# Are we now at the point where future archeologists/historians can't possibly misunderstand or not know what our current-day items, objects and events are? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 23, 2025, 6:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235 "2025-07-23T18:51:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/81 "2025-07-27T14:35:30Z")
As our resident professional historian @Exapno_Mapcase often says (paraphrased): “Science Fiction is never about the future. It’s always about the present.” Other than academics just looking for work, the public interest in history is similar. It’s about us now more than it’s about them then. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/82 "2025-07-27T14:39:58Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Presuming we’re still using something recognizably like modern computers. Not necessarily. We can scan and digitize vinyl records using a laser which isn’t the original method but still works. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/83 "2025-07-27T14:42:09Z")
I’m not sure if this point has been made, but unlike artifacts from 5000 years ago, almost all of ours come with a user manual. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/84 "2025-07-27T14:47:38Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > The idea that a civilization (or extraterrestrial visitors to Earth) thousands of years in the future will be interested in how we lived is a pretty wishful and, frankly, arrogant assumption. We’re interested in how peasants and hunter gatherers lived hundreds and thousands of years ago. And throughout history, people were always interested in the past. Why would we expect future people to be so alien to us? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/85 "2025-07-27T15:01:48Z")
> [@robby](#): > > Just considering the threat of nuclear war, war planners in the 1950s reportedly estimated it would take “only” a few hundred nuclear weapons to assure complete destruction of the other side, which evolved into the strategy of so-called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). And then both sides proceeded to build _tens of thousands_ of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world many times over. At least the situation was more-or-less stable with just two sides. But now throw into the mix China, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, possibly Iran, etc. and the situation is anything but stable. There’s a vast gulf between “destroying the capacity of the US or USSR to exist as developed nations and functional polities with the capacity to maintain cohesion and project power on a global scale” and “knocking human civilization back to the stone age”. I think nuclear weapons could absolutely destroy the world as we know it, but the survivors would pick up the pieces and build a new technological civilization right away. You wouldn’t have hundreds of years of _Fallout_ style techno-primitivism. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/86 "2025-07-27T15:02:23Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > We’re interested in how peasants and hunter gatherers lived hundreds and thousands of years ago. Who is “we”? Most people couldn’t care less. Even fewer if it didn’t make a good TV show or prop up an ideological agenda. You can’t assume people of a future civilization will have the same interests and agendas as we do. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/87 "2025-07-27T15:05:35Z")
> [@robby](#): > > Complicated by the fact that the vast majority of carabiners sold are completely unsuitable for mountain climbing, being made of lightweight aluminum. These carabiners are suitable for clipping lightweight objects only, not mountain climbing. Hence the warning included with all of those checkout-stand carabiners that say “NOT FOR CLIMBING.” I don’t see why this would be any more confusing than the “weapons” we already find that are overly ornate and made of metals that are too soft or too heavy to use in combat. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/88 "2025-07-27T15:07:54Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > it’s helpful to consider what was of interest to people 5000 years ago. Well, some of the most ancient written records are semi-historical, semi-mythical stories about how things were in the (to them, already distant) past. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh. So I think by this analysis, it’s safe to conclude the people of the far future will remain interested in us. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/89 "2025-07-27T15:10:55Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > Who is “we”? Most people couldn’t care less. Even fewer if it didn’t make a good TV show or prop up an ideological agenda. You say people “couldn’t care less” but in the same sentence you admit that it makes “good TV”. Indeed, we can see from historical sources that ancient people _also_ found accounts of _their own_ ancients to be “good amphitheater” or “good bard stories”. The fact that it is “good TV” is because people find tales of the past compelling. And our ancestors found tales of their own past compelling, too. So I don’t see why you’re so dubious about our descendants finding their past (which would include us) compelling. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/90 "2025-07-27T16:01:20Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > The 21st century may leave far fewer understandable artifacts and records to the 31st century than the 11th did to the 21st. Despite a vastly larger population and vastly more goods and records per capita Yeah definitely. Digital records make papyrus records look positively durable in comparison ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/91 "2025-07-27T16:37:14Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#): > > Sometimes I wonder if we ever got this far in the past, there’s just no evidence of it because it all broke down and degraded. > > Maybe not _this_ far, but further along than we generally think when we think about prehistory. People have pointed out that the hunter-gatherer cultures that survived long enough to be recorded by modern anthropology may be unrepresentative of humanity’s ancestors: the best areas to live in are now dominated by agriculture, leaving hunter-gatherers to eke out existence on the margins. The semi-exception were pre-Columbian North Americans and even they frequently practiced horticulture and had been devastated by European diseases by the Seventeenth century. Still, the native North Americans gave us a glimpse of what life could be like for a hunter-gatherer in an unspoiled temperate climate, to the point where a few Romanticists considered the North America that was almost a lost Eden inhabited by “noble savages”. For our distant ancestors, before the megafauna extinctions and climate catastrophes of _circa_ 10,000 BCE, it may have been even better. Some think that such an extraordinarily rich environment may have supported, maybe not what we would call a “civilization”, but cultures far larger, more interconnected and more sophisticated than the atomized scattered tribes we commonly associate with hunter-gatherers. Rich enough for example for a common culture to devote a few months out of each year to helping build a ritual center such as Göbekli Tepe. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/92 "2025-07-27T16:42:58Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > The Long Now foundation thinks about long-term information storage a lot. One of their projects is the Rosetta Disk: > [Building an Archive of ALL Documented Human Languages. - The Rosetta Project](https://rosettaproject.org/?ref=longnow.org) > > Basically a nickel disk etched with 13,000 pages of information. > > There’s a large problem that I don’t think has been fully thought through, but that I also think has a solution: what to do about computational resources? Much of our data is in a form (MP3, JPG, PDF, etc.) that requires a program to interpret. But how do you transmit the program to some future computer? > > You can document the hardware and all that, but obligating that future civilization to reimplement an entire computer to read these things is problematic. The documentation might have to explicitly give the pure ones-and-zeros binary gate function microcode that’s implementing AND, OR, NOT, etc., and let the future civilization build up from there. Or as you said, bootstrapping. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/93 "2025-07-27T16:45:00Z")
> [@Leo\_Krupe](#): > > The toilet seat sacred collar always made me laugh. I think a toilet seat is likely to remain one of the most universal recognizable artifacts of the human species. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > Many manufacturing plants can no longer operate just on generated power. Please explain this to me. What else do they need to operate– data from the Cloud? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/94 "2025-07-27T17:14:20Z")
FWIW, recall that **this board** irretrievably lost our “Winter of Lost Content”. > [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > Perhaps the technology will exist in 5000 years for Historians to journey 5000 light years from Earth and just watch our TV shows. An old cute idea, but that far away the signal would be individual radio wave photons. Maybe with a receiver dish as wide as a solar system. > [@robby](#): > > And then both sides proceeded to build _tens of thousands_ of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world many times over. Nitpick: the numbers weren’t to “destroy the world many times over” but to insure that there would still be a credible deterrent if 2/3 of the nuclear triad could be completely wiped out by a sudden attack and the surviving third badly degraded. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2025, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/95 "2025-07-27T17:48:58Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > unlike artifacts from 5000 years ago, almost all of ours come with a user manual. That was true 20 years ago. Now, the manual is online. (And, oops, the manufacturer’s website is down again., just when you need it. And you need to subscribe. ) ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2025, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/96 "2025-07-28T02:21:30Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > FWIW, recall that **this board** irretrievably lost our “Winter of Lost Content”. And this board just lost my reply that I spent 15 minutes writing. 🤨 I’ll try again. (Guess I need to go back to my old practice of copying my posts before trying to post them to the board.) > [@Lumpy](#): > > > [@robby](#): > > > > And then both sides proceeded to build _tens of thousands_ of nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world many times over. > > Nitpick: the numbers weren’t to “destroy the world many times over” but to insure that there would still be a credible deterrent if 2/3 of the nuclear triad could be completely wiped out by a sudden attack and the surviving third badly degraded. Agreed, that is the purported reason for building so many weapons (though I would argue that both sides still built far more than were needed even for that purpose). But given that the likely response to a warning of a massive attack is a massive counterstrike will all available weapons, there is unfortunately every likelihood that most weapons will reach their targets. This would result in the death of billions of people, and the resulting nuclear winter and fallout could easily lead to the global collapse of civilization. Should that happen, assuming we avoid extinction, the resulting dark ages will likely result in the loss of a lot of knowledge. > **[Nuclear holocaust](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust)** > > A nuclear holocaust, also known as a nuclear apocalypse, nuclear annihilation, nuclear armageddon, or atomic holocaust, is a theoretical scenario where the mass detonation of nuclear weapons causes widespread destruction and radioactive fallout, with global consequences. Such a scenario envisages large parts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to the effects of nuclear warfare, potentially causing the collapse of civilization, the extinction of humanity, or the termination of most biological ... And this could happen tomorrow, or next week, or 30 minutes from now. We’ve been lucky so far, but I don’t hold out much hope considering whose fingers are currently on the nuclear buttons. That’s why I think the premise of the OP is laughable (in a macabre sense, of course). ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2025, 10:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/97 "2025-07-28T10:48:16Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > And even you acknowledge many of them would be found with keys still clipped. So what’s left to puzzle out? IME the carabiner is too thick to actually fit through the keys themselves. It’s just clipped to the same little ring that the keys are clipped to. I suppose its primary use is as a handle of sorts. As for promotions, would a post-capitalism society necessarily understand the point of those? Might they not be perceived as the symbols for rival Gods? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2025, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/98 "2025-07-28T12:19:41Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > As for promotions, would a post-capitalism society necessarily understand the point of those? A post-capitalist society that doesn’t understand what capitalism is, is a post-capitalist society that won’t stay post-capitalist for long, IMO. But in any case, no, I’m pretty sure future archaeologists will be able to puzzle it out just by cross-referencing the various educational and [academic works](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348329981_Silent_persuasion_Incidental_use_of_promotional_merchandise_benefits_unfamiliar_brands) on the topic. It’s not like promo company materials [don’t outright say what they’re for](https://www.promosontime.com/d/50/promotional-carabiners.htm). There are definitely paper versions of those companies’ catalogs out there. ---
**Author:** ![Toxylon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f05b48/32.png) [@Toxylon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toxylon)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2025, 12:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/99 "2025-07-28T12:33:42Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Humanity has _never_ had any practical use for History or Archeology, and yet, we still dabble in them. A practical use is finding and studying past catastrophies (ecological and other) and learning from them. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2025, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235/100 "2025-07-28T13:09:09Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > FWIW, recall that **this board** irretrievably lost our “Winter of Lost Content”. An excellent example of how hard it is to actually lose data these days, because it isn’t irretrievably lost. You can still find those posts on sites like the Wayback Machine. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-we-now-at-the-point-where-future-archeologists-historians-cant-possibly-misunderstand-or-not-know-what-our-current-day-items-objects-and-events-are/1021235.md?page=6)