
A Monument to Outlast Humanity - prismatic
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/michael-heizers-city
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SaberTail
I was expecting this to be about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant[1]. They're
disposing of radioactive waste from weapons production there, and it will
remain dangerous for 10000 years.

It happens to be in the Permian Basin, which has deposits of oil and gas.
Also, the area has salt and potash that can be mined. WIPP itself is in salt.
So there will almost certainly be people digging for one reason or another in
that time.

The problem is how to place a message that will be understood as a warning to
humans over that long of a time scale. The last thing you want is future
archaeologists digging there because they think it is a tomb or monument.

Gregory Benford also talks about it (and some other interesting topics related
to communicating over long time intervals) in his book Deep Time[2]. It's an
interesting read.

[1]
[http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm)

[2] [https://smile.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-
Mil...](https://smile.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-
Millennia/dp/0380793466)

~~~
rabboRubble
Is WIPP back in use? They had an accident (used artificial kitty litter as
packing material instead of natural, caused a storage malfunction) about 2
years ago.

My understanding is that the clean up will run around $2 billion.

Don't know if the clean up needs to be complete before use restarts...

~~~
SaberTail
I don't know if they're actively receiving waste shipments yet. The facility
itself is running, though. I used to work on a science experiment there, and
some of my former colleagues have been able to get underground starting
earlier this year.

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b_emery
And here it is on google maps:
[https://goo.gl/maps/qLSZxPZaATM2](https://goo.gl/maps/qLSZxPZaATM2)

~~~
harlanlewis
Looking at it from space, I'm much more interested in the small circular
clearings of regular size that are everywhere in the surrounding landscape.
Each one looks the size of a truck. What are _those_ all about?

~~~
DanielStraight
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_pivot_irrigation)

~~~
diggernet
I suspect the question was about these, which are MUCH smaller:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0316037,-115.4345986,129m/da...](https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0316037,-115.4345986,129m/data=!3m1!1e3)

~~~
harlanlewis
Yup, exactly.

I don't think they're a source of materials used in the project (my first
guess) because they can be found quite far away from the site, are present
across varied terrain, and lack road access and indicators of work (eg
tailings). Such uniformity in natural features always piques my interest. Will
just be one of those endless mysteries of the desert, I suppose.

~~~
Sanddancer
Those look a lot like creosote rings [1]. Creosote's native to southern Nevada
and grows in clonal colonies that end up looking like rings, and that looks
like a nice wide place where water would gather.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrea_tridentata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrea_tridentata)

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jefurii
I thought this was going to be about the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year
clock.

~~~
aab0
It's interesting trying to compare this to Long Now. The article mentions his
'Double Negative' from ~1970 and that it's already badly decayed (a look on
Google Maps supports this) after barely 40 years. It doesn't give much detail
about the City, but the illustration (photo?) suggests that its most prominent
features are mounds of unreinforced concrete. The famous Sandia study on long-
term building that Long Now and Steward Brand often cites finds that
unreinforced concrete does very poorly over the long run, and that to last,
concrete needs to be reinforced and mixed extremely dryly with tons of manual
labor (one reason Roman concrete has lasted so long); Heizer is doing this
with a skeleton crew and must take shortcuts.

So it sounds like the depressions are going to fill in quickly on a 10,000
year timescale and the exposed concrete is going to break down on the order of
centuries. It might last a relatively long time in a buried form like Mayan
pyramids, but not as an artwork with integrity, and I doubt much will be left
at all by 10,000 years.

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kaybe
And in a few thousand years people will wonder about it and say that it was
used for ritualistic purposes, presumably.

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ZanyProgrammer
What an ugly work of art. _This_ is the long lasting record of humanity?

~~~
ASpring
I personally find it compelling and inspiring the lengths that Heizer went to
for this monument.

We're all ready to admire the single-minded devotion and amount of work that
goes into TempleOS and I view this monument the same way.

~~~
douche
There are lots of crazy people that obsessively build monuments.

[http://inhabitat.com/incredible-cathedral-built-by-one-
man-w...](http://inhabitat.com/incredible-cathedral-built-by-one-man-with-
salvaged-materials/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle)

Weird coincidence, tuberculosis was involved in both cases.

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jseliger
I think the real monument to outlast humanity will be in the infrastructure we
build in space. That's the real long game.

~~~
hprotagonist
That's _Seveneves_, not _Anathem_ ;-)

