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A Million-Year Hard Disk
sciencehabit writes "Pity the builders of nuclear waste repositories. They have to preserve records of what they've buried and where, not for a few years but for tens of thousands of years, perhaps even millions. Trouble is, no current storage medium lasts that long. Today, Patrick Charton of the French nuclear waste management agency ANDRA presented one possible solution to the problem: a sapphire disk inside which information is engraved using platinum. The prototype shown costs €25,000 to make, but Charton says it will survive for a million years. The aim, Charton says, is to provide 'information for future archaeologists.' But, he concedes: 'We have no idea what language to write it in.'"
I can encode a "don't open" image on one table, the periodic table on another, several number systems (for translation) on a third, and a schematic of the objects buried on a 4th indicating the radioactive elements inside other materials. So yes, 4 tablets that don't require technology to decode. Or one could do a large tablet including all of the above. The first image is all you need. The other 3 are for civilizations that understand atoms to understand what the hazard is.
And still they are often ignored. See Japanese tsunami warning stones.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I think modding needs 1-5 rankings in multiple categories:
Relevant: not at all to spot-on
Funny: no to puked on my keyboard (where no doesn't mean failed humor, just not funny, which most posts would probably be)
Incendiary: irrational flame bait to cold logic
Popularity: The author is evil to the author is my god
My thinking is that if popularity were explicitly differentiated from relevance, people might not be so eager to mark down things which they disagree with.
Infuriate left and right