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.
Not necessarily. We can scan and digitize vinyl records using a laser which isn’t the original method but still works.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah definitely. Digital records make papyrus records look positively durable in comparison
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.
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.
I think a toilet seat is likely to remain one of the most universal recognizable artifacts of the human species.
Please explain this to me. What else do they need to operate– data from the Cloud?
FWIW, recall that this board irretrievably lost our “Winter of Lost Content”.
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.
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.
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. )
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.)
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.
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).
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?
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 on the topic. It’s not like promo company materials don’t outright say what they’re for. There are definitely paper versions of those companies’ catalogs out there.
A practical use is finding and studying past catastrophies (ecological and other) and learning from them.
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.