Ragnarok Proofing: Difference between revisions
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* In ''[[Adventurers!]]'', temples are designed with [https://web.archive.org/web/20100620174218/http://www.adventurers-comic.com/d/20030117.html thousand-year rustproofing].
* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]''
** [//www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-08-08 Invoked] then [//www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-08-10 subverted] with a robot designed to play mentor to a hunter-gatherer civilization.
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== [[Real Life]] ==
* Currently, teams of scientists, linguists, and anthropologists are struggling to properly identify Nuclear Waste burial sites. It sounds simple at first... until you consider the half-life of this crap will [[They Don't Make Them Like They Used To|far out live any facility or structure that contains it]], the memory of what it was, or our descendants' ability to read the warnings on the labels, leaving us [[Neglectful Precursors]] to our own descendants. As an added twist, future archaeologists might successfully decode the labels, just to brush off our warnings as the [[Sealed Evil in a Can|superstitious ramblings of an ancient, underdeveloped culture]]. ''Damn Interesting'' has an [http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160 article] on the process.
** The Chernobyl facility in
* The [[wikipedia:Long Now Foundation|Long Now Foundation]] intends to build a clock capable of keeping time for 10000 years.
* Don't forget all the time capsules we've buried, some of which are intended to be opened thousands of years in the future, which are deliberately Ragnarok-proofed.
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** Children's TV show ''[[Blue Peter]]'' dug up its 1971 time capsule in 2000. Half of its contents had turned to slush. Oops.
* Egyptian tombs were also deliberate attempts at Ragnarok proofing, as the ancient Egyptians believed the body had to remain intact forever for their afterlife to work properly. They didn't have all that much success, at least in the case of the Pharaohs, as the conspicuous and treasure-filled tombs tended to draw robbers. That being said, the mummies themselves, while they aren't exactly full-fleshed, still have some meat on their bones, which is almost achievement enough for any sort of organic material that old.
** What's inside them may be (as a rule) long gone to looters... the [[Pyramid Power|pyramids]] themselves are a powerful example of this trope. The Great Pyramid is over four thousand years old and spent most of that time as the tallest structure on the planet. It lacks only its limestone facade from ancient times; much of which was deliberately removed a few centuries later, to use for building houses. Barring the destructive impulses of its [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|creators]] the Great Pyramid will likely last on a geological timescale.
** Ironically just dropping a body in the sand will preserve it very well as it will dry out and plenty of soft tissue (skin) will survive. Burying a body in a coffin in sand retains enough moisture to let the body rot leaving just bones (both types of actual remains can be seen in the British Museum). Thus the entire mummification process is an attempt to recreate (and improve) the effect of the very simplest form of burial.
* Any object tossed into the vacuum of space can be expected to last a ''long'' time, as there's nothing to erode it except temperature changes, vacuum effects, radiation and micrometeorites. Supposedly, footprints on the Moon could last as long as ten million years if undisturbed (needless to say, more solid things could presumably last a lot longer), and those of the Apollo astronauts are believed to still be there today. Many of our satellites crash from high atmospheric drag once they expend their stationkeeping propellant, but anything in a stable orbit could easily outlast any artifacts on Earth's surface by a long, long time.
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