So, did Nathan’s “Weans” inspire or were they inspired by Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” (also 1956)? Or is that simply a magnificent coincidence in which multiple people shared an idea simultaneously (in the manner of Natural Selection and the Telephone)?
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Yeah.
The holy incantation on the urn of the gods:
San itized fory ourp rot ection.
One of my most favorite books is Earth Abides by George Stewart.
Some parts are quite dated now; I believe it was written in the late '40s. Its premise is a calamitous plague that sweeps over the earth, killing most, but not all of humanity, but no other species (at least not directly). By the end of the book, the descendents of the survivors are developing quite a mythology about certain artifacts, such as coins and the pictures on them.
And I guess that’s one scenario that would make the OP’s premise plausible. But let’s consider another one.
Barring the discovery of some faster-than-light space drive that will allow us to tap incredible resources throughout the galaxies, sooner or later we will no longer be able to sustain a high tech civilization.
Sooner or later we will no longer have the energy resources necessary to keep it all going. It may happen at all once in a great big train wreck, or it may be a long, slow, gradual decline. But someday–perhaps in two or three centuries or perhaps not for thousands of years–we will simply no longer have the resources to maintain libraries, universities, computer databases and the numbers of highly- and moderately-educated persons necessary to preserve all the knowledge we have. Knowledge will contract. Knowledge of the past will be lost, together with great amounts of other kinds of knowledge. And that loss will continue until the day comes when we will have lost virtually all the knowledge we have won over the past three or four thousand years.
The day will come when our descendents will wander among the ruins of great civilizations they can not themselves ever hope to equal, hunting wild animals and scratching the soil for a bare existence as they await the extinction which is the inevitable fate of our species.
Some of the monuments the OP is talking about will survive. But the knowledge concerning their origins will be lost. And of course, some people will invent legends and myths to account for such things as Mount Rushmore and the pyramids of Egypt to account for their existence. These things will be mysteries. Our distant sons and daughters will come across stone monuments, or find shiny discs buried in mounds of debris, or stumble upon the rusting hulks of great machines, and they will spin fabulous tales of gods, supermen and devils to account for these things.
Our civilization, * all [/] civilizations, are transitory and ephemeral in the cosmic scheme of things, and the day must surely come when our many-times-great grandchildren will find relics of our world and have no inkling of their history or meaning.
Look upon my works, O ye mighty, and despair.
And a friend’s room mate has just informed me that Mount Rushmore and the carvings on Stone Mountain probably would not last more than a few centuries without constant maintenance, so I guess the pyramids of Egypt will be here long after our American monuments have disappeared.
Oh really? You think that unless we can drill for petroleum on Alpha Centauri A-3 and ship it back to Earth, we’ll be S.O.L.? You’re thinking entirely in 20th century industrial terms. In the next century or two, we will - IF we don’t stupidly screw up- devise new technologies that will alter civilization as radically as the Industrial Revolution did. Try fusion energy, self-reproducing machines, biospheres, genetic engineering, or nanotech just for a start. And who knows what might be discovered by 2204 AD that isn’t even on the horizon yet.
The only things civilization needs to survive for the next fifty billion years, are raw elements, energy, and the cleverness to utilize both.
They will if the Luddites have their way.
Says who? Four billion years ago, someone looking at the collection of organic molecules at the Earth’s surface might have said “Just about all the free amino acids have been scavenged already; those little blobs of protein can’t survive much longer”. Four billion years later and us blobs are doing just fine thank you.
I always thought a cool idea would be to encapsulate all of our knowledge up to this point and send it into orbit around the Earth and have it land every three or four hundred years where it could either be used or updated.
…A kind of Carl Sagan gold record that returns.
I guess I’m just a pessimist…a Gloomy Gus
I was taught in Graduate school that the cultural element that changed most rapidly was language. I believed this, and there was lots of evidence to back it up, but now, looking back at 30+ years of experiencing cultures, I have to say that fashion and music change faster. (Although music can be considered an element of commun i9cation and thereby language.)
That aside, in another two millenia, our languages will have mutated enough that translators will be necessary to decypher the ‘time capsules’ we leave for the future. Intervention of global calamities will hasten/intensify this process.
It is not a matter so much of “if” or “what,” but when. It will happen.
Earth has been irregularly visited with calamities over our 3.4 billion years, and some few of them have had some historical record. (The “flood,” for instance). It is likely that statistically, we are overdue.
Again, perhaps our solar system is quieting down adequately that our next calamity will be of our own doing. But, given such a global calamity with the capability to knock out the infrastructure supporting our technology (gods, it would be so incredibly easy to do), the adaptations we would have to manifest for survival might just change our language and memories enough that viewing those items of technology that will survive will cause awe and reverence.
We leave our written record, which becomes indecypherable, at least until a new generation of linguists emerges…
Look at our culture. What will survive in translatable form for, say 2000 years of neglect? Books? maybe a few. Tapes? CDs? DVDs? On what players, and with what electricity? Words in stone? How many words carved in stone are worth carving in stone?
We are ill-prepared for global catastrophe.
Aside: One researcher that most of the rest of us considered a kook, posited that the iron age, bronze age, etc., all seemed to coincide with the amount of time that it would take for those artifacts to decay, and that anomylous examples of technology have been found preserved in ancient strata. Not enough to form any coherent theories mind you, but enough to get recorded in Fortean transcripts.
As for the pyramids, the question isn’t so much “what are they for” but “how the fuck could they do that with the level of technology they had then???”
Could we build an equivalent structure right now, with our technology? Probably. Could we build it with the technology we assumed they had? Maybe… Would we? No. Why bother?
Yet there are massive projects built by our government of which the public is largely unaware. Mountains hollowed out and reinforced. Pits that go so deep into the Earth that decompression is required to exit. Our surface structures are impressive, but frail, and won’t outlast the works of old. In fact, the newer something is, the less time is has on this earth, generally speaking.