Two thoughts: (1) You write "effort spent was comparable to a mediocre sci-fi film script". I hink it might possible have been significantly less. Prometheus h

Two thoughts: (1) You write "effort spent was comparable to a mediocre sci-fi film script". I hink it might possible have been significantly less. Prometheus had a budget of $120M, so hiring a dozen writers to come up with ideas, then hiring another dozen writers to re-write and clean it up is probably not how it's done, but possible given the budget. What do you think the budget for the Human Interference Task Force was? So in a way it's even worse than you state. Such things are just not a priority. (Cough... climate.. cough) (2) I agree that some are really fantastical and most likely useless at the stated purpose. The way out, to me, seems something like creating a "hierarchy of abstraction", and keeping your message as low as possible on that hierarchy. The lowest level of warning you of some action is making it impossible for you to do it. If you want to keep someone from digging, make it harder for them to dig. (There was an idea of a very large basalt plate or a concrete slab poured over the site) If you want to keep someone from doing agriculture here, make it harder for them to do agriculture. (Salting the earth, irregular terrain, soil is full of large rocks, ...) - Don't just do scary stuff, do stuff that is extremely inconvenient. (Edit: stupid typo, thanks autocorrect)