wonderingwanderer

And there you go assuming they would be stone age. We’ve come full circle.

You’re imagining a future civilization will be so devolved that they would have less colors than we do? You’re not even approaching this from a standpoint of reality, so I’m done here.

Not every grave contains valuables, and ones that do would be marked with more elaborate symbols and ornamentation.

Nobody’s tombstone has a skull and crossbones on it, your argument is completely detached from reality

And you’re too dense to understand that literally every human being who’s ever lived or ever will is capable of drawing the inherent connection between the skull and crossbones and death, due to the inherent relationship between them.

Literally Carl Sagan even proposed using the symbol. Is he too dense to understand too?

That’s me in the corner

Your arrogance is showing. It’s embarrassing for you that you don’t see it.

“i’Ve ReSeArChEd ThIs, trust me bro” oh yeah, and I suppose that means you’ve encountered a culture that doesn’t understand the meaning of the skull and crossbones, since you’re sooo confident they would think it means treasure?

By the way, pirates didn’t mark their treasure with the symbol; that would be stupid. They displayed it on their ships to instill fear in their victims before boarding.

You do understand that a modern or post-modern society will have their own tools to detect radiation? We don’t need to optimize for them, we need to optimize for those people who haven’t developed that far.

Yes, and do you realize that not everyone in a nuclear-capable society wanders around with a geiger counter? If an archaeologist digs up a plate with an atomic diagram of a radioactive isotope, they would at least know “hey, maybe I should get a geiger counter before digging any further.”

Oh yeah? Have you seen any research demonstrating that people unfamiliar with that iconography associate it universally with death?

Dude, when humans die, they decompose, leaving behind a skull and bones. I’m not making any assumptions based on “pirate media.” Pirates used the symbol because it’s universally recognizably as implying “death” or “danger.” It’s highly arrogant and insulting for you to think any other culture wouldn’t be capable of drawing that connection.

Yeah, not like millions of people have been following such rules for thousands of years.

And modern society, particularly in scientifically-minded sectors, already view that as archaic superstition. How are you going to convince enough nuclear engineers to join your cult in order to maintain an unbroken apostolic succession for millennia?

We LITERALLY have religions that survived their languages & scientific knowledge dying off, and most of our modern religious ideas are simply remixes of previous ones.

Name one religion that has survived its original language dying off. Reconstructions such as neopaganism don’t count, and neither do languages that can still be translated.

Also, if the nuclear radiation cult’s mythology gets “remixed” by a new religion, then it loses the intent of preserving a warning for future generations. Do you honestly believe modern christianity has maintained the same intent as the original?

Exactly…

But that’s following the assumption that a society far into the future will be at the level of advancement of a middle-age society or prior. It’s not universal if anyone from a modern or post-modern level of advancement would look at it and think “that’s just primitive superstition.”

A skull and crossbones is a pretty universal symbol of death. As long as a future society is humanoid, or at least familiar with humanoids, they can see that and recognize what it means, regardless of their level of advancement.

Some mythology that speaks of ancient ancestors who created magical rocks that can melt your flesh off at a distance so that they could turn the daylight on inside isn’t likely to deter anyone but the most gullible and least inquisitive.

It also assumes that such a made-up religion would survive longer than any extant languages and scientific knowledge, which is absurd.

Okay, so I should have said “middle age or prior.” Would that be better?

I mainly said middle ages since they compared the idea to the catholic church, but I understand the analogy could apply to other religions

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!!!

If they don’t have anything to hide, then maybe they’ll consent to an unwarranted search. Who needs constitutional rights when you have nothing to hide? /s

New rule: recording someone else without their consent gives them partial ownership of your device: enough that they can rightfully destroy it if they so choose.

People used to call me a creep whenever I raised concerns about mass surveillance. Like, obviously if I wasn’t okay with that then I must have been planning something nasty, right?

Well this is precisely the scenario I was trying to warn about, and it’s far nastier than anything I could have possibly done, even if that were my intention…

This is the next logical iteration of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you have no reason to be concerned with people filming you without your knowledge/consent!”

It was never a good argument, but too many people seemed to believe it and now we’re here…

Only an absolute tool would wear that crap.