Comment by ReactiveJelly
2 months ago
> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
I've been saying for years that future archaeologists will wonder at these mysterious emblems they dig up, generally associated with a large deposit of what was once highly refined iron, aluminium and copper. About half a metre wide and 11cm high, made of incredibly durable plastic obviously intended to last for centuries, if not millenia.
And they'll puzzle over the inscriptions, "G809 BGG", "R420 BRL", "RFS 131Y", "SJ12 EXW", "RE51 CUE" - this on some huge chunk of steel, easily three times as big as the rest, and so many others.
What could they mean?
As a non-American, I don’t even understand today what that means. (And the website linked to isn’t loading, so I don’t have the context from that.)
License plates vary between countries but this description should be recognisable to most of the world.
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I believe those are car license plate numbers.
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"We believe they served some kind of religious purpose."
I mean, <gestures at car culture>...
Ironically, most of the metal stuff doesn't survive from antiquary. For instance most statues were in bronze not marble, but since metal can be easily recycled the only metal statues that survived are from ship wrecks.
Stone is a safer bet to survive the centuries, but even those are reused as bricks, like the Rosetta Stone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
I thought it was 40K reference at first about certainty of steel
it's from the mistborn series by brandon sanderson. fun books. would make a great big budget TV series someday
Mistborn was supposedly picked up for film.
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You can buy rocks engraved with "Nothing Is Written In Stone". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nothing+is+written+in+stone&ia=ima...
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