On a recent visit to the Natural History Museum in London, my son and I attended a talk about dinosaurs. There were many children in the audience who had an impressive knowledge of dinosaur facts and were able to answer almost every question the professor threw out. When it came to the audience’s turn to ask questions, a small boy near the front said: “How can you tell so many details, like what colour the dinosaurs were, just from a stone fossil?” The professor explained how researchers looked at other cold-blooded animals and made some assumptions. “Oh, so you guessed!” said the young boy and they entered into an exchange about unusual coloured animals such as zebras and red snakes. Eventually the professor conceded that researchers do indeed guess some things
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On the way home my son and I had a discussion about the guesses future archaeologists might make about our lives in the early 21st century based on the objects we leave behind. Here is what we imagined they might say.
At some point in the 21st century humans’ hearing started to fail. Almost everyone wore hearing devices called headphones for carrying out daily tasks or while walking or traveling on mass transit systems such as planes and trains. Where there was a lot of background noise it was compulsory. As a result of failing hearing almost all communication was written – via text messages, emails or applications on mobile devices. Teenagers during this period would use this method to send messages to their parents from their bedrooms, requesting drinks.
Most humans gained weight rapidly during the 21st century and they were so worried about this rapid weight gain that they took daily, if not hourly, photographs of themselves and published them on websites and apps to keep track of their changing size. This also allowed others – even those unknown to them – to pass judgment, comment and compare their own size. So important was this to society, that cameras and photo applications were added to people’s hearing aids.
In an effort to control pollution and climate change the world was rezoned and an area referred to as China was assigned to be a manufacturing centre. Almost all artefacts on display in museums from his period have ‘Made in China’ marked on them. Activity in Europe seems to have been focused on coffee, which replaced water as the main source of fluid. Examinations of waste sites from this period contain large quantities of paper cups in increasing size and quantity. Towards the end of the 21st century cups became so large that two hands were needed to hold them.
During the 21st century commerce moved entirely online and customers interacted with automated systems and businesses relied on using big data to analyse all situations and reduce risk to a minimum. Meanwhile, the rapid innovations that were a key feature of the 20th century came to an end as automated systems decided what was statistically likely to be successful – and humans were relieved of having to think about or want anything new or different.
What started out as a fun and creative way to pass the time for me and my son soon turned into a bleak and troubling view of society. Surely this is not how our world will be recorded in history!
