I think it’s very likely that modern designers could come up with some really good ideas that would better convey the danger than anything presented on the wiki page.
I’m not arguing that it’s impossible to come up with a good approach…I’m arguing that the approaches presented seem unserious about achieving the stated purpose.
Take the “forbidding blocks” concept. It honestly reads like something from a low budget sci-fi horror movie: “A space crew lands on planet, finds the crumbling remains of forbidding blocks. One crew member warns that the blocks look forbidding. The warning is ignored and bad things happen.”
And what I just described is strikingly similar to the plot of the Alien series movie Prometheus :) [0]
The space crew disturbs the Alien bio weapon facility and unleashes a proto-Alien.
So again, my “complaint” (so to speak) is that the wiki article makes it sound like the amount of effort spent here was comparable to the effort spent on a mediocre sci-fi film script. It just doesn’t seem to me like a truly studious attempt at a framework to warn future generations.
I think I would probably say that it’s a serious attempt at making the case for the need for such a framework though. The people who did the work are clearly very intelligent people but some of the ideas presented just seem so fantastical.
For instance “The plans included a suggestion that the building be designed so as to create a ‘dissonant and mournful’ whistling sound when wind blew through it, acting as a Level I message.”
Would this whistling still even work right after 1000 years of weather and crumbling? Would a future culture have the same sense of dissonance and mournfulness that we have?
Much of it seems so rooted in the present for something intended to be so timeless.