[HN Gopher] West Point discovers time capsule from 1828
___________________________________________________________________
West Point discovers time capsule from 1828
Author : geox
Score : 207 points
Date : 2023-08-28 02:38 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.westpoint.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.westpoint.edu)
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I'm betting they open it and a singing frog pops out.
|
| _Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal. Send me a
| note by wire, baby my heart 's on fire!_
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| unlikely, that song was written in 1899.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The frog pops out, says "please wait while a required
| software update is installed", freezes for 7 minutes, climbs
| back in the box, and then pops out again and sings "hello my
| baby" etc.
| scarlson wrote:
| Or was it written much earlier and someone didn't want to
| wait until 2024 to open their time capsule, thus introducing
| the song to the world much earlier than expected.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Was thinking that the whole time I was reading this thread.
| Classic.
| Electricniko wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the most famous students who would have
| been there in 1828 were Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis. Also,
| the valedictorian from 1929, Charles Mason, was the student with
| the highest scores ever at the academy. He beat out Lee for
| valedictorian, with Lee holding the record as the second highest
| scoring student in academy history. (The third highest scoring
| student ever was Douglas MacArthur 75 years later.)
| p-e-w wrote:
| It's pretty surprising how strongly top performance at that
| institution seems to correlate with accomplishments later in
| life that are mostly unrelated to academic prowess. That isn't
| true for regular universities, I think.
| malablaster wrote:
| Firstly, it's a military school and we're talking about
| military achievement so the things are hardly unrelated.
| Secondly, it would be more surprising if there were low or no
| correlation between their school and military achievements.
| grotorea wrote:
| Would you expect correlation between school and software
| engineering achievement, to give the most HN-relevant case?
| hajile wrote:
| If Lee hadn't gone to West Point and rubbed shoulders
| with all the right people, would he have gotten the job
| that made him famous? There were probably rank and file
| soldiers blown away in opening volleys who had more raw
| potential as military strategists than Lee, but were
| never given the opportunity because they didn't have the
| money, prestigious degree, and political connections.
|
| Software has always been a special case because despite
| some naysayers, it is quite meritocratic compared to
| other fields. Your degree might boost your ability to get
| an interview, but in a good technical interview, the good
| coder without a degree is generally going to stand out
| from a bad coder even if they have a degree from a
| prestigious university.
| ziftface wrote:
| I would definitely expect a high correlation between the
| top software engineering school and software engineering
| accomplishments, because there's a strong bias. If you
| want to achieve something in software engineering, most
| likely you'd want to go to a top school. I think it's the
| same for West point.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I expect it to be an upside down parabola. From my
| experience, top performers in school were either very
| smart or worked very hard, or both - two skills necessary
| for software engineering achievement.
|
| The other side of the parabola are smart kids who worked
| hard on things they found interesting, which just
| happened to not be school
| jl2718 wrote:
| I thought so too, and I went to one of the three National
| Service Academies, so I was taught about a lot of these
| people directly. Many of the modern top generals were some of
| the lowest-ranked graduates, and generally took the easiest
| majors, mostly Political Science. The bottom-ranked leader
| phenomenon starts with the leaders selected by the cadets
| themselves, and continues to the top of the ranks. So why was
| it different back then? There was a stronger emphasis on
| military science, but they also prided themselves on
| outperforming Harvard in whatever colleges used to compare
| each other, so it wasn't the only focus.
|
| The obvious answer is pretty simple: graduation order
| determined time-in-rank seniority, so they were considered
| for promotion before anyone else, and this both continues and
| compounds throughout their career.
|
| Is there an actual correlation to military performance?
| Probably, and probably slightly more so for the academy than
| other schools, because of the way that subjects are taught. I
| later went to several other name-recognizable universities,
| and there are large differences in the pace and depth of what
| is taught and tested, with the academy having a much greater
| pace over much more material at a much lighter depth, so it's
| kind of like testing your ability to take in a lot of
| information very quickly and react to it, rather than master
| a domain of knowledge and creatively expand upon it.
|
| There is also a social effect of named leaders to gain
| support among a cohort, especially in 'minority' populations,
| which are formed by commissioning source in the military
| officer corps. For example, Westmoreland was "first rat" at
| The Citadel, which has a much lower admission standard than
| West Point, but it was a brutal program with fierce advocacy
| among graduates.
| mandevil wrote:
| I'm not sure what the line about Westmoreland and the
| Citadel and minority populations means. William
| Westmoreland, the US Army general who lead MACV during the
| critical years of the Vietnam War, spent his first year of
| college at the Citadel, but then transferred to USMA
| (transfers into military academies was quite common at the
| time), where he ended up as First Captain (basically head
| of Cadets, not top in class rank but the commander of the
| Brigade of Cadets).
|
| One of his classmates in the class of 1936, Benjamin O.
| Davis Jr, was the first African-American to attend West
| Point in nearly 50 years, and would go on to lead the
| Tuskegee Airmen into battle. Davis suffered from a set of
| social isolation during his entire four years at USMA,
| never had a roommate, no one talked to him during meals, no
| one talked to him outside of class, he was not invited to
| dances or social events, etc. trying to drive him out of
| the Academy and return it to the all-White way it had been.
| Apparently Westmoreland wasn't one of the ring-leaders of
| this ostracism, but as First Captain it sure as hell was
| his job to stop it, and he failed to do so.
|
| This started a pattern for Westmoreland, of being wrong
| about things but getting promoted anyway, that continued
| for the rest of his life. _Westmoreland: The General Who
| Lost Vietnam_ by US Army in Vietnam veteran Lewis Sorely,
| is appropriately scathing of the man and his failures.
| vintermann wrote:
| Isn't it likely that those people got to be top generals
| precisely because their good school results?
| dmurray wrote:
| I wouldn't think so. They might get their first choice of
| specialty within the army as a young second lieutenant, and
| get some compounding advantages from that. But twenty years
| later, when you're up for promotion to general, aren't they
| going to look at your achievements as a colonel rather than
| wave you through on your long-ago test scores?
| ffhhttt wrote:
| The pool of professional officers was very small and
| completely insufficient for the needs of the expanded
| military.
|
| Being a semi-competent officer with some experience
| basically guaranteed that you'd be fast tracked to a
| senior command.
|
| e.g. Grant left the military in 1854 and was just a
| captain when the war started. In about 4 months he was
| already a brigadier general
| LanceH wrote:
| Promotion to general is very much a political effort as
| well as job performance today, but even more so back
| then.
|
| Being at the top of your cohort from the beginning has a
| number of advantages. Your name is known from the very
| start. Big things are expected and big opportunities are
| presented. There is probably a very strong personal
| commitment to a military career by those bothering to
| achieve top scores, and not being a career captain, but
| aiming for colonel or above.
|
| Being the top of the class also puts a person on a track
| that is even promotable to the very top. A 2nd lieutenant
| supply officer just isn't on the same trajectory as a
| high profile infantry officer commanding a forwardly
| deploy combat unit.
| scrlk wrote:
| The class of 1915 had 36% of its 164 graduates go on to
| attain the rank of general. John Keliher (rank 159) made
| it to Brigadier General.
|
| See:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_class_the_stars_fell_on
| wnoise wrote:
| It is explicitly trying to optimize for measuring/inculcating
| military performance.
| dmurray wrote:
| I think there are two effects here:
|
| 1. West Point does a very good job of selecting for and
| rewarding the same traits that lead to career success.
|
| 2. The most successful military leaders (especially in
| wartime) become famous, far beyond the most successful
| doctors or lawyers. 12 of them became US Presidents, but
| this has been true since ancient times. The guy with the
| best grades in Harvard Medical School might have a
| fantastically successful career, but you haven't heard of
| him.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Is that still true though? A handful of leaders from WWII
| are well known but the only American leader I know from
| recent times is general Schwarzkopf with his video games.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Colin Powell is another.
| keiferski wrote:
| Wars in more recent times are less impactful on the
| American populace. The last war that had a significant
| influence on the average person was Vietnam, and even
| then, we _almost_ had John McCain, Al Gore, and Wesley
| Clark as presidents, although none were particularly
| high-ranking in the military.
| whafro wrote:
| After being West Point valedictorian, Wes Clark was NATO
| Supreme Allied Commander, Europe - can't get too much
| higher than that. But yes, McCain was "only" a Captain,
| and Gore served for a year or so.
| keiferski wrote:
| That's true, my mistake, and I guess he was in charge
| during Kosovo. But I'm not sure he would really count as
| being a "military leader" in the same way that
| Washington, Grant, or Eisenhower were.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It is less true in modern times, but the wars that have
| been waged have been inconsequential for the average
| American. It will probably matter again someday.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well hopefully not. I'd be really happy if we could
| deprecate the military and its spending altogether
| because the world is safe enough. War is terrible for
| everyone even the winner. And there is no glory in
| conquest.
|
| Unfortunately we still need them for now.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| You weren't paying attention to national news if you
| didn't read about Petraeus.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Probably could have been a president if he didn't leak a
| ton of shit to his mistress and get gmail hacked -- he
| was the golden boy for a while
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yeah, he was the golden boy until he wasn't. There could
| have been another universe where he parlayed into a
| political career, but I think the fact that Iraq is still
| fundamentally a mess cut against him because his big
| success was still sort of just an asterisk. He would have
| had to run in like 2012 on the platform that Obama was
| ruining his victory in Iraq.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| If not following the news is enough to miss someone then
| I would think they're not that famous
| keiferski wrote:
| I knew that U. S. Grant was also at West Point, but I looked it
| up and he was there in 1839. A good many of the generals on
| opposite sides of the Civil War served together in prior
| conflicts.
|
| I wonder if there's a book out there that traces their lives
| from West Point to Appomattox. I found a book recently that did
| a similar thing with Wellington (following him through his
| India campaigns) and Napoleon (starting in Egypt.) Although I
| don't think they ever met before Waterloo. (Or even if they
| personally met at all, actually.)
| simonh wrote:
| Since we're off down a rabbit hole anyway, my favourite
| meetings of rival generals are those between Scipio Africanus
| and Hannibal. Once before the battle of Zama, and again years
| later in Ephesus when their military careers were behind
| them. I think one account is in Polybius and the other Livy.
| dkga wrote:
| Amazing!
| rpeden wrote:
| This one might cover what you're looking for:
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1504046900/
|
| I haven't read it yet, but have heard it's an enjoyable read.
| keiferski wrote:
| Thanks, this looks good.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| There is a book that tracks both of these men through to
| Appomattox.
|
| The Generals - Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee ; Authors
| Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson (1989) ; ISBN
| 0-394-75985-0
|
| My cousin "loaned" me this book years ago. One day I will
| return it.
|
| It does what you ask - following each man's life from
| childhood through the surrender at Appomattox and includes a
| nice bibliography, chapter notes, etc. I found it a
| fascinating read that offered up so many details one would
| not expect. For any lover of history this is a great book
| contrasting two of the most important people in that
| conflict.
| xavdid wrote:
| Looks like it's available as a scan from the Internet
| Archive here:
| https://archive.org/details/generals00dwig/mode/2up
| kej wrote:
| Not the book you're asking for, but I want to plug Grant's
| autobiography. It has a sort of "I've already been a general
| and president so now I can tell you about embarrassing things
| I did as a kid" charm that is an interesting contrast to
| typical biographies.
| kuharich wrote:
| Grant, a paper millionaire prior, discovered that he had
| lost his entire fortune in a Ponzi Scheme. Realizing that
| he needed to find a way to pay back the loan and support
| his family, Grant turned to writing. Mark Twain convinced
| Grant to sign a contract with his nephew's new publishing
| firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, to write his memoirs.
| To sweeten the deal, Twain offered Grant a seventy percent
| royalty from the profits. The need to write the memoirs
| quickly became more urgent when Grant was diagnosed with
| inoperable throat cancer that worsened with time. Grant
| worked vigorously throughout early 1885 to write the
| memoirs. He and his wife Julia also relocated in June to a
| friend's cottage in upstate New York at Mount McGregor to
| continue writing in a peaceful setting. Grant spent upwards
| of five to seven hours a day working on the book, aided by
| his son Frederick and other assistants who checked facts.
| His servant Harrison Terrell and Doctor John Hancock
| Douglas also played a crucial role by tending to Grant's
| medical needs and provided comfort during moments of great
| pain. Grant finished the Memoirs three days before his
| death on July 23, 1885. When "The Personal Memoirs of
| Ulysses S. Grant" were published later that year, they
| became an instant best-seller. The first paycheck to his
| widow, Julia Dent Grant, was for $200,000, providing long-
| term financial stability to the Grant family.
| Ballu wrote:
| Could you share the book, about Wellington and Napoleon?
| keiferski wrote:
| So it's actually a quartet of books, not a single one. I
| only bought one at a used book store and didn't realize it
| was an entire series.
|
| "Simon Scarrow: The Wellington And Napoleon Quartet".
| unnah wrote:
| In case anyone else is wondering:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mason_(Iowa_judge) made a
| career in law and Iowa politics, but was not exactly a
| historical figure at the national level.
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| IMO I think time capsules only really start to get interesting at
| the 400+ year maturation.
|
| The capsule should be resealed again and passed forward to the
| next generation 200 years from now, perhaps with a note from our
| current time.
| ilamont wrote:
| Video of the opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJRWKCtKqo
| tedajax wrote:
| [flagged]
| tpmx wrote:
| There's always that one guy.
| Aachen wrote:
| Skip 25.5 minutes if you want to see the opening... and after
| watching a minute or two, skip till 34:21
| Animats wrote:
| https://youtu.be/VNJRWKCtKqo?t=1535
|
| Skip the speeches.
| tasogare wrote:
| [dead]
| danielvf wrote:
| No spoilers here please - best watched yourself for maximum
| effect.
| nre wrote:
| Also don't scroll down and read the spoiler-filled youtube
| comments! Just watch.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| It's empty lmao.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Haha, it's empty!
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Its a empty box.
| soneca wrote:
| Yep. They opened live on YouTube. Nothing but some dirt inside
| it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/live/VNJRWKCtKqo?si=_Tlp6lgPozaqDN4x
| scohesc wrote:
| I wonder if it was intended to be filled with items, or if it
| was just one big joke?
|
| "Heh, someone's going to find this long after I'm dead and
| open it to find nothing but a chunk of dust, and they're
| going to think it was important!"
| 93po wrote:
| Could have been symbolically empty, or it could have been
| the box itself had significance. Or it could have been that
| there was a valuable item but it was taken by whoever
| sealed it, knowing there would be no risk of getting caught
| whoopdedo wrote:
| May be worth analyzing that dirt to determine where it came
| from. I'm reminded of sports fans who will collect dirt from
| the field (or melted ice for hockey) as a memento of a game.
|
| Or research the library in case someone wrote about the time
| capsule.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Well perhaps there was a dead squirrel
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Perhaps it holds/held the ashes from someone's cremation.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I'm surprised that they are not waiting till 2028 to open it.
| Would be and great PR. I wonder if the inconclusive X-rays
| indicated underwhelming contents.
|
| A difficult to x-ray lead box sounds like the ideal use case for
| neutron imaging.
|
| https://www.phoenixneutronimaging.com/neutron-imaging
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Sooner better than later. If you wait and there's nothing
| interesting in it, the windup and letdown would take the wind
| out of their sails.
|
| Remember Al Capone's Vault (1986)?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_V...
| paxys wrote:
| Why take it away from current cadets? West Point doesn't need
| internet PR, and 200 is as random a number as any other.
| ortusdux wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicentennial
| highwaylights wrote:
| Yeah this seems... kind of like a jerk move?
|
| Finding a time capsule and then opening it at 195 years rather
| than 200 years seems very much like you just don't want someone
| five years from now to get to do it instead of you.
| unglaublich wrote:
| There's nothing special about 200 besides being a multiple of
| 10, which is an arbitrary convention.
| brk wrote:
| I think sometimes people get too hung up on arbitrary
| numbers.
|
| Will another ~2.5% of elapsed time really make much of a
| difference?
|
| Also, why shouldn't the people who discovered it get to open
| it at this point?
| goodbyesf wrote:
| Most people, probably including those who created the time
| capsules, like nice 'round' numbers for some reason. It's
| why we have terms like centenial, bicentenial, etc.
|
| People bury time capsules in the hopes that it is unearthed
| 50 or 100 or 200 or 1000 years
|
| You'll notice that most time capsules are buried with the
| expectation that it is unearthed on non-arbitrary dates.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_capsules
|
| > Also, why shouldn't the people who discovered it get to
| open it at this point?
|
| The people who created the time capsules, if given the
| choice, would probably want it opened in 2028 rather than
| 2023.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 195 is a multiple of 13, to commemorate the 13 original
| colonies, 3, for the trinity, and 5, for the Five
| Freedoms.
| brk wrote:
| So what would be the recommendation if it was found at
| 205 years instead of 195 years?
| chasd00 wrote:
| I don't know a lot about Westpoint but my hunch is if
| someone from Westpoint wrote "don't open this for 200
| years" on the time capsule then it won't be opened until
| exactly 200 years has passed.
| [deleted]
| SnoJohn wrote:
| Update: It's Al Capone's vault:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_V...
| LynxInLA wrote:
| based on what was inside, you weren't far off
| googlryas wrote:
| The most interesting thing about time capsules is the way
| they inform us of how bad we are at thinking about the
| future.
| ggm wrote:
| Every time capsule I've seen online ever, seems to have
| remarkably hokey artefacts in it. Random things which it's hard
| to judge relevance of with modern eyes.
|
| I wonder how many of them yield eg low background radiation
| sources, air samples insulated from contemporary changes, tree
| ring data with specific times, previously unseen sources of
| confirmatory data about other things, extractable DNA, colour
| swatches preserved from UV light, whisky bottle residue..
| Animats wrote:
| The Westinghouse Time Capsule, buried below Flushing Meadow in
| New York in 1939, is rather banal. That was a elaborate
| project. It's supposed to stay buried for 5,000 years The
| contents should survive; the outer shell is a very durable
| alloy, and the contents are sealed in glass in nitrogen. But
| the site will probably be under water in this century.
|
| To keep track of where it is, thousands of copies of "The Book
| of Record" were distributed to libraries around the world. If
| you want a copy, it's about $10 on eBay.
| londons_explore wrote:
| In about 100 years time, someone will probably dig it up...
| schlauerfox wrote:
| I was told a story about a time capsule in Covina, CA, USA
| same result nothing found, because hermetic sealing wasn't
| figured out until a year after that one was buried. This
| clearly shows the capsule was breached and 200 years of
| water, air or moisture will ruin anything organic. Worst case
| it was human ashes, I doubt something like that, Kosciuszko
| died in Switzerland, but it would be interesting to do some
| mineral x-ray gun atomic analysis on the remainders to see
| paper? cloth? only silt?. The Westinghouse one was done about
| as well as you can preserve organic things like paper and
| cloth. Also reminds me of the TMBG song "By the time you get
| this" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCOajqLycI
| sbierwagen wrote:
| See also Miss Belvedere, a time capsuled 1957 Plymouth
| destroyed by water intrusion.
| https://axleaddict.com/cars/MissBelvedere
| PotatoNinja wrote:
| https://www.theonion.com/newly-unearthed-time-capsule-just-f...
| paxys wrote:
| The purpose of a time capsule isn't scientific discovery. It's
| simply one generation of students showing a slice of their
| everyday life to another. "Hokey artifacts" is the entire
| point.
| [deleted]
| w-ll wrote:
| /remind me 200 years. curious to what the people in 2223 have
| to say about us.
| notbeuller wrote:
| "What does "this is not a place of honor" refer to?"
| ggm wrote:
| Some 20th century hazing ritual, involving massive amounts
| of plutonium.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Pretty hopeful that humans make it back with reading and
| writing in just 200 years after a big nuclear war.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| Clearly the ancients worshiped plutonium.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| "What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us... Wow they
| must have hid the _really_ good stuff here! "
| notbeuller wrote:
| It was from a study of how to mark a nuclear waste disposal
| site so that it would be understandable in 10k years. That
| was one of the sentiments they were trying to express -
| through symbols, earthworks, multiple languages.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The message sent would be "here's a plutonium mine!"
| gizajob wrote:
| I keep thinking that if you didn't want outsiders to
| dishonour your place of honour, that's what you'd write
| at the perimeter...
| tialaramex wrote:
| It's not about writing, this isn't like "Hey if we write
| in big letters surely they can read it" because there is
| no reason to think people will have English or even
| writing at such a distance in time. These are _NON-
| LINGUISTIC_ messages. Their expression as written text is
| for our convenience in assessing the project, which is to
| deliver that message without language.
|
| "This place is best shunned and left uninhabited" isn't a
| useful thing to write, but it's a useful sentiment to
| evoke for this purpose. Construction of deliberately
| hostile landscapes was one potential implementation. If I
| can live anywhere, why would I choose to live on the
| vast, too hot, practically indestructible black rock the
| ancients have inexplicably built here ?
|
| One of the potential options for this project was very
| brutal. Just deliberately leave the surface of the site
| slightly radioactive. People who try to live there will
| discover they get cancer and die, it doesn't matter
| whether they go "Oh, it's radioactive here, that's not
| good" or "The ancient curse, don't live there because the
| Ancients have cursed that place" it has the same
| functional effect which is they stop living there and
| don't return.
| gizajob wrote:
| Yeah, I have a master's in philosophy and semiology, I
| know exactly what they're getting at, but at the same
| time almost any kind of message of warning is going to be
| misconstrued and inverted anyway. One may as well write:
| "Extremely radioactive waste" in English and a few other
| languages - the future culture will either be able
| understand that because they're still at our level, or
| they won't at all and have to work it out for themselves.
| Virtually everything we've found with an ancient curse
| we've completely disregarded, same for dynamiting our way
| into the Great Pyramid, and also "honour" isn't what it
| used to be, and as a concept regarded wholly differently
| by almost every society on earth, even between
| individuals in the same society, so I wouldn't even
| bother invoking a concept like that in a warning.
|
| The idea of poisoning the perimeter a radioactive site
| with radiation is similarly bizarre. If there's been some
| kind of catastrophic "fall of man" then we may as well
| leave them to it. If they're approaching our level, then
| their (reinvented) Geiger counters will tell them what
| they need to know.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The entire premise is an exercise in fear mongering, not
| aimed at people 10,000 years in the future but rather at
| people in the present. The message is that we must not
| use nuclear power because the waste is so dangerous that
| we have to go to elaborate theatrical lengths to prevent
| cave men in the future from killing themselves with it.
|
| The most sensible way to deal with the waste, after
| burning up transuranic waste in nuclear reactors (common
| sense), is to put it somewhere that the effort to find
| and retrieve it is so great that only people who already
| knew what they were doing could manage to get their hands
| on it. The most obvious candidates for such a method are
| dumping it into the ocean. If you want to get fancy it
| could first be dissolved into water, or instead vitrified
| and sealed. Either way, it could be placed directly on
| the sea floor in deep parts of the ocean, or dropped into
| subduction zones, or buried beneath the sea floor. Any of
| these would be adequate. Another option is horizontal
| boreholes a few kilometers deep, but that's a bit less
| practical.
|
| Of course people today lose their lids at the thought of
| a little tritium getting dumped into the ocean; this is
| the result of the same sort fear mongering campaigns that
| _" this is not a place of honor"_ comes from. But this is
| a sociological problem deliberately created by activists,
| not a technological problem. A great deal of nuclear
| waste, including spent fuel and reactor components, was
| dumped into the ocean in the 20th century and nobody
| crying about Japan's tritium loses much sleep over that
| waste. China pretends that Japan's tritium will ruin fish
| for China, but they're not acting concerned about the
| several hundred TBq of nuclear waste the Soviet Union
| dumped into the Sea of Japan. Their objections to Japan
| dumping their tritium are political theater. The impact
| this oceanic dumping has had since it was done decades
| ago can be studied, and the answer is that it's not an
| issue. Water is a really great shielding material and
| very deep water is really good at keeping meddling idiots
| away from things. Much better than any spooky monument or
| deliberately poisoned land.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioacti
| ve_...
| gizajob wrote:
| At the same time those activists likely don't want oil,
| gas, or coal either. They probably wouldn't enjoy the
| countryside being covered with solar panels and wind
| farms. Not sure how you'd win if it's from an activist
| perspective with some kind of escatological focus ten-
| thousand years hence used as a mode of attempting social
| change today.
|
| I don't see what the major issue is with burying
| radioactive waste inside a mountain and then dynamiting
| and sealing the entrance so it can't be accessed without
| serious excavation machinery. (Finland is doing this).
| Uranium is naturally occurring, we've just condensed it a
| bit. The civilisation that encounters it would need
| decent technology to dig it up, and if they've gone
| backward to the point they don't then not much semiology
| is going to reach them.
|
| We also have a reasonable grasp of some of the meaning
| and motivations inherent in rock art from Aboriginal
| cultures and Lascaux. Much of that is 10,20,30 thousand
| years old. Communicating at that distance isn't some
| impossible task of semiology, but the more one tries to
| abstract a message into symbolic meaning, the greater the
| chance of it being misunderstood which is why I'd stand
| by my point of writing it in English and other languages
| to give a key. Could carve it into granite alongside a
| well-rendered image of humans dying and in pain. Humans
| are pretty smart particularly when determined to
| understand something. If they're completely illiterate it
| might even inspire them to realise that language can be
| encoded as symbols, but I don't know what would have to
| come about whereby we'd lose that ability now. And if
| it's got that bad, then a mountain full of uranium is
| going to be the least of their problems.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Nuclear waste storage site.
| asah wrote:
| Social media. /S
| p-e-w wrote:
| I'm not a fan of such relativizations. Today's understanding
| of just about anything is unimaginably more complete than it
| was 200 years ago. The amount of thought that tends to go
| into such projects today puts to shame all that 19th century
| people did or could have come up with.
|
| When trying to predict how people in 200 years will view
| today's civilization, looking back 200 years into the past is
| a poor approach. Just because phlogiston theory was garbage,
| doesn't mean we should expect our understanding of combustion
| to turn out to be equally flawed. I've read about modern time
| capsules containing descriptions in hundreds of different
| languages, including pictograms and algorithms, instructions
| for bootstrapping data retrieval devices, earthquake safety
| taking into account plate tectonics tens of thousands of
| years into the future etc... Such projects today are most
| certainly not just putting a bunch of stuff in a closed
| chamber and leaving future generations to puzzle about why.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| I'd like to think there are some things today which we have
| got completely wrong. That we're not just refining correct
| theories.
|
| I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead
| (eventually) to actual understanding. Data precedes theory.
|
| You're thinking of nuclear waste? Not representative of
| today's time capsule, any more than space shuttle software
| development is representative of software development in
| general.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I think today's explosion of LLMs etc will lead
| (eventually) to actual understanding."
|
| Or the opposite. Most people become too lazy to think and
| let the AI do it for them... and so the AIs can never
| overcome their baked in biases, so no real progress will
| happen.
|
| And about what we have got wrong, I think the problem is
| mostly how we (the average human) lives.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Every story about dark energy should just be labeled "our
| astronomy has some large but unknown flaw."
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| At the same time, there are so many things that people 2000
| years ago understood quite well, and didn't have much worse
| of a grasp on than we do today. I could be wrong, but it
| seems that specialized technologies and the knowledge they
| yield are the vast majority of improved understandings.
| There's a lot otherwise that maybe we haven't made much
| progress on.
| p-e-w wrote:
| The design of a time capsule is above all else a task of
| cross-cultural communication. Until very recently,
| ethnography, linguistics, and social psychology simply
| didn't exist as formal disciplines. Prior to the 20th
| century, questions like "What are people in the future
| going to look for when trying to understand this?" could
| have only been answered by random guessing, if indeed
| such questions were even being asked in the first place.
| Today, there are mountains of literature and research
| into those topics. That's not even remotely comparable.
| solveit wrote:
| What are some examples of things people 2000 years ago
| understood almost as well as us?
| ggm wrote:
| The rise and fall of the Nile.
|
| The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and
| tides.
|
| Where baby animals come from.
|
| How to make beer and bread.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > The rise and fall of the Nile.
|
| The ancients noticed patterns, but had almost no
| causative understanding of what was happening.
|
| > The influence of the moon and the sun on weather and
| tides.
|
| Even Newton didn't correctly understand how tides
| actually work (there is _no_ oceanic "tidal bulge"). It
| took until Laplace for dynamic theory to be developed.
| The ancients were unable to predict tides except by
| repeated observation of a specific location.
|
| > Where baby animals come from.
|
| There was _zero_ understanding of biological reproduction
| before the modern era. Claiming that people 2000 years
| ago understood this phenomenon "almost as well as we do"
| is absurd. They didn't even know about sperm cells,
| nevermind chromosomes or DNA.
|
| > How to make beer and bread.
|
| Alchemy, with no insight into what was really going on.
|
| The ancients understood none of the things you mention
| even remotely as well as we do today. In fact, I'd argue
| that they essentially didn't understand them at all.
| ggm wrote:
| For the purposes of planning, I think they understood
| them about as well as most modern people do. Specialists
| now understand them a damn sight better but in practical
| terms I suspect a brewer in Egypt knew when the beer was
| ready about as well as some hipster with his alcohol
| meter, and the Egyptian shepard knew when sheep fell
| pregnant, and how to tell which ones had been tupped by
| the Ram.
|
| Very few people trying for a baby think about DNA. They
| think about the fertility of the woman in terms of her
| menstrual cycle. Thats practical science which has been
| unchanged for a very long time.
|
| You're not wrong. I am literally wrong of course.
| Figuratively I think I'm less wrong than you say.
| stouset wrote:
| Literally none of these are even remotely close to
| "examples of things people 2000 years ago understood
| almost as well as us".
|
| Knowing when the beer is ready is a damn sight less than
| the chemistry done by even a good number of amateur home
| brewers these days. Knowing the sheep are pregnant is a
| far cry from the directed breeding done even at small
| farms today, to say nothing of the genetic programs at
| larger ones.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Well, human psychology is a good example in my opinion.
| Technology has allowed us to make progress here, but even
| philosophies from this era still hold incredible insight
| that many, many modern humans may never acquire in their
| own lives.
|
| Look at Buddhism or stoicism as examples. The deeply
| nuanced and detailed understanding of human behaviour in
| some writing is almost dumbfounding at times. You can
| learn so much from it. Sure, there are weird parts too.
| But kids these days like skibidi toilet, and I know
| people who like tv shows about guessing if something is
| made out of cake or not. We're as weird as ever.
| nurettin wrote:
| Nothing. It was all magic and gods. They lived as long as
| their rotting teeth allowed. And discovering that you can
| observe things and have power over your own mind isn't
| exactly huge these days.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Well for one thing, fewer people back then believed
| ridiculous Whig histories that portrayed the past as
| incomprehensibly barbarous.
| ggm wrote:
| An example of this is an air collection, which operates in
| Tasmania. They fill diving canisters with air samples, and
| mark them by date and climate/conditions.
|
| They also collect community sourced air, dive schools and
| dive charter boats ring them up and say "we've got a
| cylinder which sat out back from 1972 do you want it" and
| they get an albiet dirtier, less certain view of the air,
| at that place and time.
|
| Future science is going to have a field day.
|
| A couple of well established air samples from when
| scientific glass blowing first happened have also been
| found I believe. Obviously collection techniques impart
| different qualities, but it's still amazing what you can
| do, with a reasonably well authenticated pocket of air of
| known provenance.
| midasuni wrote:
| https://youtu.be/bu5-VERN3XY?si=gdKL1ef-BLs51zSt For more
| of the Tasmania air
| rsapkf wrote:
| Opening livestream link:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJRWKCtKqo
| rsapkf wrote:
| Update: It's empty!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNJRWKCtKqo&t=1540s
| exodust wrote:
| I like how he got Mike over for a second opinion. "Yep, it's
| empty".
| boppo1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| optimalsolver wrote:
| It was. Fortunately the usual suspects have now been mostly
| deprived of power and tamed.
| knodi123 wrote:
| The U.S. Military Academy will open and unveil the contents of
| a nearly 200-year-old time capsule during a ceremony on August
| 28 at 10:30 a.m. in Robinson Auditorium at Thayer Hall.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| 1828 was probably the least racist time in history up to that
| point in history. All of human history prior to that is endless
| tribal and imperial conflict. U.S. was the first country that
| ever even explicitly set out to legally equalize unrelated
| people from different religions and ethnic backgrounds and
| simultaneously do away with the concept of inherited nobility
| entirely.
| triceratops wrote:
| There were other multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires in the
| past that treated all citizens or subjects equally. Rome, the
| Mongols, and the Achaemenids left their constituent peoples
| to govern themselves as long as they paid taxes and remained
| peaceful. Rome even made everyone a citizen by the 3rd
| century or something (can't be bothered to look it up right
| now).
|
| As for inherited nobility...that's just how things have been
| done for most of human history. The Americas were able to
| start over without that baggage.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > U.S. was the first country that ever even explicitly set
| out to legally equalize unrelated people from different
| religions and ethnic backgrounds
|
| No they didn't! They could have done - racial equality was
| discussed at the time, as was gender equality, but they
| compromised in favor of allowing the slave states into the US
| in the first constitution. Many of which had racism embedded
| in the _state_ constitutions in ways that were never even
| attempted back in Europe, such as prohibitions on
| miscegenation.
| komaromy wrote:
| There would have been some students at West Point in 1828 whose
| families owned slaves. Slavery was only abolished in New York
| State one year prior to this. "Incessantly racist" is probably
| underselling it.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Also, keep in mind that at this point the American
| Colonization Society (then Society for the Colonization of
| Free People of Color of America) is a thing.
|
| The ACS isn't in favour of _slavery_ , but it also doesn't
| want free black people in America. Instead, it proposes what
| today you'd hear yelled by bigots as "Send them back". It
| wants the United States of America to be a white country, and
| it's going to literally ship all the black people to Africa.
|
| So yeah, no slavery there, but still "incessantly racist"
| seems a good characterisation.
| triceratops wrote:
| > There would have been some students at West Point in 1828
| whose families owned slaves
|
| Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis, according to another
| comment on here.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Top comment says this was contemporary with Robert E Lee, a man
| so racist that he rebelled against his country and got a lot of
| people killed for it, so .. yes?
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I'm also curious if it has anything unsavory to modern
| sensibility. For a point of reference, "Jump Jim Crow" was
| written in 1828, but it had yet to become the major hit it was
| destined to be and wasn't published in sheet form yet. The era
| of minstrel shows as mainstream entertainment was still a
| little ways off.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| This sketch depicts this well: https://youtu.be/xIiNbBQM_Go
| jeroen79 wrote:
| would of been nice if they just added an alert in the beginning
| the thing is empty, quite boring useless watch now.
| olliej wrote:
| a non-zero part of me wants to keep it closed to 2028
| keiferski wrote:
| _The sealed lead time capsule measuring about one square foot was
| discovered in the Thaddeus Kosciuszko monument 's base during
| recent renovations. Academy officials determined the capsule was
| placed in the base of the Kosciuszko monument 26 years after the
| academy's founding by cadets in 1828._
|
| This sentence seems to imply that the capsule is from 1854, 26
| years after 1828.
| netrus wrote:
| The sentence is ambiguous, however, West Point was founded in
| 1802.
| keiferski wrote:
| Ah, I see. The fragment _in 1828_ should not have been put at
| the end of the sentence.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > [...] by cadets in 1828.
|
| Cadets would not have founded West Point, so the sentence
| already switched to the context of what those cadets did
| (in 1828).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The article also references the _class of 1822_ , and the
| Roman numerals in the Academy's arms in the upper left of
| the page read _1802_. With these three things taken
| together, it 's hard to be sympathetic to the "founded in
| 1828" inferences.
| keiferski wrote:
| Right. I would have written it this way:
|
| _Academy officials determined the capsule was placed in
| the base of the Kosciuszko monument by cadets in 1828, 26
| years after the academy's founding._
| throwaway0634 wrote:
| English is not my native language, so I initially misread
| it as being founded by cadets in 1828. That seemed
| strange to me, so I had to read the sentence again before
| I figured out the actual meaning.
| midoridensha wrote:
| English is my native language, and your reading is
| correct. It's badly written. English is not a high-
| context language; you shouldn't have to know that the
| university was not founded by cadets for the sentence to
| be clear, so the "26 years after the academy's founding"
| part should have been a subordinate clause, separated by
| a comma.
| keiferski wrote:
| I wouldn't feel too bad about it. I am a native English
| speaker and was confused too. It's just a poorly-written
| sentence.
| OJFord wrote:
| It is mine, and that's the most natural reading IMO, it's
| poorly written.
|
| I would have said:
|
| > [...] base of the monument by cadets in 1828, 26 years
| after the academy's founding.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > The capsule was found in 2023 when the monument's base was
| removed from the site.
|
| This is a reminder of how quickly things are forgotten. In this
| case, the presence of the time capsule was forgotten within the
| span of less than 200 years. I suppose those who placed the
| capsule could have done so under complete secrecy. More likely a
| few people knew about it, but that knowledge just disappeared
| with those who knew it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I like to think that, unless there's a plan to open it,
| forgetting about it is just fine, if not the intent of a time
| capsule. Makes opening it up all the more exciting.
|
| Putting it in the base of a statue was also smart, instead of
| burying it somewhere or encasing it in the foundations.
| Somewhere public and obvious, but still hidden.
| userabchn wrote:
| The school that I went to buried a time capsule that was
| supposed to be opened in 25 years. When that time came around,
| some of the students present at the burial contacted the school
| the enquire about the opening, but no one at the school knew
| anything about it (the staff had all changed within that time)
| and the burial spot had been built on.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Isn't that the point of time capsules? The quicker we forget
| about them, the better. Then some event happens and they
| surface to everybody's excitement.
|
| Lesson learned here is to make sure to add things which won't
| decay :)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| If they are completely forgotten, they are probably more
| often than not, never found again.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| 200 years is about 8 generations...I don't know if I'd consider
| that "quick" to be forgotten
| wernercd wrote:
| humanity is 10k+ years old and the world is billions of years
| old.
|
| Quick is subjective.
| neonate wrote:
| That's older than I remember other "time capsules" being. When
| did people start doing this?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| The name "time capsule" and the formality around them is a 20th
| century thing, but people have been hiding messages to future
| people for as long as we've had the ability to do so.
| itake wrote:
| The pyramids are pretty old.
| praptak wrote:
| I don't believe there was any intention to deliver a message
| to future humans (except maybe "don't rob this grave or
| else") when they were built. Or at least we don't have any
| evidence for that.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Depends on how you think of it. It was built to last
| forever, a monument to the person interred; a message to
| the future saying "I existed". Didn't they also contain the
| interred people's history and achievements?
|
| Maybe not a time capsule in that sense of the word, but
| still.
| gizajob wrote:
| I find quite an opposite message to that, more "look how
| impressive this monument is, it cannot be destroyed and
| will serve as a time capsule to us whenever you encounter
| it". Great Pyramid isn't a tomb.
| lordnacho wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
|
| "The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest Egyptian
| pyramid and served as the tomb of pharaoh Khufu, who
| ruled during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom."
| gizajob wrote:
| Yet no body of Khufu or anyone else was found inside it.
| It's been attributed to Khufu, and there's decent reasons
| to doubt that attribution (really not getting all Graham
| Hancock here, but there's nevertheless little to indicate
| it's a tomb. Yeah other pyramids are tombs with
| sarcophagi but the Great one is absent of that - no body,
| no tomb.)
| memefrog wrote:
| [dead]
| grodes wrote:
| what, put it back
| niemandhier wrote:
| Big discovery ( at least for me ): West Point is a liberal arts
| college.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "liberal arts" in that context does not imply "liberal" in the
| present-day political sense.
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