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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I like the comic where the happy man has successfully plundered the nuclear waste. It contaminates him and he is observably less happy, though still exhibiting signs of above-average satisfaction with life. Then in the final frame, his beloved treasure stolen, he sadly dies of what appears to be thyroid cancer. His dying thought is that the person that robbed him of his ill-gotten plutonium squeezings will soon be suffering the same fate. Justice.

If I were watching a movie where the protagonist goes in to get some ancient artifact and this comic showed up on the wall, I would be like "yeah fucking right, some spooooky spirit kills the tomb raider? suspension of disbelief fail!" But of course this is real and is actually what would happen. If the society in 10,000 years is as cynical as me (and has forgotten about radioactivity), this comic will just egg them on!

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>This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!

>Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

>This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...nothing valued is here.

>What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

>The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

>The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

>The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

>The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

Alright! I'm getting close to the superweapon!

I did notice that "video game designer" was not part of the multidisciplinary team.

I imagine a culture, 10,000 years down the road, that reads from bottom to top. Wow, awesome, let's excavate one of these disease absorbing blocks!

Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?

The comic shows the tree has grown bigger in the final frame of the comic.

So they'll have to assume it shrinks trees as well as absorbing disease :)

It would never occur to me to interpret it that way, rather than him moving the block closer to the trees. Wouldn't it take a human life time for a tree to grow that much?

Depends on the type of tree. When I was a kid we got a tree cutting at some arbor day event and planted it in the backyard. By the next summer, the tree was as tall as our two-story house.

"Why not stick the waste in an old Uranium mine? Maybe our future descendants will be able to make good use of our radio active waste?"

That was my thinking too. The decision to label it as "waste" for the next 10'000 years seems so narrow-minded to me!

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