The wildfires burning across Europe this summer have exposed a potentially deadly threat lurking beneath the blackened landscape: rusty bombs and mines from World War I and II.
Archeology in the distant future will be metal. Literally and figuratively.
One might find a mechanical clock, gears seized but maybe still coherent enough to reverse engineer it (though the precise timing we set up might not make much sense to them because the days could be longer, depending on how much time has passed), while another needs to spend great effort to break into a metal tomb only to find it doesn’t contain artifacts from one of our deaths but just causes it to anyone that enters it quickly or anyone who spends time close to artifacts taken from it more slowly.
And anyone that finds computer parts will probably have no idea what’s going on with them.
After we’re gone, subsequent species will discover a mustard gas cylinder, and think it’s some advanced sign of civilization.
Then it’ll go off and they’ll hate us as much as we hate ourselves.
mustard gas is the least of their problems.
panic will set in when they find all the nuclear waste buried.
Archeology in the distant future will be metal. Literally and figuratively.
One might find a mechanical clock, gears seized but maybe still coherent enough to reverse engineer it (though the precise timing we set up might not make much sense to them because the days could be longer, depending on how much time has passed), while another needs to spend great effort to break into a metal tomb only to find it doesn’t contain artifacts from one of our deaths but just causes it to anyone that enters it quickly or anyone who spends time close to artifacts taken from it more slowly.
And anyone that finds computer parts will probably have no idea what’s going on with them.