Buried Cheetos for future civilizations to find in 10k years

I’m into projects like this. A few times when I was a kid I left messages inside the walls of houses under construction. Nothing very interesting; “I’m x years old and I like pizza”, that type of thing.

My house is about 75 years old, and I’m slowly remodeling it myself; mostly trying to take out walls and open up spaces. My partner and I were measuring things one day and discovered that one of the walls was extra thick, like 18 inches, and we thought, ooh, is there something in there? Because we’re doing it ourselves it took forever, so it was a months-long mystery: what’s in the wall? A body? A duffle bag full of cash?

When we finally got to it, I poked a small hole right at eye level – I didn’t want to just tear into it, in case there really was something in there – and what I saw was a playboy centerfold that had been pinned up on the inside of the opposite piece of sheet rock. Miss January 1970. There was also a bottle of Gatorade and a pack of Twizzlers sitting on the floor inside the wall with expiration dates from 1990 so I think that’s when they must have put them there.

Anyway, I appreciate the level of execution that went into this guy’s Cheetos joke (to anyone who hasn’t watched the video, it’s a big, expensive, and time-consuming project), but I think the fact that it’s so well documented takes the punch out of it. The idea of the joke is that whoever finds it thousands of years from now will be mystified, but it seems more likely to me that they’ll be the developer of a shopping center or condo building, and instead of being mystified they’ll look up this video pretty quickly and they’ll think, good one, guy from 80 years ago.

One thing I wonder about is why there aren’t more jokes like this from our ancient past. I know there are lots of old jokes and porn in ancient texts, but I can’t think of an example of anyone carving into a rock, “Hey, person 10,000 years from now, your mom’s a cow”. I know that things like the great pyramids were meant to survive tens of thousands of years, but they seem more like, I dunno, claiming ownership than communicating. “This space is mine, forever” rather than “Hello, future people!” I guess you can only arrive at that sort of idea once you can take a thorough look at your own past, which maybe is only a thing after industrial or informational revolutions.