Member-only story
Curious Life: How Much of Our Species Exists Online?
What might future intelligent civilizations assume about us without it?
Imagine with me, if you will, that in about two thousand years, an alien or future civilization stumbles upon the remains of our modern society — much the way we discovered Pompeii and other ancient civilizations like the Mayan or ancient Egyptians.
Let’s say we don’t stop climate change, and it wipes out life as we know it within the next 100 years, as some experts predict. Then, sometime around the year 4021, a new intelligent species, or maybe a futuristic human civilization, discovers the remnants of our life today. What conclusions would they make about us?
Initial Curiosity
I was thinking about this the other day whilst recalling a memory from seventh grade. During a large school project, I was assigned the task of imagining unusual explanations for ordinary, everyday objects. Like when the Little Mermaid combs her hair with a fork because that’s what she thinks it’s used for.
The point of the project — or at least what I took away from it — was for us students to understand that everything we know about history isn’t necessarily the entire truth.
