The first thing that sprang to my mind was this fascinating document about how to create a long-lasting notice that a nuclear waste site is extremely dangerous.
This was a very interesting read - I'm sure it's fairly well-known, but I hadn't seen it. Thanks for sharing!
There's definitely something chilling about the way that this multidisciplinary team chose to describe radioactivity in the most stark, basic terms. It almost has an element of cosmic horror about it - this passage describing their rough summary of the message would not be out of place in a Lovecraft novel:
This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here...nothing valued is here.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...
the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Similarly, their notes on designing the very form of the structures to reinforce the message of repulsiveness and sickness would also fit into Lovecraft's Old Ones' grim labyrinths. Kind of an interesting similarity. But I guess that his writings often were of people trying to contain horrors which would live long beyond those who had imprisoned them.
Well, hopefully fact won't follow fiction in how people will react to these messages in the future.
While I think it's a good effort, ultimately it would fail to have an impact. If archaeologists uncovered a similar message today, what would our modern reaction be? Probably a mix between curiousity and arrogance ("we can handle it")
We did uncover many such messages, only we had some problems deciphering the script. And so we forged ahead and for the most part we survived going into the places that were forbidden to us by the various gods of the past.
Yeah, but at some point, that's on them. As the authors put it,
>We consider the key to a successful system to be a credible conveyance of the dangers of disturbing the repository. We must inform potential intruders what lies below and the consequences of disturbing the waste. If they decide that the value of the metal component of the waste far outweighs the risks of recovering the metal, the decision is their responsibility, not ours.
I think we can leave this one. HN's goal is to gratify curiosity. That isn't best served by spelling everything out, so it's ok to have a vague title or two.
Clickbait also is based on whetting curiosity.
I'd rather have a descriptive title so that I knew what lies ahead, than an enticingly mysterious title ("you won't believe...") that I'd dismiss as clickbait.
That's true to some extent, but if you look at a lot of clickbait headlines you'll notice that they tend to use gimmicks that invoke reflexes rather than well-crafted phrases that evoke intellectual curiosity. I wouldn't say there's no overlap, but there's less than one might expect.
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...