They didn’t seem terribly useful, compared to other long projects.
- Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
- Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
- Unite humanity with a living new language.
- Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
- Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
- Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
- Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
- Balance personal rights with social duties.
- Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
- Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.
Basically, a freethinker version of the Ten Commandments tablets.
Openly advocating genocide and eugenics? Yeah, definitely not what I would call useful
If they were meant to survive nuclear apocalypse, then why did one small non-nuclear bomb bring them down? You’d think they should be better constructed or protected or something.
Elbert County, Georgia. A county with about 20k people in it.
They didn’t need to withstand a direct hit. Just the fallout/nuclear winter that would kill most of humanity.
I see. I guess odds were pretty low that a nuclear bomb would lay waste to a rural town.
As an aside, I wonder why they used so many languages if the nuclear winter survivors would have been rural Georgians like the ones who built the monument. I don’t imagine a Russian survivor would ever find themself in the American Deep South without functional airplanes and such.
The extra languages are probably to help it act as a sort of rosseta stone to help future archeologists.
Conspiracists attributed nefarious intent on these stones. I learned about them from a podcast that studies conspiratorial thinking. I didn’t realize they’d been destroyed. I kinda think I heard that ep after the time when they were bombed, so maybe that was mentioned and I didn’t internalize it.
Heads-up: conspiracy people are potentially dangerous. They blew up these stones that were probably pretty trivial / harmless. They have shot people for perceived great-replacement bullshit (synagogs). This shit isn’t just amusing and stupid. They’re irrational and they can project and cause harm.