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Motel of the Mysteries is a great book for imagining what people in the future will think about what we leave behind.

https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-Macaulay/dp/039...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/07/15/i...

I don't understand. Is stuff like this supposed to be serious? Even if there was a disaster that completely destroys the communicative link between us and a future people (say, because humans have to return to subsistence hunting/gathering), there is an outrageous amount of written language everywhere as durable artifacts. Any future industrialized (or hell, even agrarian) society will be able to learn to read our language and understand huge amounts. These sorts of widespread written artifacts just didn't exist before the printing press, so pretending that looking at our current era by future people will be like us looking at 1000 BC makes no sense.

The only way to change this is to go to the far future when tectonic activity plausibly erases most artifacts. But once you've looking millions of years in the future, you're talking about a different species and everything about interpretability goes out the window.

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