"If you are reading this, your world is in grave danger. Touch nothing. Take no samples. Leave this place immediately. Destroy everything you have brought here, and never return. We have left this message in stone, in every language we have ever known, to stop a horrible threat. Heed these words, even though you do not want to. "What does it say?" "Beats me." "Isn't language supposed to be a big subject for a linguistics specialist?""
"From the patterns in the glyphs, it looks like it's the same message repeated multiple times in different forms. It's like some kind of Rosetta stone, but much bigger. "Yeah, these monuments are huge. They sure made a lot of copies." If you are reading this, you have missed, ignored or misunderstood the messages we launched in probes across the galaxy, and the one we transmitted from a beacon here for as long as the equipment lasted."
Ancient tablets instruct readers to leave immediately, touch nothing, take no samples, and destroy all brought items to avoid a grave danger. The warnings appear carved in many languages across huge monuments, creating a Rosetta-like array that repeats a single dire message. Visiting explorers debate whether the inscriptions are religious or practical while scanning glyphs and preparing to send data home. The inscriptions claim prior probes and a beacon attempted to warn others and that curiosity or haste led to catastrophic consequences. The warnings present a final, explicit danger: those who ignore them will suffer the same fate.
Read at Nature
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