entity2636 wrote:I thought I'd throw my two cents into this too. The thing about signage and symbols is that they need context to work. To understand the meaning of the above mentioned bathroom symbols, you need to know in advance, what a bathroom is and that sometimes there are separate bathrooms for different variations of users, to put it blunt. For someone who isn't informed about the meaning of the "inclusive bathroom" symbol, it could very well mean that this bathroom is reserved for a distinct third gender or beings that look like the wheelchair. To be honest, I myself had to look up the correct meaning of said symbol, because I was not sure what exactly it means.
I think you're overestimating context clues in and of themselves. Again, if you look at a hundred different bathrooms mens and ladies restrooms will have different layouts, but those layouts will be consistently different in the same ways between the two groups. Likewise the wheelchair symbol appears within a number of bathrooms for both genders in addition to having separate bathrooms, so it's reasonably easy to surmise that the third group isn't distinct.
Even if you don't know what a bathroom is, and all the sinks and toilets have been destroyed, you can still tell these rooms were made to move large amounts of fluids in specific ways, and are constructed using tile, linoleum, and other materials that don't soak water as carpets do. So even if you only have the symbols themselves and simply look at what's there in and of itself, you'll be fine.
For a space alien or future archaeologist it would be much, much harder and they might come to the conclusion, that humanity as a species has 4 distinct biological genders, because a digital or "throw-away" culture like ours will not leave behind a lot of usable data for them to obtain context. We see this already today when our relatively recent data stored on early computer storage mediums is much harder and often impossible to "access" than, say, a book from the middle ages. Electronic devices produced as recently as or 90s or 00s are often broken beyond repair, while early electronics from the 20s or 30s that have survived are either still operational or can be restored to operating condition with relative ease.
I think you very much underestimate the amount of information still on paper or preserved elsewhere. You won't get a perfect snapshot of all life but we can see enough surviving artifacts, made of wood and other perishable materials, from our own history that've lasted hundreds of thousands of years that it's fully reasonable to assume that even if humanity was violently killed to a man tomorrow half a million years later an alien archaeologist would in fact find surviving books, magazines, and newspapers if they looked hard enough.
As a matter of fact, this situation presents a serious, but interesting problem or thought exercise. We bury our nuclear waste in special repositories where we believe it can remain safe for millennia. How do we mark these areas in such a way that any future civilization technically able to access them, understands what dangers it holds and doesn't accidentally or out of curiosity dig into them. How do we design markers and symbols in such a way, that they will be understandable to anyone anywhere anytime without any cultural or historical context. As an example =>
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... grams.html
That's an alltogether different argument because those signs need to not just be understood, but understood to a degree far greater than anything discussed here. Specialists spend a lot of time debating increasingly ridiculous hypothetical situations like robotic mole miners coming in from below, or similar such things. A discussion of "how can a random no context human know this is bad" is a far simpler problem.