[krior]

The concepts of gas and entropy are pretty young, I am not sure we can rely on humans knowing about those in 5000 years or so. The other uncertainty is the correct interpretation of your depiction. Do future civilisations map the same concepts to "our" visualisations?

[at_a_remove]

Multiple visualizations. A seed, a sprout, a tree. A baby, a child, an adult, an elder. And so on.

I am still a fan of vitrification and dumping the end results along the subduction zone of a tectonic plate, myself.

[Vecr]

It's still arrows though. Put some illustrations of (actual) arrows and spears along with the stylized arrow, all pointing in the same direction. That should cover the less advanced civilizations, and provide a good bridge to the thermodynamic depiction to others.

[notahacker]

I'm 100% certain if you showed panels with stylised representations of entropy, arrows and spears to a random assortment of modern people with good general knowledge and access to every part of the internet apart from this subthread, you would get an extremely wide range of explanations about what the panels conveyed about an artefact and its surrounding location (absolutely none of which would be the correct response of "absolutely nothing, these panels are simply an illustration of which direction to read panels in")