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Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

I'd just draw something in similar vein to this and call it a day:

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/2/2d/Gho...

after 10k years in the sun and elements those images might be etched and indecipherable. Or maybe they see it and think it'll make the sick well again. We are still plagued by homeopathy, after all.

I don't know why they didn't do that exactly. I'm imaging there was some reason though.

>Or maybe they see it and think it'll make the sick well again.

I actually thought about that possibility. Figuring civilization will have collapsed several times, there's a good chance most people could look quite disfigured. I mean, post-apocalyptic wastelands can be harsh. At a minimum nobody will be exfoliating on a regular basis.

Then, if the meaning of certain common symbology happens to be reversed (e.g. arrows pointing away from the subject of interest), that's all it would take to mistake that image as marking the location of a miracle cure—a radioactive fountain of youth.

One possible solution is to show a longer timeline in the pictograms establishing what order to read them in. E.g show a child growing into an adult, approaching the site, and then falling down in agony and dying.

Regardless of how you read things you'd put those in the correct order since I'm fairly certain that the direction of time won't have reversed by then. It also avoids flipped meanings of glyphs like arrows.

Exactly, you need to rely on universal truths rather than symbols. The article has an example very similar to yours. They picture a man next to a small tree when he is exposed to the radiation, and then collapsed in agony next to a larger version of the same tree.

They additionally convey a "contamination" of radioactivity that stays with the man over time.

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/WIPP%20Exhibit%...

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