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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Surely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication.

Just have the same concepts relayed in as many languages/ways as possible, and then make the site sufficiently difficult to infiltrate that it would take a sufficiently advanced civilisation to break into it.

You could even tier the messages, and use words that would likely be common and thus more likely to have been recognised based on discovering whatever other shit we've left around.

DEATH.

THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.

THIS MATERIAL WILL KILL YOU.

And progressively more complex and complete messages, etc translated into Chinese, Spanish, Braille, French, pictograms, what the fuck ever.

And if they're too lazy/careless to try and decrypt any of the fucking obvious messages, fuck 'em.

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> Surely written warnings, if some future society discovers them, they might be curious enough to have decrypted at least one of our present day languages/methods of communication.

The pyramids were known for their entire duration of their existence, and investigated and/or plundered regularly. But we lost all knowledge of hieroglyphs for a time period of almost two thousand years (until we found the rosetta stone).

And at the same time we were using Uranium to give glass a wonderfully green sheen. And it glowed in the dark, too! Awesome!

If there is an event cataclysmic enough to wipe out all knowledge of nuclear repositories, it will likely wipe out human civilization at large. We can't make really useful predictions how much knowledge will be kept, and at what pace it will be rediscovered.

And yet nobody has yet to dig hundreds of feet under the pyramids to find out what they're really hiding. Also, the thing will be practically made of Rosetta Stone, designed on purpose to help translate.

Really, there is nothing to worry about.

Sure, so what we do is, as the other bit of my post said, make the material sufficiently difficult to get to that it would take a long time and an advanced civilisation to be able to get to it, by which point they would have had plenty of time to figure out what the writing meant.

We're not talking about a bunch of dudes with shovels here, we're talking about colossal industrial machinery or advanced explosives.

And then some far future warlord-in-making sees "The things here make death" and stops reading and starts digging.

And the problem solves itself.

> THE THINGS HERE MAKE DEATH.

I wouldn't be sure what that meant. They make death what? Great again?

It sounds like a powerful weapon, actually.

It kind of is!

So the person who reads the statement with the predilection for violence, is killed by their own bloodlust.

How one should know that a combination of signs (or a separate sign) stands from "death" not, e.g. "food", "fortune", "treasure", "fame", etc? Regardless of in how many different languages or styles repeated.

How did we figure out any historic languages? We researched them and analysed them. It's not really my field but there are ways of doing this and we've been doing it for thousands of years.

And mostly fail (unless we get some direct translation, like the Rosetta Stone). And if the civilization is gone, it's not unlikely that there won't be much more written record.

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