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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Recovery Manual for Civilization - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
It seems like the north & south poles could be natural schelling points for storing information to transmit to far-future civs: they're cold, so things preserve well, and they're unique points on the earth's surface.
Given that they are indeed Schelling points, to what extend did we look at them whether someone buried things there for us to find?
Who are we expecting to have buried things there? I can come up with 6 possibilites, is there another you were thinking of?
Modern humans. In this most likely case it's probably not interesting, maybe some Propaganda Preservation Program from the Cold War.
Recent aliens. I would expect if any aliens were about to jaunt over, notice our space-faring potential and bury a cache for us to discover to mark our readiness to join the Galatic Federation, we would have probably noticed them in other ways by now.
Ancient aliens. Why would visitors before intelligent terrestrial life think it worthwhile to bury stuff just in case we evolved? You've got to have a whole lot of faith in your civilization's stability to think that leaving tags everywhere is a better strategy for continuity than just colonising.
Ancient, non-human but earthbound civilization - Silurians. I could believe that another society might do this, and I think this is who the grandparent is suggesting we aim for - but since we're speculating over geological times the location of the poles is quite variable. Unless we have a fair idea of when the sender lived we don't know where to look, and to find out when they lived we'd need to find the cache... Or you could be saying "hmm, those big extinction events kind of look like the one we're causing now, I wonder where the poles were at those times?"
Some recent but forgotten technological human civilization - Atlantis. Maybe, but like the recent aliens I would expect there would be other signs.
The whole of human history is a lie! - Hiigarans. Fun times.
I don't think it's worth specifically scouting around for something, but maybe if we're buying anyway and it's cheap it'd be worth checking.
Probably better than looking for Dinos on the Moon.
I'm not aware of any effort to do that, but it seems like a moderately worthwhile project (especially if combined with a project to bury stuff in the event that nothing is found).
Only with radar and sonar. And only incidentally.
Except that they are not - in geological times, they move (relative to tectonic plates). Even disregarding the drift, they are rather inconvenient as places for information caches, being both under tons of water - although something might have been buried under South pole when it was not under tons of water, but would we find it, without the builders making some kind of beacon? The same applies for a cache under North pole sea floor.
And if you are aiming at less than geological times, highest mountain makes much more sense. In particular, putting something on top of South pole ice is in danger of the ice melting (bad if you account for the civilization risk being climate-based).