The Final Day

As the final day falls upon me, and I sit at home in my forced exile from work, I ponder how to encapsulate the existence of all Humanity. What words are worthy of our obituary as our doom approaches? With coffee cup in hand, and a head full of the news of our impending doom, I look to the past with a critical eye and consider those events that one might hold up for those that inherent this land after us. So… a few notes to our inheritors. You know, to explain what all this crap is lying around.

Yes, we were dirty animals. We made a mess. To whatever species has now risen to read this, I apologize for all the fossil fuels we burned. Surely you’re thinking about burning some yourself, and now you’re having a hard time finding any. Your industrial revolution was likely stunted because of this. I say “likely” because if you’ve managed to decipher this writing from some ancient rusted hard drive on some crusty server buried for a million years, then you’re long past your industrial revolution and well into the computer age. I’d also like to apologize for all the nuclear and toxic waste. By now, you’ve probably learned to avoid those areas. Or maybe you evolved in them, and relied on them, in which case, you’re welcome!

Oh, and our garbage dumps – great archives weren’t they? Everything you need to know about us, you can probably find in there. Dirty diapers make up a significant percentage of those dumps, but there are plenty of other things. Precious metals, ancient information, artifacts to ponder, bits of engineering to deconstruct. Oh, the square boxes all over – those contained a food we called “pizza.” We ate it a lot. And the yellow turd-shaped things with the white stuff inside? Those were another food called twinkies. We made them to last forever. Go ahead, try one. For building, we liked metal. I’m sure you do too. Metal was useful to us. So was plastic. You probably don’t have so much of that since we used up most of the easy oil, but maybe you’ve learned to make yours out of our recycled containers. We were doing that toward the end too. It was a growing business! We were learning to live off our garbage. You should too. Try figuring out how to recycle the diapers. We never mastered that.

About the stone stuff that’s still around – yeah – we built that, but it was really our ancestors. Funny how that stuff outlived the things we later created isn’t it? You can’t beat stone for longevity. Steel rusts, wood decays, but stone lasts a really really long time. Most of the stone buildings were built long before we started building the big piles of twisted metal you find in what used to be our cities. We used metal for money too. Those are all the little round things you find scattered around. They were, ironically the least valuable of our typical money. The expensive stuff was made out of paper. We used it to buy things – like plastic and diapers. It was easier than trading.

So, you’re probably wondering what most of us did. Basically, we got up, we went to work to earn the little metal disks and paper, then we went home. Once every five days, we stopped work and did chores around the places we lived. Sometimes we played games. Sometimes we traveled. But, most of the time, we worked. Most of us didn’t like the things we had to do in order to earn the metal discs. Those of us who did enjoy the toil we were forced to endure were the lucky ones. The goal in life was to earn enough money to stop working and sit around. Toward the end, there were a lot of people doing that, which was becoming somewhat a problem in the wealthy countries that had a lot of paper money. Anyway, after sitting around, we would die, and then we’d get buried or incinerated, and our descendants would continue doing the same thing until they died. This went on for hundreds of years. It wasn’t ideal, but we hadn’t figured out anything better yet.

Some of the big things we did included exploring space. We sent humans to the moon. We sent robots to the other planets. Our robots were getting pretty advanced, but maybe you’ve already built better ones. In any case, you might still be able to find some of our robots out there – big boxes and tubes covered with concave dishes and filled with all sorts of electronics that probably don’t work anymore. We also made some fairly interesting medicines. We delved into the nature of matter – although we never really tied it all together, but we were working on it! We made big machines to smash pieces of matter apart and examine their parts. And we created a whole slew of different kinds of foods. I expect you’re very interested in that. Food was a big thing with Humans. A lot of the information you’ll find will involve the creation of food – all to make it taste a specific way. We created many different forms of communication – that was a big thing with us too. We liked to exchange concepts, emotions, and ideas. We had all sorts of stories – some of which weren’t true. I’m not sure if you have the concept of fiction in your society, so you should probably be aware that not everything we encoded was truthful. A lot of it was pure fantasy – an art form we enjoyed. Our music and visual arts are also probably interesting to you. Go ahead and plagiarize it. At this point, there’s no need to stop you since we’re all dead.

So, that’s it. I could go on and on about our religions and our television shows and our other, um… more questionable achievements, but you’ll surely discover them for yourselves in many other records. I recommend watching the Matrix. It was my favorite movie.

You might be wondering what killed us. I can’t really answer that because I’m not dead yet. I suspect it might have been an antimatter meteor, or a mega solar flare, or a nuclear war. It could have been a sudden shift in dimensional frequencies, or an overlap with a fifth dimensional reality. Maybe it will be a super plague. Maybe the earth’s core will stop spinning and the Van Allen belt will cease to exist for a few decades. Or maybe aliens will come and harvest all of us for their own food supplies. It’s really hard to say, but I will say this: It’s been a hoot.

L8R Doods! (I didn’t prepare for the end at all. I hope it’s fast).

What will I do on my final day? Well, I’m going grocery shopping. In case the end doesn’t come, I’ve got to get food for the rest of the week, and we’re out of milk. Yes – milk – can you believe we drink the lactation from cows even as adults? It’s incredible, I know. I still can’t wrap my head around it, but there you go. My kids are complaining that there isn’t any in the house. We’re also out of unfertilized chicken embryos and pig flesh. I might pick up a pizza too. And maybe a movie.

Too late, it’s already happened. I just checked my stats. I’m the last one left alive. Crap. I’m going to get a pizza anyway.