Comment by baxtr
18 hours ago
It’s gotta be coins though.
Most famous example was Louis XIV who created medals specifically to preserve French history for future archaeologists.
At that time they realized that they knew almost everything about Romans and Greek through preserved medals.
So the King created a vast medal series (Histoire Métallique) intended to outlast paper, books, and buildings.
These bronze and gold medals were intentionally buried in the foundations of monuments like the Louvre, specifically waiting for future generations to excavate them.
So the key is: durable materials, widely spread.
If humanity suddenly died tomorrow the world would be littered with handy rectangular glass pieces all over the world.
Alien archeologists would have a field day figuring out what they were for.
They're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.
21st century humans had notoriously poor light receptors, so they used these "smart" devices to reflect more sun into their eyes in order to see while hunched over
Watching cat videos feels a lot like that.
They indeed were used as part of a mating ritual.
"They clearly stare into the black void to make themselves feel better!"
Shame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually.
But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.
“…used for religious purposes and/or tribal rituals.” (Far-future Archeologist, Zarb-7854)
Which, joking aside, isn’t too far from the truth.
https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/life-in-general/marbles.h...
"""Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer?
...
This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """
They’ll last thousands of years, but not millions.