what it is, how
| it was made and even -- if we're very, very lucky and tales of a
| glorious civilization somehow persist that long -- who put it
| there._
|
| That's much more optimistic than Steinbeck:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pearl_(novel)#Summary
| bombcar wrote:
| The "civilization will collapse and the remainders will be
| hunter-gatherers" seems some weird form of the "dark ages" mythos
| that is certainly attractive to many. I wonder why that is.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In the back of my mind, not seriously more on the your top 10
| friends are your zombie apocalypse team mind, that learning
| non-techy skills are worth while. Won't need any damn lawyers
| except to sacrifices when the zombie hordes get too close, but
| doctors would be good. Knowing how to grow food would be
| useful. Making clothes would be nice as well as being able to
| build things. Still trying to decide if at that point UI/UX
| people are lumped in with the lawyers, but marketing/PR people
| might go before the lawyers.
|
| In otherwords, learn some hobbies that might just be a fun
| thing now, but makes you invaluable when civilization
| collapses.
| holoduke wrote:
| I am gonna melt some pictures and USB sticks inside a marble.
| Must be doable without destroying it.
| teddyh wrote:
| Unpowered flash memory can only hold data for a _maximum_ of 10
| years or so, and can be as low as _three months_.
| notum wrote:
| We could 3D laser etch data inside glass, now that would be
| both pretty and durable!
| maskedinvader wrote:
| I thought micro plastics and chicken bones were going to be the
| lasting remnants of our current civilizations see [1] and [2].
| [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chicken-bones-
| may-... [2] https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/chicken-bones-
| and-plast...
| dnautics wrote:
| Microplastics are too tempting of a carbon source for bacteria.
| I would be surprised if polystyrene and polyethylene
| degradation genes don't start to run rampant in the global
| bacterial pangenome via horizontal transfer in the next 100
| years
| yamrzou wrote:
| > Let us start with an assumption that most of us already suspect
| to be true: that civilization will not survive more than a few
| centuries into the future.
|
| If no big new innovations are made (e.g. finding a way to exploit
| previousely unused raw materials), how long will the current
| earth reserves allow technology to last?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Forever I think. Global population is projected to peak at
| about 10 billion and technology is getting more efficient all
| the time. The planet receives vastly more energy than we need
| even if everyone on the planet has a European standard of
| living. Everything we make can be recycled even with the
| technology we already have so long as we can expend enough
| energy. If our species dies out it will not be for want of
| stuff but because we are unwilling to work together.
| jar3624 wrote:
| That's a big deep hole for one small marble. looks like a hole
| for a concrete pier... dug 8 of those last year. that's some back
| breaking work ...
| jl6 wrote:
| There's really no need to make an extra effort to bury anything.
| The world's landfills surely already contain more than enough
| weird durable objects to puzzle future archaeologists.
|
| Also, pessimism is so lazy.
| kleer001 wrote:
| > Also, pessimism is so lazy.
|
| "There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old
| optimist."
|
| -- Mark Twain
|
| ;)
|
| Optimism takes faith or creativity, but both are pretty
| expensive.
| m463 wrote:
| We should figure out how to combine CD/DVD technology with
| marbles and then bury spherical data containers.
| tyingq wrote:
| Microsoft has Project Silica: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/research/project/project-sil...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| Wasn't that kinda the idea with the Github arctic code vault?
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| Done: https://www.zmescience.com/research/technology/quartz-
| disk-5...
| Exuma wrote:
| Nothing like a warm cup of suffocating existential angst to start
| the day!
| [deleted]
| meowster wrote:
| Interesting, but I fear they'll be too small and buried by too
| much sediment. Unless he burries a hundred of them in the same
| location, it will probably never be found, or if found, just an
| insignificant oddity.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Ok, how do I get a data stream on a marble (lasers?) and how
| dense can I make it - or how big can I make a marble?
|
| Bonus points if I can simply make a glass CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| TLDR: Man loses his marbles from imagined doomsday
| guhcampos wrote:
| I love the idea of trolling future generations and have thought
| about a couple methods in the past.
|
| Yet, it makes me think: are we being trolled by past generations?
| What inexplicable wonders of archeology might just be someone
| thinking "whoever finds this will be so confused they'll go
| crazy".
| [deleted]
| notional wrote:
| How many cave paintings were just some whiteboard equivalent of
| hashing out an idea
| pletnes wrote:
| Alright guys, so we've got the herd, say, over here. I'll
| just sketch'em real quick on the wall so we're on the same
| rock here. So at first, a couple of the youngsters chase them
| down the ravine, which is this crack in the rock over there.
| Now, after they round the corner, some of our more
| experienced guys flank them with spears. After running uphill
| over there, they won't be rested and we should have a nice
| meal tonight. Thoughts?
| jcassee wrote:
| So if this is what remained on the cave wall ... it was the
| plan that killed the whole tribe?
| pletnes wrote:
| Or maybe they didn't have whiteboard markers, only
| permanent ones.
| kalonis wrote:
| They had both, but some new hire confused them.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Nah, it was a prehistoric whiteboard interview.
| m463 wrote:
| "What is the best way to climb a tree to hunt or gather
| food..."
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I prefer agile
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I see you have 10 years experience hunting antelope.
|
| We hunt gazelles here. Do you have any experience hunting
| gazelles?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| "And this end is called the Thagomizer. After the late Thag
| Simmons".... [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thagomizer#/media/File:Th
| agomi...
| twic wrote:
| Mentioned here recently i think:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The trick to trolling the future is effort.
|
| The more effort something obviously took, the harder it is to
| suspect it's just a troll.
|
| And this is why I think our generation of Internet people are
| perfect for the job.
| m463 wrote:
| It will be like the explanation of 20th century history in
| from the 31st century in Futurama.
| oasisbob wrote:
| People are diverse enough that with a few millennia, probably
| no need to troll.
|
| There's an archaeological site near here, vaguely described in
| most publications. If you can get your hands on some of the
| original field reporting, you learn that one of the finds was a
| burial site where the head of the deceased was replaced with
| that of a canine.
|
| Not a known practice, apparently.
| api wrote:
| Even better: lets seed Mars with life and leave an actual
| mysterious buried or maybe orbiting artifact for future
| intelligences to find should any evolve there.
|
| Then the Martian equivalent of Giorgio Tsoukalos, the Ancient
| Aliens guy with the crazy hair, would be _right_.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| I doubt this was all that common, because it requires the
| pranker to have the idea of actual archaeologists to play the
| prank on, and that isn't something that's been present in all
| societies across history.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Archaeologists no but grave robbers have been around a long
| time.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Archaeologists aren't that new either. The oldest museum we
| know of was curated by Ennigaldi-Nanna, the daughter of
| Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
|
| Why do we think she created a museum? When the palace was
| excavated, dozens of neatly displayed artifacts from widely
| different eras and places were found. That alone wouldn't
| be conclusive, except for the fact that the artifacts had
| labels detailing their origins. In three languages.
|
| Ennigaldi-Nanna lived in the 6th century BCE.
| SamBam wrote:
| Manages to be both extremely sweet and extremely pessimistic at
| the same time.
|
| I wouldn't put even money on the chances that homo sapiens will
| go back to pre-modern times within ten thousand years. However,
| the probability of some civilization-ending event within that
| time (nukes, viruses, aliens, a giant asteroid) are certainly not
| zero either.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I can't recall the source (SciAm?), but I recall reading an
| article claiming that the longest impact humans can make is 16
| million years. And that refers to radioactive isotopes. We do not
| have the technology to make anything that can last longer than
| that.
|
| (I can't even figure out how to phrase the question to google for
| the article.)
| zimpenfish wrote:
| This might be relevant:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...
|
| > But the longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout,
| iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If
| there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring
| prosauropods, we wouldn't know about it.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| YES! That is it. Thank you.
| bombcar wrote:
| I don't see how Voyager II is not going to last longer than 16
| millions years - what exists to change it?
| monocasa wrote:
| How long will it take to evaporate into a metallic cloud?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Even outside the solar system there are still _some_
| particles about, most of which are moving at high velocities.
|
| At a minimum, I would expect it to look quite thoroughly
| sandblasted after 16 million years.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect the size of the particles and number is very very
| low - effectively zero once you're far enough away from the
| Oort Cloud.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Good question. The author didn't explore deep space. I
| believe it was related to terrestrial objections, but that is
| an interesting thought. Since nothing has ever been that far
| out I think it is quite impossible to say for certain, but I
| guess there's no reason to assume the microparticles per
| cubic meter are any different than inside the solar system.
|
| NASA talks about space dust here [1] and how it literally
| tore apart Mariner. But maybe that is just dust orbiting the
| sun and not something interstellar.
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watchtheskies/meteor
| _cl...
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Couldn't we just make a fossil?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| The problem is that fossils are incredibly statistically
| rare. It is highly unlikely we could pick the right
| geological location over that time scale? How do you know
| where a continent is going to be in 10's of millions of
| years? Perhaps we could map out where plates are moving, but
| are we accurate enough to avoid tectonic plate subduction,
| erosion, volcanoes, floods, ice ages...? I think we take the
| statistical rarity of fossils for granted because they
| permeate culture: the chances of something being fossilized
| for hundreds of millions of years are practically nil. But
| not zero.
|
| Here's the article:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc.
| ..
| lxe wrote:
| I think information and civilization has progressed far beyond
| the possibility of a total loss of all our knowledge, barring a
| complete extinction or a destruction of earth.
| astorgard wrote:
| But destruction of Earth is inevitable!
|
| Even if we manage not to destroy ourselves in the next hundred
| thousand years, we still have to deal with some "soft" and
| "hard limits".
|
| First we have comets/asteroids impacts. I guess we might have
| the technology to deflect them in the next 5000 years or so, so
| this shouldn't be a problem.
|
| Gamma ray burst, close super nova explosions and glacial
| periods would severely damage half of Earth, but, again, as
| long as this doesn't happen in the next 5000 years or so, I
| think we will develop the technology to recover from that also.
|
| Let's fast forward to 600 million years where things start to
| get interesting: the level of carbon dioxide will fall below
| the level needed to sustain photosynthesis... So no more
| plants. But if we are still around here by then, I guess this
| should also not be a problem as we will be able to synthesize
| whatever chemical we need.
|
| In 1000 million years the solar luminosity will be 10% higher
| than at present. This will cause the atmosphere to become a
| "moist greenhouse", resulting in a runaway evaporation of the
| oceans. Hmmm... 1000 million years is enough for us to come
| with a solution for this, but who knows?
|
| In 2500 million years Earth will lose its magnetosphere.
|
| In 4000 million years the surface of Earth will melt from heat.
|
| In 7500 million years the Sun will absorb Earth.
|
| So... if we want to preserve man kind I would say that, in
| order to "play it safe" before things get more complicated, we
| have around 500 million years to escape Earth and ten times
| that to escape the solar system.
|
| I'm quite convinced that we will manage to do both. I'm also
| pretty sure _we_ will be there to witness it: we just have to
| hang on for ~50 years or so until we get functional cryogenic
| chambers; from there it is just a matter to tell the operators
| to wake us up in 5000 years once immortality is achieved.
|
| Who is with me? :)
| modeless wrote:
| See How To Destroy The Earth by QNTM:
| https://qntm.org/destroy
| gopalv wrote:
| > if we're very, very lucky and tales of a glorious civilization
| somehow persist that long -- who put it there.
|
| I just finished reading "Motel of the Mysteries" [1] and the
| Treasures section of that talks about the sacred seal of "Do Not
| Disturb" & the pendant made or rubber (it's a tub stopper).
|
| At best, this is just going to confuse the hell out of every
| archaeologist who interprets this as a "religious act".
|
| [1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-
| four/wp/2016/07/15/i...
| miglmj wrote:
| A teacher read us this book in elementary school and I've
| unsuccessfully been trying to track this book for years. Such
| an interesting way to think about the world around us, how it
| will be perceived, and the degree to which we cannot be sure of
| the accuracy of our perceptions of the past.
| dekhn wrote:
| Here ya go: https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-
| Macaulay/dp/039...
|
| David Macaulay's illustrations are fantastic.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| FYI, the author of this piece is Chris Crawford, author of
| groundbreaking classic videogames such as Eastern Front (1941)
| and Balance of Power.
|
| His outlook on modern videogames and life in general seems pretty
| pessimistic.
| oasisbob wrote:
| > So now let's go back to our marble. It is completely impervious
| to any chemical attack
|
| Isn't this a wildly misguided assertion? As any antique bottle
| collector will tell you, bottles underground WILL corrode, and
| the corrosion is very obvious in less than a century, depending
| on soil conditions.
|
| Granted that's soda-glass, and there are many types of glass, but
| just because a bottle can hold sulfuric acid for a few decades
| doesn't mean all glass will last centuries.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Yeah glass is not that resistant to alkaline conditions over
| long periods of time. You can, of course, perform chemical
| reactions in them using highly concentrated base, but you don't
| want to leave important features in contact with it for long
| periods of time. E.g. you can wash your scientific glassware
| with base, but you don't want to leave it in there to soak.
| Otherwise the ground-glass joints (rough patches of etched
| glass used to help connect glassware together) can be corroded
| and smoothed out.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Right. He says that glass is the same as quartz, but it
| isn't. It's got other stuff in it to reduce the melting point
| and improve other working characteristics. Most everyday
| glass is soda-lime glass or (less commonly than in the past)
| lead glass ("crystal"). Lab glass is often borosilicate
| glass. All are pretty durable, but not anything remotely
| approaching pure quartz.
| jnellis wrote:
| Marbles are buried in every yard that had children and will not
| be rare to future civilizations. They were very popular. Keys are
| the second most found item buried in yards. This was a recent
| discussion in r/gardening.
|
| I can attest to this as I've torn out an entire front lawn and
| topsoil from a 1964 tract home, sifted every square inch of it
| through 1/4" hardware cloth to build raise beds for vegetables.
| The findings were, in order, so many marbles, over half dozen
| keys, little plastic dinosaurs or other toys, two 9mm slugs
| (likely from people shooting up into the air as they were not
| deformed.)
| m463 wrote:
| In the old days it was arrowheads or civil war bullets.
|
| I wonder if keys are a blip in the timeline, like analog radio
| transmissions, which gradually are replaced by high-information
| signals that are akin to random noise.
| elicash wrote:
| > Well, the pyramids will last a long, long time. If there were
| more rain in Egypt, they'd erode away in a few tens of thousands
| of years, but no matter what, they're going to be here for a
| long, long time. Most of our other stuff, however, won't last a
| thousand years. Except for marbles.
|
| I remember reading a piece about a decade ago about how the last
| trace of human civilization that will (likely) survive, for
| BILLIONS of years, are our satellites. Actually, just found it:
| https://www.wired.com/2012/10/the-last-pictures/
|
| This isn't to detract from a great piece. Just adding this
| thought.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Interesting proposition regarding satellites. I have to wonder,
| though. What about:
|
| Debris from satellites breaking up, causing a very slow
| Kessler-type syndrome--over these time scales there will
| certainly be millions of close encounters with random objects
|
| Kinetic changes from similar gravity perturbations, leading to
| highly eccentric orbits which then decay into the atmosphere
|
| Solar flares--I imagine in the next few hundred million years
| we'll get some doozies, with similar kinetic effects
|
| Solar expansion--in about a billion years, the Sun will have
| expanded enough that liquid water can't exist on Earth's
| surface anymore. Won't that massively expand the atmosphere and
| drag satellites down a lot faster, even at geosynchronous
| orbits?
|
| I can definitely see "millions," but "billions" feels
| hyperbolic.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think that you thinking of near earth sats. There are many
| others like the solar observatory that are much farther out
| and are unlikely to be disturbed by anything in the gigayear
| range.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| You mean the SDO [0]? It's still in geostationary orbit.
| Which, of course, is much farther out than LEO, and orders
| of magnitude less affected by the Earth's atmo, but still
| interacts with it. Heck, even the Moon is probably affected
| by it [1].
|
| Perhaps a solar orbit--I didn't consider that when I wrote
| my first comment. But the plates described in the article
| aren't going there, they're going to GEO.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Dynamics_Observatory
|
| [1] https://phys.org/news/2020-09-earth-oxygen-rusted-moon-
| billi...
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| That's a cool thought. I always imagined it be something like a
| the K-T boundary (1), a thin layer of rock that looks different
| than all of the other layers.
|
| (1)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_b...
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