Random thoughts about the past in the future

Having a little time on my hands, I've been sorting through and cleaning out years of stored personal papers. I've just completed shredding 15 years worth of bank statements and cancelled checks (yes, SK, it's finally finished, phew!). While the blades whirled, my mind wandered to a university project a few years ago in which students and their professor dug through and uncovered decades of landfill. The experiment was designed to discover the rate of decay of various materials. What they found was that tightly packed paper devoid of sunlight and unexposed to the atmosphere remained pretty much intact. In an age when identify theft had yet to take place, check stubs and registers weren't destroyed. And this gave the students a whole other layer to their study - a bonus, if you will. For there in the depths of landfills was a perfectly preserved microcosm of the everyday life of ordinary people; a slice of society of the day.

So what's going to happen a couple of hundred years from now, with everything now shredded, recycled or deleted? Just a random thought.