What if your 15 minutes of fame comes 3 million years after you die?

A bunch of my friends are preggers these days, and I just keep finding geeky T-shirt slogans that I want their babies to wear on onesies. This is my new favorite, made by The Affable Atheist store on Cafe Press* and introduced to me by paleo-blogger and stand-up hominid Brian Switek.

*Also purveyors of "If You Can Read This, Thank an Evolutionarily Successful Hominid" bumper stickers.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

Whenever I see someone wearing that shirt, I’m going to ask them if they plan to be cremated. If they say yes, I’ll laugh my ass off. On a related note, transhumanists should also think very carefully before wearing it.
Teller

Short detour: I do wish BB had a post-Submit edit feature beyond Preview. Like for all the times I’ve wanted to change ‘Christ, what an asshole’ to ‘That guy’s such an asshole.’
RedShirt77

All the more reason to get my name carved into my Femur. I’ll be damned if I get called “lucy” by some future super evolved human.
superflippy

It’s stuff like this that has me rethinking cremation.
- RedShirt77
  
  But really, are you going to go lie in a riverbed at 95 when its your time?
bmcraec

Given 1) the far greater numbers of H. Sap, 2) the industrialized nature of managing death, and 3) the reverence virtually all cultures currently flourishing on the planet, or known and studied by archeologists and anthropologists, I’d say that future fossil finds will be plentiful. That is, unless the sun goes nova, or something.

I have no idea if any evidence of evolutionary change will be deducible from the fossil evidence itself. LIke social evolution, I suspect that it will be the context of masses of individual finds that will fuel the hypotheses of future hominid palaeontologists.

Then again, there could be an alternate future. What if the Singularity actually produces Homo Novus, whose main evolutionary thrust is to get off this little nest plane? Maybe 5 million years from now, only the remains of the dead-end H. Sap populations will remain.

Anyone recall a SciFi short story from the ’50s or ’60s about evolved children who can bend space-time and disappear, leaving their “Tween” parent to learn the non-Euclidean geometry required to follow them? Brilliant, haunting story.
bmcraec

Crap. Proof-read before hitting Submit.

1st para, 3rd point should read “3) the reverence for the dead of virtuallyâ€¦)

4th para, the 2nd sentence should read “â€¦to get off this little nest planet?”

Oh, and the children in the short story coined the terms “Dims” to mean those who simply didn’t get it (we would call them Republicans), “Tweens” and “Brights.

I hope I make the cut from Dims to Tweens.