1,800-year-old Roman statue discovered in parking lot | Hacker News Reader

1,800-year-old Roman statue discovered in parking lot

cnn.com

61 pointspeutetre24 comments

I always enjoy thinking about what modern artifact might make a similar journey into the future and be discovered under equally serendipitous circumstance.

One of my favorite things is thinking about the life of discarded objects.

I'll be walking through the woods and find a Mountain Dew can from the 80s. Who left it here 40 years ago? What store did he buy it from? Who stocked it on the shelf? Who was the person who packaged it after it came off the production line? Who was the truck driver that dropped off the aluminum? Who was the miner that pulled the ore from the ground? What star did the elements come from?

Abandoned houses. They're all over the US, slowly decaying and collapsing, but at one time they were new. Someone assembled the materials and put in days of hard work, sweat, and blood building the house. They looked upon the completed house with all sorts of hopes and dreams in their mind. What happened? What was it like when they left? Did they hope to return someday? Or were they leaving behind a life of pain and suffering? Are there relatives that still own the house that look upon the house with disdain? Or is it a bank dispassionately looking to sell the land? Will it ever be bulldozed and burned? Or will it continue to sit in the corner of the plot rotting away to dirt and dust?

You reminded me about documentaries, not sure if History channel or somewhere else, about abandoned towns from Wild West days, almost as they were back in the gold race or train building days.

Modern Pompeiis, without the corpses, until those wood houses finally collapse due to Nature's action.

Check out the YouTube channel "Ghost Town Living". Some guy bought an entire abandoned mining town in California and has been living in it for the last few years while slowly making the whole town liveable for guests and tourists. One of the coolest personal projects I've seen in a long time.

Thanks for the tip.

Styrofoam packing nuts. They will likely fall out of use, then people will forget about them. Finally, as they reappear centuries later, people will start collecting them until they find a completely intact Amazon package of seeds from an extinct plant… and packing nuts. Then, the mystery will be solved; The ancients must have believed that these packing nuts could preserve objects since the styrofoam itself would last forever.

You should read about Nacirema (no spoilers).

The original is at https://web.archive.org/web/20061004083040/http://www.aaanet... and it has been transcribed at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...

Egyptian artifacts have made it to Manhattan think of that puzzle left for the future. My guess is that it will look like Egyptian dynasty may look like it lasted much longer to the future.

cheetos probably

This is why I own a metal detector!

Found anything interesting yet?

Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of LLMs than she did to the building of the pyramids of Giza.

... and when the pyramids were being built, Mammoths were still roaming around.

Wrangel* island? That puts a new spin on the 1981 soviet cartoon "Mother for a Little Mammoth": https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mpew0

* named for the explorer, not the White

Reply on news.ycombinator.com