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The Same Way We Dig Up Dinosaur Bones, Future Explorers Will Dig Up Fossilized Machines
If some kind of apocalypse knocks us back to the Stone Age and we recover enough to start digging up fossils again, then future archaeology is going to be really weird. On a long enough timescale, anything can be swallowed by the Earth and fossilized until we dig it up and stick it in a museum. That includes whatever you're using to read this article right now.
According to scientists writing for The Anthropocene Review, everything that we manufacture, from pens to garage doors to tractors, will eventually be covered up by sand and dirt and become "technofossils." That sounds like a bullshit term made up for a Michael Bay movie, but it's a real concept which kids might learn in third grade one day.
Imagine future dig sites where people are using little chisels and brushes to delicately extract your PlayStation, or your phone charger, or your dildo (or your phone charger / dildo). And depending on how far removed our cultural memory is from modern times, they'll probably have no idea what half of this stuff even is. Future museums might look like Ariel's treasure room from The Little Mermaid, with plaques explaining how forks were used for combing hair and cheese graters were defensive weapons.
And this has the potential to get weird. Imagine future scientists digging up the Neon Boneyard, the place where Las Vegas dumps all of its old neon signs. Or thousands of fossilized E.T.: The Video Game cartridges.