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Tombstones That Last?
Reality Master 101 asks: "Being an engineer, I've always been annoyed by the quality of the average tombstone. The typical marble kind only seem to last a maximum few hundred years before the lettering gets worn away. Old-school stone ones were better, but you still max out at about 500 years. This started me asking the question of what would I make one out of that would last 1000 years? 10,000 years? Clearly a solid gold or silver tombstone would last without corroding, but that would be uneconomical and would probably be stolen. What material would give the most bang for the buck for lasting power? What other factors come into play when you start talking Egyption timespans? I was also thinking that I should mount the tombstone to the casket so it doesn't fall over or otherwise wander away." It's odd the links to things that you can find over the internet, so when I read this question, I was reminded of one of Piro's recent rants on MegaTokyo that starts off with an odd discussion about this very issue. Might the information passed in the beginning of the rant be a reason why tombstones made today don't last very long? Do Tombstones need to last for over 500 years, anyways?
We are evil that way, aren't we?
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Posted by CommodoreKackner:
To C. Thomas,
I have a Perl-related query that only you can solve (you'll understand once I explain, it's about a script you authored). In order to save this thread from something off-topic, I request your e-mail address so that I may further detail the extent of my plans.
Oh really? And what makes you think that perpetual care will accually exist byond your time? Sure it will continue for a few years or so, but for how long? Stable goverments for more then 1000 years are rare. I'm not certian that any have made it that long. Future historians interested in the life of people from the 20th century (which will be interesting if they figgure out what we have done, even if it seems primitive by their standards), but they won't have much to go on. CDs hav been claimed to last 100 years, not 1000. Stone in a desert has been proven to last, but climates have been known to change. Indeed if you can find a way to make deserts grow odds are they will become argracultural areas. (Look at Chile, theyhave the dryest desert, no rain in over 500 years, but they irrigate it - who knows what this will do to your tombstone.
Personally I want to be burried in an unmarked grave in the middle of a field. I want my body to become fertialiser. When my soul (whatever you belive, you get the concept) no longer inhabbits my body I don't care what happens to it, if my body can be useful to others, then that is fine with me.
What sort of arrogance is it that could lead you to believe that anybody is going to care who you are and where you were buried 500 years from now? Sure, tombstones from 500 years ago are interesting to historians, but only because of the absense of other records about how people lived. I don't know if you've noticed, but we're pretty much a record keeping and artifact building culture now, not a bunch of rural peasants whose only impact on the land is wiped out by the next rain.
There are tons of grave yards that have been dug up and the tombstones placed on a wall somewhere because the land was needed for something else. And the pressure on land is only growing. I wouldn't give current grave yards a snowball's chance in hell of surviving out the next century without being paved over.
Do yourself and future generations a favour. Get cremated, have your ashes scattered somewhere that meant something to you, and build your legacy by having good children rather than a long-lived gravestone.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Suppose you had resources like Bill Gates? How about building a pyramid like (or larger than) the Great Pyramid? After all, today there's modern earth moving equipment.
OpenSourcerers
What about stainless steel?
:)
Then electrify it so it doesn't get tampered with.
I AM a materials engineer, ceramics don't corrode/react much at all. They are the low-energy form of metals/minerals. Using a loose defination, rocks ARE ceramics.
Never let your fears overcome your dreams.
I'm not a materials engineer, but I remember seeing some demonstrations of ceramics in a class I took. They had hammers and engine componenents that were increadably strong and able to withstand extreme heat, etc. I'm not familiar with the corrosivity of ceramics, but they may hold the answer to your question. They look fairly nice too...
-Andy
The problem isn't that common materials don't last; it's that you're looking at marble.
Marble is metamorphosed limestone, and so will corrode like crazy in an acidic environment. Any reasonably sturdy oxide (quartz, granite, glass, ceramic, etc.) should last long enough for your purposes.
I have a Perl-related query that only you can solve (you'll understand once I explain, it's about a script you authored). In order to save this thread from something off-topic, I request your e-mail address so that I may further detail the extent of my plans.
Disposable account du jour: cthomas one two three four five at hotmail dot com
We could bury all of the people who have ever lived on the Earth, about 105 billion, in a space the size of the State of Kansas (82,000 square miles). That would give about 22 square feet for each grave.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Either find something that can tolerate the acid that falls downwind of our factories, or put your tombstone somewhere where they don't have acid rain.
There are stones with inscriptions that lasted thousands of years in Egypt, and then after being moved to New York, disappeared in a single century.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
'nuff said!
The pigment is embedded in the plastic, not just a thin layer that's painted on. Take a durable material (granite or maybe ceramic -- ceramic would certainly be easier). Make the letters of the inscription be veins of tinted material that go all the way through.
That way, no matter how worn down the monument gets, the writing will still be readable, especially if the surface is ground down a bit.
-- THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK -- --
First, I'd seriously consider granite. It is available from all regular sources and it doesn't noticably degrade over the 100 year timespan (I did a bit of 'field research' a few years back: comparing the apparant degradataion of tombstones of different materials in local graveyards) If you are really worried about long term readability, you could spend a bit extra for a larger monument with deeper inscriptions.
Another option, that you probably won't find at the regular sources, is glass. Tempered glass several inches thick is unlikely to be easily shattered and should resist acid rain fairly well. The inscription could be embeded beneath a clear outer layer to add some extra resistance to environmental damage. I haven't any idea where you would go to get a glass tombstone, or how much you would expect to pay.
As a genealogist, I would give almost anything to find reliable information on my ancestors from 500+ years ago. While I don't expect the majority of my own descendents to care in 500 years, there will likely be a few who wonders about their ancestry back in the ol' Sol system.
On cremation... Not necessarily a bad idea, but I'd still like a monument to my existance.
John
Personally, I would prefer a tombstone made out of explosively sintered ceramics.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Actually, your best bet for a perpetual monument is to have a separate well-funded foundation which is in charge of maintaining the monument. Of course, to be fail-safe you should have several cooperating foundations which are geographically disperse and operating under the protection of unrelated governments, so as to avoid destruction by war, economic, political, religious, or legal changes.
Certainly, the foundation would have paid the cementery for its maximum maintenance fund. But your foundation would be responsible for monitoring that maintenance is suitable and deal with special situations. If the cementery closes, a highway is routed through your final resting place, or molten rock dissolves your monument, then the foundation would have funding and specifications for building a replacement at a suitable site.
Or just write a great book, one which you'd be proud to have as your memorial, and hope that libraries and Project Gutenberg will preserve it for you.
Engineer, eh? Napping during your materials science class? *grin*
Only corrodes in a monoatomic layer, so it never really "rusts" more than an atom or two thick. Dull finish, so it's not as enchanting as stainless steel (many of which still corrode). Might be recycled by someone, but I wouldn't exactly call that an insult. Now, if your stone tombstone were ground up and used for road construction.... Magnesium is in the same category, but, well, a bit tempting to ignite for those who can identify it.
The real problem with tombstones is that they are not acid-resistant. Not a problem a centuries ago, but with the advent of fossil fuels and acid rain, probably quartz would be a good choice. You can make your own by passing large amounts of current through things, and they're experimenting with this now as a way of permanently and intertly dealing with nasty chemicals. Maybe just cast yourself something in glass.
The problem here is that rain is mildly acidic (something like 5.6) even when clean and not polluted.
The solution? You need to become such a person among humanity that society will pick up the bill of maintaining your tombstone forever.
There are tons of grave yards that have been dug up and the tombstones placed on a wall somewhere because the land was needed for something else. And the pressure on land is only growing. I wouldn't give current grave yards a snowball's chance in hell of surviving out the next century without being paved over.
It's obvious you never get out of whatever big megalopolis you live in. There's lots of land out there. Next time you're flying somewhere more than an hour or two away, look down and you'll understand. Sure, graveyards in the middle of Manhattan might be in danger of being removed, but not the one in, say, Wallville, Oklahoma.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
For those interested in the challenges of really long term preservation, check out the Long Now Foundation, who are building a variety of interesting projects, including a 10,000-year clock (designed by ubergeek Danny Hillis) and an updated version of the Rosetta Stone. I've seen these pieces in person, and they're very cool.
For the clock, they mention they are using "Monel alloy, Invar alloy, tungsten carbide, metallic glass, and synthetic sapphire" in the prototype.
Put it on a rocket in some semblance of a stable orbit around the sun. Hard to get to, sure, but very long lasting. Or you could send it to the moon, crash onto the surface, though you would have to worry about micrometeorite erosion. Get your DNA encoded onto a gold platter like on the Voyagers and pay JPL to put it on its next spacecraft that will leave the solar system. How about a crate of dynamite and a mountain as in Mt. Rushmore?
Justin Ingersoll
Plastics in general are bad choices. A glass-filled PTFE might have the requisite toughness and chemical/UV resistance, but they still char in fire (a cemetary is bound to have grass or forest fires if left unmaintained for long enough). Many plastics just fall apart by themselves after a few tens of years, as the Smithsonian has found out. Stick with hard stone (granite, basalt, obsidian?) or ceramics.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
No, I wouldn't. I'd want to remember him/her for the positive things that happened. Not for where he/she left a nice blood stain.
Maybe if the markers designated the site of an honorable death, I might understand. 99.9% of the time, they don't. I gave a couple of examples. Here's another: There's a cluster of four crosses I pass on my daily commute. They mark the location where four people died pushing an out-of-gas vehicle, with no lights on, across a high-speed divided highway at 3AM. There is no cross at this location for the driver who hit their unlit vehicle on the dark highway at 3AM. I'm sure he has a nice headstone in the proper place, though.
I can't be certain, but I doubt there are Darwin Awards on the crosses. There probably could be.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I certainly hope my surviving friends and family remember me for the smart things I did, and don't imortalize me for doing something stupid like riding a bicycle in the traffic lane of a highway.
A marker at a 'final resting place' is one thing. A marker reminding everyone of where doofus rearended a semi is a waste of time and space.
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I suggest you put it on the moon. Apart from the chances of being hit by meteorite, what environmental factors would affect it?
Of course, no-one would see it there until Moonbase Alpha is completed.... perhaps better would be to burn the inscription on the moon so big it can be seen from earth. If you change your name to Coca-Cola I'm sure you'd get sponsorship.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Perhaps you could make a tombstone out of the same kind of stone that statue was made of in Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Ozymandius?
That thing certainly lasted a long time, and was a fitting tribute to the sort of person who expects the world to remember him forever.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
heh, The idea that Piro's rant on cement landed on slashdot is unnerving to say the least ;)
-largo
styrofoam.
Ha! I kill me!
In part, I think the Egyptians lucked out. They happened to be in a good climate for preserving material: the desert.
These days, isn't it acid rainfall that causes the majority of disintegration of stonework? If so, my advice would be to step up your personal campaign against pollution and acid rainfall, and then arrange to be burried somewhere in a really, really dry desert area that's likely to stay that way for the next thousand years or so. Try the Sahara or something.
A tombstone to outlast all tombstones?
Well, lets see if we set some rather lofty goals:
+Lasts 10,000+ years
+Over that period it retains its structural integrity.
+Any inscriptions/designs/etc should still be intact (And perhaps a "rosettas stone" of sorts, for future civilizations)
+And since this marking your grave, a method for retaining your remains/mementos/etc in an air-tight containter so they last as long as the tombstone.
The only feasible solution I can think of is to avoid the ever changing Earth and simply be blasted into space.
This method allows for you to be placed in any form of container (within reason- it has to fit in the rocket) and of most types of materials (as long as you are incased in something to protect you from the hazards of space- your actual tomb could be inside this casing). You could even be aimed in a direction that avoids as much objects as possible- You might even be able to go for millenia undisturbed!
Think about it: Some alien race may find your capsule and decide to place you in their museum! Or they could just decide to eat you, but at least you lasted that long!
As far as I know, this is actually something that was planned to be available to the public, instead you would blast your cremated remains into space in a small rocket. I vaguely remember hearing about Gene Roddenbury's widow planning to blast some of his cremated remains into outer space. I don't know whether the company that was offering it ever actually succeeded in doing this, but it was planned.
So, I suppose that if you had enough money you could possibly have your physical form and your tombstone (of sorts) to last for billions of years in the vastness of space.
It is cheep. It is hard so sand will not eat it away too fast like sandstone, and it is resistant to Acid (Acid rain). Also it looks cool. Better than ceramics that are often linked to toilets.
One way to increase plot space is to forgo the traditional horizontal casket design and have yourself buried standing... thus increasing available space.
Are YOU listed?
Rynite, by Dupont.
GE Has created a few Super-Performing resinse that I've read about before, but can't get access into their site without registering...God I hate that!
Well, I'm not finding many right now, but I know that I've seen quite a few different plastics that have proven to be tremendous performers; but for 10,000 years, I can't say. But I'm almost sure it wouldn't be too difficult to find some closed cell, non-corrosive polymer, or maybe a polymer/metal blend, or a coating over concrete/stone...Hey, you know what, there may be niche for a business here? Either way, now that I think about it, a Good quality Stone or blend of some kind, dipped into an amorphous resin such as acrylic, might do very well in the aging process; but it'd require one hell of a creep test!
I mean these things are huge. Solid. Massive. Weighs a helluva lot more than a ton. A Solid immovable chunk of granite on the move.
These things grab my imagination as sources of fun and amusement....
Variants are possible...
For this one, your need the aid of a friendly Do It Yourself building supply store...
Modern art has been a great source of giggles for everyone for decades...
If the city fathers take legal steps against you, remove it whilst moaning copiously to the local newspapers about being "misunderstood", "unappreciated", "heathens", "actions were only undertaken out of civic pride" etc.
Of course, the last joke should be, umm, "on me", I would love one of these things as my tombstone for when I snuff it...
However, a tad of circuitry to detect passes-by during the witching hours and a bit of sturdy hydraulics under the block could supply some light entertainment for my descendents....
Nah! Too complicated. It would be better just to spread a rumour that I was determined to "take it all with me" and was buried with a huge treasure....
The activity of placing a number of booby traps around the coffin, (stink bombs, luminous paint spray bombs, demon howlers, goblin laugh bags, etc. etc.) could cheer my mourners immensely while they prepare my grave for the treasure seekers...
Arthur C. Clarke would probably recommend a normal stone tombstone encased in a thin (1mm or less) layer of diamond. The diamond will be transparent, reasonably tough to scratch, and quite weather-resistant.
Of course, acquiring such is a more difficult proposition. They're making lots of strides with new carbon compounds (bucky-whatnots). Or, you could wait until Jupiter explodes (9 years by A.C. Clarke's count) and then go get the diamond ejected from the planet core.
Another method of hiding it with a hated, but long lasting material, is to built it with taped re-runs of "Highway To Heaven". That show never goes away, and nobody likes it!
Shoot, if you want something that will last for thousands and even millions of years--just take some data from our oh-so-friendly environmentalists. From what I recall, plastics can be made in such a way as to not biodegrade for many, many years. If you want to be remembered for a long time, I would have a casket made out of clear plastic and have it up on top of the ground. That way everyone can see your body in there--and just how you decompose naturally. Now that's a way to get noticed for centuries!
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I'm sorry, but if you're talking Egypitian timespans, the next such timespan will see the earth not have enough space to give everyone their own graves. In the old days you could afford to give individual graves to everyone, and we can tollerate it now, but in the long run we're going to have to make room in your livingroom for a grave.
Of course there are the examples, such as Japan, where space is at such a premium, that you're only buried for X-number of years before you're exumed and placed in a little jar for your home shelf.
Quite frankly, there is no point in having tombstones last for more than a few hundred years, because after that, policies on burial are going to have to rapidly change.
How about a sub-topic? How could we make the most use of space to fit our dead into? Cremation is obviously very compact, but maybe there are some other ideas out there that don't destroy the body (or minimize damage).
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I wouldn't give current grave yards a snowball's chance in hell of surviving out the next century without being paved over.
Do yourself and future generations a favour. Get cremated, have your ashes scattered somewhere that meant something to you...
My company has a temporary hiring freeze. Sorry. I'll let you know when we're hiring again. (Should be soon.)
Anyone else see what I see in the above statements? Sorry - I couldn't help but laugh. Just sounded funny to me.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Firstly, kudos to you for asking the most unusual question I've ever seen on Slashdot.
I was surprised, however, that you didn't mention the fact that gold (even if not stolen) would NOT be an ideal material for this sort of thing. True, it won't corrode, but a larger problem with gold is that it is so soft that the weather alone will probably destroy your beautiful creation.
Alas, we need to find a material that won't corrode (or otherwise get destroyed in all but the most severe of weather conditions). Perhaps the solution lies in redundancy. First, make a granite (not marble) tombstone and carve with all the details. That should last you a while.
After doing this, encase the entire thing in titanium. Carve again. The titanium shell should last you a few centuries, I believe, and even if it falls away you'll still have a few more centuries worth of granite to erode before it disappears.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
In big cities, the cemetaries have a time limit on how long your grave lasts. So it is rather stupid to have a grave that lasts forever, but your grave site doesn't last that long. Also, why waste valuable materials for your grave when it could be benifiting the living (which it should)?