I read it some years ago, too. It's an intriguing task, as the comments in this thread show.

The considered the whole "people will think it is treasure" thing. From memory the solution was to make it an open but unpleasant place to try to avoid people thinking there was something hidden.

One idea that stuck in my mind was black concrete pillars on a black concrete surface, in a hot environment to make it extremely hot and oppressive for anyone to enter.

Sounds like a great place to hide a treasure.

This message was never supposed to be written anywhere, in any language. That message is the content. It’s the goal, it’s what is supposed to be delivered. It’s the payload and the panel came together to find a way to transport that payload across time.

The goal is not that someone in the future reads exactly that message, the goal is that someone in the future sees the markers and they convey (at least parts of) the message to them so that they honestly believe it.

As you can see, just describing the intended message right now, today, can be highly misleading and confusing, even when you are straightforward in describing it. People are quick in assuming fraud and deception, for example. That’s the challenge.

But no, no one wanted to put signs with that message up. That would not do. That was always clear. Even if people in 10,000 years would understand English.

Seems quite rude to leave unmarked radioactive waste lying around where future people might stumble over it.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8091034

Then they would try using the stuff as a weapon and discover you can't clean up after throwing it at the enemy.

A couple of cities would become uninhabitable and everyone will learn that when the sign says "do not touch", we actually mean it.

instead of those statements, a few simple scientific demonstrations should be more than sufficient.

it should simply show large photographs of what happens with radiation exposure, as well as enough scientific equipment that even a simpleton can realize that this isn't some superstitious gobledegook.

seriously. what do you think the egyptians would have said about their tombs?

Best left undisturbed, right? Or Ra will come smite your ass.

Show, don't tell.

Well, we don't know how to build required scientific equipment that will remain operational for more than few decades. Actually, the genetically-modified glowcats mentioned in the article is the closest thing I can imagine that could work over the timespan of many millenia.

Also, I don't see how future archaeologist would not assume anything they find is a "superstitious gobledegook" in need of verifying, if today we do exactly that.

Except that the proponents seem to have forgotten the small fact of evolution. Species evolve. All the time.

Over the course of a 100 century timescale I would expect the glowcats to evolve into quite different species, possibly several such species, or perhaps going extinct. It's anybody's guess, really, and whether they would retain the colour-change genetics is at best nothing more than a rather long-shot hope. Or those genes might evolve to cause the organism respond to other stimuli than radiation.

The only certainty, here, is that such creatures will evolve into something different from what they start out as, so, almost certainly, defeating the original objective.

It's not "superstitious gobledegook", it's how you convey a message without using words only people from our culture and time period would know. Or indeed, without any words at all.

Photographs, diagrams, technological equipment, and everything else, were all proposed in the paper as methods of conveying that information. But there are serious issues with all of them. Very few things will last that long, especially in good shape. And symbols we understand in our culture will have no meaning to them. Even photographs can easily mislead, and as you said, encourage people to explore.

If that's really the only reason, it seems easy enough to circumvent.