What If You Woke Up 10,000 Years in the Future?

You close your eyes tonight and open them in the year 12026. What's waiting for you? A sky with a different North Star, a world where a common cold could kill you (or you could kill everyone else), and a message carved in stone that we wrote specifically for you. It says: go away. 0:00 A worm frozen for 40,000 years 0:54 How long is 10,000 years? 1:27 The English you can't read 2:02 What's left of our world 3:05 The message we left for you 4:44 Nobody understands you 5:25 A different North Star 6:20 Your hometown is underwater 7:17 Your germs vs their germs 8:18 They study you like Ötzi 9:33 Your $1 is now worth 44 digits 11:07 The 10,000-year clock What one object would you take with you to explain who we were? Tell us in the comments. Sources Shatilovich A.V. et al. (2018). Viable nematodes from late Pleistocene permafrost of the Kolyma River lowland. Doklady Biological Sciences 480:100–102. Trauth K.M., Hora S.C., Guzowski R.V. (1993). Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Sandia National Laboratories, SAND92-1382. Sebeok T.A. (1984). Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia. Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation. Bastide F. & Fabbri P. (1984). The "ray cat" proposal. Zeitschrift für Semiotik 6(3). The Long Now Foundation: The 10,000 Year Clock. Keller A. et al. (2012). New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman's origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing. Nature Communications 3:698. Maixner F. et al. (2018). The Iceman's last meal consisted of fat, wild meat, and cereals. Current Biology 28:2348–2355. Stephenson F.R. et al. (2016). Measurement of the Earth's rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015. Proc. R. Soc. A 472:20160404. NASA, Lunar Laser Ranging: the Moon recedes about 3.8 cm per year. Itan Y. et al. (2009). The origins of lactase persistence in Europe. PLoS Computational Biology 5(8):e1000491. Huerta-Sánchez E. et al. (2014). Altitude adaptation in Tibetans caused by introgression of Denisovan-like DNA. Nature 512:194–197. Ilardo M.A. et al. (2018). Physiological and genetic adaptations to diving in sea nomads. Cell 173(3):569–580. Gaffney V. et al. (2009). Europe's Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland. Music (all by Kevin MacLeod, incompetech.com) "Investigations" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Wallpaper" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Local Forecast - Elevator" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Life of Riley" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Sneaky Snitch" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) "Echoes of Time v2" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ #whatif #science #future #history