Archaeologist 2525 AD

[Hanslune]

The world civilization collapses either due to a idiocracy (movie) type future or any number of catastrophes, natural or man made. The question is what do they find in the archaeological record and what ideas would they have about our period of time and what caused the collapse?

Speculate! If we are the Lost Civilization

[Byrd]

A global collapse back to the Dark Ages is honestly unlikely.

But, if I had to speculate on a time when what and who we are now is mere myth, I think I'd pick a timeframe thousands of years in the future.  Our information systems are dense and robust, so the main villain would not be a world that fell apart but rather countries that faded and split or merged with others and records getting lost because they're trivial or not important to the time.

Very little of our data would have survived (and what remained could only be read by scholars) -- think of how English has changed...almost none of us here can read Beowulf in the original language.

There'd be a boatload of microplastics.

And there'd be the space equipment left on the Moon.

It would be difficult to decide where country boundaries are, because so many of us use the same products and eat the same food.  Landfills would still be visible and would be the best hunting ground for Mysterious Things.  Broken porcelain dolls, broken Pyrex cookware, old electronic stuff, cars, and tires.  Some iconic buildings would have been preserved

IMHO, of course.




...and somewhere out there, someone would STILL be arguing that the Great Pyramid is one of the Biblical Joseph's granaries.  Trust me on this one.

[Hanslune]

Yes there would be vast amounts of evidence from tunnels, wells, quarries, foundations =, etc, huge mounds of debris where cities had been etc. Yep it would be quite a task to sort out history if the languages couldn't be read. I read a lot 19th century books and I have to constantly look up stuff to find out what they were referring too and the import of what they were stating. How much of electronic memory would be recoverable - is a topic I'm unsure of. 

I think an asteroid hit of sufficient size would be devastating enough to lose our present civililzation, that or a disease, a weakening or strengthening of the sun, etc., one can imagine all manner of disastrous like Harte becoming immortal and becoming the ever living and creating a new religion based on, maths and fringe theory! Holy Harteism of the unkempt wrench and the bleeding discount engineer's Church of the metric bypass

[Hanslune]

Once long ago, on the idea of a lost civilization this idea was presented: Overtly intelligent sea slugs were the first civilization 45 million years ago. They gained mastery of the Earth by casting off their shells unfortunately they didn't realize their brains were in those shells. What archaeologists call "shell middens" are really ancient Sea Slug cities that died out after the 'great sloughing off'. These are the two archaeologists who made the discovery in 1967: Mira 'Knuckles' Conrad, Ph.D. and her assistant Pierrette Dark-Master Flob, Ph.D. became one of the leading experts in shell brain recognition

[Byrd]

Yes there would be vast amounts of evidence from tunnels, wells, quarries, foundations =, etc, huge mounds of debris where cities had been etc. Yep it would be quite a task to sort out history if the languages couldn't be read. I read a lot 19th century books and I have to constantly look up stuff to find out what they were referring too and the import of what they were stating. How much of electronic memory would be recoverable - is a topic I'm unsure of. 

I think an asteroid hit of sufficient size would be devastating enough to lose our present civililzation, that or a disease, a weakening or strengthening of the sun, etc., one can imagine all manner of disastrous like Harte becoming immortal and becoming the ever living and creating a new religion based on, maths and fringe theory! Holy Harteism of the unkempt wrench and the bleeding discount engineer's Church of the metric bypass

Some fun scenarios there to muse about.:  Big Horking Asteroid (BHA), The Big Plague (TBP), Massive Solar Instability (MSI).

BHA -- unlikely to sneak up on us.  Early efforts would be made to deflect the thing; if not possible, alerts would go out about likeliest area for a hit.  Governments would start prepping. Expect migration from that area - so population shifts and hoarding and general disaster scenario situation.  If it lands with a big whackety-boom, it will take out some of the international power grid, some of the international Internet backbones, etc.  If it hits in the ocean, expect an increase in global temperature (a BIG increase.. 10degrees or so) from the instant moisture in the air.  Hitting land... expect cooling.  

In either case, humans can deal with it.  The big problem will be the refugees.  Second big problem would be the food chain.  Governments of the least affected areas will be working on solutions (algae burgers, anyone?  Cricket yummies?) that may not please everyone but will keep most alive.  There'll be conflicts, but them with the best tech will come out in the end.  If BHA hits the land, the impact will be greater, if only because of the possible loss of some mineral resources.  That country (or countries, unless one of the huge ones) will basically be at an end, but the rest of the world will stagger onward.

TBP -- would come on somewhat gradually.  Most likely to survive are island nations and if they can hold on until the plague passes, they have access to all the goods and factories of the rest of the world that didn't survive.  Infrastructure would still be there, and often in easily repairable (or fully functional) condition.  International communications would still operate.  The biggest problem will be lack of manpower and resource grabs (who owns what), but population should rebound in a thousand years or so. 

MSI -- there'd be some warning of it -- solar instability.  We can hide from it underground if it's going to go darker, but maintaining an ecosystem will be difficult (and choosing which species to save will be a hot bone of contention...like mosquitoes...)  If it's a nova, our only chance is to get out of the range of it and start living on space stations...again, working to create a functional biome in a limited space will be a problem, but we could do it.  As far as we know, there's no suitable planets around nearby stars, so we'd be a nomadic sort of colony (any ship colony that tries to go it alone is going to be doomed)... and that would also be an interesting scenario.

[Sirius]

--..process was mitosis, civilizations core became denser and denser until it split in two. The processes started happening faster and faster with each cell dividing until the shell cracked.--  the page tore away in the wind as the archaeologist boarded his shuttle back to Elysium

[Hanslune]

Some fun scenarios there to muse about.:  Big Horking Asteroid (BHA), The Big Plague (TBP), Massive Solar Instability (MSI).

BHA -- unlikely to sneak up on us.  Early efforts would be made to deflect the thing; if not possible, alerts would go out about likeliest area for a hit.  Governments would start prepping. Expect migration from that area - so population shifts and hoarding and general disaster scenario situation.  If it lands with a big whackety-boom, it will take out some of the international power grid, some of the international Internet backbones, etc.  If it hits in the ocean, expect an increase in global temperature (a BIG increase.. 10degrees or so) from the instant moisture in the air.  Hitting land... expect cooling.  

In either case, humans can deal with it.  The big problem will be the refugees.  Second big problem would be the food chain.  Governments of the least affected areas will be working on solutions (algae burgers, anyone?  Cricket yummies?) that may not please everyone but will keep most alive.  There'll be conflicts, but them with the best tech will come out in the end.  If BHA hits the land, the impact will be greater, if only because of the possible loss of some mineral resources.  That country (or countries, unless one of the huge ones) will basically be at an end, but the rest of the world will stagger onward.

TBP -- would come on somewhat gradually.  Most likely to survive are island nations and if they can hold on until the plague passes, they have access to all the goods and factories of the rest of the world that didn't survive.  Infrastructure would still be there, and often in easily repairable (or fully functional) condition.  International communications would still operate.  The biggest problem will be lack of manpower and resource grabs (who owns what), but population should rebound in a thousand years or so. 

MSI -- there'd be some warning of it -- solar instability.  We can hide from it underground if it's going to go darker, but maintaining an ecosystem will be difficult (and choosing which species to save will be a hot bone of contention...like mosquitoes...)  If it's a nova, our only chance is to get out of the range of it and start living on space stations...again, working to create a functional biome in a limited space will be a problem, but we could do it.  As far as we know, there's no suitable planets around nearby stars, so we'd be a nomadic sort of colony (any ship colony that tries to go it alone is going to be doomed)... and that would also be an interesting scenario.

Yep I could image a cascade of these event overwhelming the world, but I would suspect that a small portion of the full technology would be saved - or one would hope so. But in this case I was looking at how we might become the 'lost civilization' of the next generation of fringe, and what it might be like to be an archaeologist in that future situation

[Byrd]

Yep I could image a cascade of these event overwhelming the world, but I would suspect that a small portion of the full technology would be saved - or one would hope so. But in this case I was looking at how we might become the 'lost civilization' of the next generation of fringe, and what it might be like to be an archaeologist in that future situation

In a sense, that's happening... Tartarian Mud Flood stuff, for instance.  People who've never handled a slide rule or an abacus not able to understand how we managed the calculations and computing to get a person to land on the moon.  Or that we communicated and formed social groups on BBSs and systems like Compuserv (I see this blindness in some social research.)  And remember John Titor-- how the original tried to pass off some odd-looking military equipment as "time machine parts"?

So I would guess that it'd take maybe 400 years or so before some form of it came up and that it would form around certain cultural groups or nations that dissolved.  Certainly within 2,000 years, we'd see "lost civilizations" and artifact interpretations that are really off-base. 

Pacific Island nations might make for good fuel, particularly if some locations are obscured or eliminated by rising oceanic waters.

[Hanslune]

So I would guess that it'd take maybe 400 years or so before some form of it came up and that it would form around certain cultural groups or nations that dissolved.  Certainly within 2,000 years, we'd see "lost civilizations" and artifact interpretations that are really off-base. 

Pacific Island nations might make for good fuel, particularly if some locations are obscured or eliminated by rising oceanic waters.

Probably that might occur the fringe IS running out of place where they can place lost civilizations - which nature prevents them from verifying.

[rickymouse]

The world civilization collapses either due to a idiocracy (movie) type future or any number of catastrophes, natural or man made. The question is what do they find in the archaeological record and what ideas would they have about our period of time and what caused the collapse?

Speculate! If we are the Lost Civilization

The twinky will still be edible if they dig one up in five hundred years.  Everything else will mostly have turned to rock and will be unidentifiable.  I have seen iron become unidentifiable after about a hundred  years, it rusts through when buried in areas and looks like soft stone as the iron leaches out into the soil turning the soil redish colored.  I am sure that thicker iron will mostly crumble up after five hundred years buried.