The museum of tomorrow

I wonder how history will find us. Not in the sense of what we did or didn't do. Not the label of the history books. The history books will say that certain things happened at the turn of the 21st century to change humanity. And it will comment upon them, rightly or wrongly, in the context of that time.

But the rest of us, those of us who won't go down in the annals of history as presidents or governors, how will history find us? We're in the digital age now, and our photos are on discs. Our words are online or printed on cheap paper that's inferior to the acid-free stock of the past.

I suspect that history will look back to the beginning of the 21st century and find a gap. Books on good paper, and newspapers of worth, will be abundant up until about 1990. And then the trail will vanish, or be found only in the landfills, where copies of The Herald might live for centuries, buried beneath the waste of today.

The legacy of the common man won't be found in thrown pots or cuniform. It will be found in the remanants of automobiles and the remains of a Cool Whip dish.

A thousand years from now, a museum dedicated to our time won't show how we went from daylight to lamps, as the county history museum is featuring this month. It'll show how we went from oil use to some other energy source, moving along the earth to leave our scars and badges in hot pursuit of the next big thing.

It'll have a desktop PC as an oddity, with no way to know what was inside. And inside that one PC, trapped like ghosts from another time, might be a lifetime of digital memories, belonging maybe to you.

Photos will be few because they're all tucked away in these boxes, unavailable. The museum curators will speculate: were they tall? Short? Fat? Do you suppose they were human?

When I was very young, I read a story, perhaps in a Reader's Digest, that made a huge impression. It was about an archeological find in some future time. It what we would know as an hotel room, a skeleton laid sprawled on what was left of a bed, facing a black box.

They worshipped this box, found in all rooms, this future archeologist surmised. He called it a primitive worship, so much so that he doubted the humanity of his find.

He ultimately decided they were human because they all needed privacy for elimination needs.

The story stuck with me because of the wrong hypothesis of the archeologist. His guesses were so wrong, yet so right.

What will remain of us, this society? Will we be remembered at all?