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.
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.
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