this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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I mean, testing showed it generally got the point across even if people didn't understand why it was dangerous
I'm curious what testing and what people. Unless it's an as-yet uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rainforest, I'm not convinced that they successfully made a universally understood sign of danger.
And even if the message gets across, I will reiterate: when archaeologists understand that a message says "entering here will kill you," it only makes them want to enter more. Future post-post-apocalypse archaeologists will treat our nuclear waste disposal sites with as much care as a 19th century British scholar would have treated the pyramids. We're a curious bunch. Best we can hope for is that we keep making Geiger counters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
People have put alot of thought into this exact topic and there's no easy answers
I'm well aware. Personally, I like to think of it from the opposite perspective; what message might we find that someone could have written 10,000 years ago that would convince us not to mess with something? The only proposals that work are ones that involve translating the dangers of radioactivity to new languages. Either that, or bury it deep in a place that isn't expected to be particularly habitable for a few thousand years. Every physical marker is just begging for an archaeologist to discover why exactly they were constructed
So like a Pioneer plaque but spelling out in pictogram form particle physics and nuclear decay