wonderingwanderer

They were really counting on a middle-age level of advancement when they suggested making a new religion with a priesthood and its own mythology…

Yeah, a future civilization finds a field covered in spikes. “I wonder what that’s guarding. Must be something good!”

Yeah, Carl Sagan was like “skull and crossbones”

But of course everyone else wanted to over-engineer it, so you get proposed solutions like encoding messages in the DNA of plants, and color-changing cats with an accompanying viral song that no one’s ever heard of twelve years later… 🤦‍♀️

Like, guys, if people today can’t even figure out what it means, then it’s not a universal and enduring message.

And then some of the suggestions would only serve to make it a glaringly obvious archaeological dig site.

Skull and crossbones is about as universal as you can get. Maybe some atomic diagrams and radiation symbols, and written warnings in as many languages as possible, just in case people still understand them. And a giant slab that someone could only drill through deliberately, requiring heavy equipment.

I can’t believe these were supposedly some of the smartest people in the world, and yet they made the mistakes of assuming that future civilizations would be hyperintelligent and thoroughly inquisitive, while also not understanding any symbols from our era and being likely to avoid areas designed to seem ominous. As if egyptologists today respect the warnings on ancient tombs.

And yet they overlooked the skull and crossbones because it seemed too obvious. The whole point is that it’s supposed to be obvious!!!