Reaching into the past is sometimes a guessing game. We once thought that dinosaurs had scaly skins and loud booming roars, but now it appears they had feathers and screaming, whiny voices. Artifacts that aren't all that old can be a mystery. Have you ever wondered what future beings will make of the weird stuff we have? One commenter at, I believe, Metafilter, asked what future generations will have from our civilization if they cannot access our digital records. The answer was fidget spinners. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
4 comments:
Reminds me of classic example of anthropolagists 500 years from now presenting their finediings of the "We'ans" named derived from continual use of the letters US meaning we in anceint lexicon.
Very funny and enlightening.
alas cannot find it with quick google.
@Anonymous, I think you are referring to "Digging the We-uns", published in the 1963 scientific humor book A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown (and Other Essays for a Scientific Age).
Good stuff in that book, including Digging the We-uns; Ode to a Mushroom Cloud; Meihem in ce Klasrum (about possible spelling reforms, accessible here); a story whose title I do not recall about a robotic lifeform on a distant planet who observes in his telescope color changes on Earth and hypothesizes life there -- possibly even intelligent life -- but is ridiculed by other robots...
Miss C republished the title story (without diagrams) and related information here on Neatorama; that story is more technical than most of the stories/poems in the book.
The book and its 1982 re-publication are available on Amazon.
-WDitot
Thank You
If this sort of thing interests you, then try this:
"It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber. Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization."
From "Motel of the Mysteries", published by David Mccaulay in 1979 (at the height of the 'King Tut' craze that resulted from the traveling exhibit of some of the artifacts), a humorous book that detailed the finding of an old roadside motel several centuries in the future and the subsequent 'interpretation' of the artifacts found within. It's apparently still in print, and it's still hilarious to show just what might happen when erroneous assumptions are blindly accepted as 'scientific fact'.
-"BB"-
Post a Comment