> We are not giving humanity enough credit here. The standard nuclear hazard symbol would suffice.
Symbols are far, far less translatable than words. We were unable to translate hieroglyphs with any real success until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and the pictograms used could be matched back with known writing systems.
There are symbols today that you and I would instantly recognize but will be meaningless to a child born tomorrow (the floppy disk icon, for example). Symbols and pictograms can be repurposed and reused: indeed, the article gives the example of the skull and crossbones, which has significantly changed meaning over four hundred years.
The cargo cults you're talking about have come about in years and decades, not millennia. The timescales being talked about here are far, far different. If anything, you're not giving humanity enough credit for its ability to evolve over the next 10,000 years.
Once some individual humans get sick or die. Even very primitive human cultures in the vicinity of nuclear sites would very quickly notice a pattern. Any symbol that was used consistently near nuclear sites would be come to be associated with danger.
In a very primitive cultures with no knowledge of science, visiting the sites with these symbols would end up becoming some sort of religious taboo.
The argument isn't the the meanings of symbols can't change. But rather that humans are smart enough to notice patterns and communicate them with others.
And symbols in regular use for millennia can change meaning utterly in a few years. The swastika, for example, first used over 10,000 years BC, whose meaning changed utterly over 12 years in the first half of the 20th century.
Symbols are far, far less translatable than words. We were unable to translate hieroglyphs with any real success until the Rosetta Stone was discovered, and the pictograms used could be matched back with known writing systems.
There are symbols today that you and I would instantly recognize but will be meaningless to a child born tomorrow (the floppy disk icon, for example). Symbols and pictograms can be repurposed and reused: indeed, the article gives the example of the skull and crossbones, which has significantly changed meaning over four hundred years.
The cargo cults you're talking about have come about in years and decades, not millennia. The timescales being talked about here are far, far different. If anything, you're not giving humanity enough credit for its ability to evolve over the next 10,000 years.