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.
The listed weights and dimensions are the most useful things to me. Knowing the approximate weight of a kilogram and length of a meter would be incredibly useful when trying to recreate things you find in records
Openly advocating genocide and eugenics? Yeah, definitely not what I would call useful
If you read “Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity” as eugenics and genocide, I think you might be jumping the gun a bit based on personal biases. Population bottlenecks require you to be very careful about species-wide gene pools. In a population of 10,000, you don’t want Cletus reproducing with his first cousin.
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.
They were quite likely put up by folks that believed the same wack job shit as those that destroyed them.
Removed by mod
I have mixed feelings on this monument. The parts recommending eugenics is not cool, but some of the messages like living with nature and valuing truth are important. Sadly, it was probably the encouraging of universalism, tempering with reason, and the living with nature that the religious terrorists took issue with.
I can’t say I morn the loss of the monument entirely, but the fact a more or less secular monument was destroyed for religious reasons kinda feels haunting. Kinda reminds me of the Taliban destroying the ancient statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.
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.
Good riddance for probably wrong reasons. Shame they plan to rebuild this crap. Guidestones for thinly veiled eugenics and genocide, they were. Blergh.
