You can’t imagine an energetic waste source beyond the detection capabilities of modern humanity? This seems like the precise sort of ignorant hubris that this thought experiment is exploring.
Unless the laws of physics are fundamentally different in a way we currently do not have any experience with, then no, I cannot.
Because to cause physical damage to physical beings, you need to interact with them physically in an energetic fashion.
Even primitive people, with the right knowledge, can construct a test for the presence of a hazardous waste source (i.e. literal canaries in coal mines).
There are a number of methods available to 18th century technology which would be able to infer the existence of an energetic hazard even without fully understanding what it is, provided they were somewhat aware of the underlying principles.
We know for a fact that our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed somehow due to "dark matter" (aka fudging our equations because they don't balance based on experimental observations).
Comments
You can’t imagine an energetic waste source beyond the detection capabilities of modern humanity? This seems like the precise sort of ignorant hubris that this thought experiment is exploring.
Unless the laws of physics are fundamentally different in a way we currently do not have any experience with, then no, I cannot.
Because to cause physical damage to physical beings, you need to interact with them physically in an energetic fashion.
Even primitive people, with the right knowledge, can construct a test for the presence of a hazardous waste source (i.e. literal canaries in coal mines).
There are a number of methods available to 18th century technology which would be able to infer the existence of an energetic hazard even without fully understanding what it is, provided they were somewhat aware of the underlying principles.
We know for a fact that our understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed somehow due to "dark matter" (aka fudging our equations because they don't balance based on experimental observations).
We simply don't know what we don't know.
maybe the canaries don’t die until a year later of total DNA collapse :^)