The Forkmakers

Imagine our civilization fell tomorrow. What would our descendants think of us? What would they know about the 21st century? They would know surprisingly little about our greatest material triumphs. Our civilization’s favorite building materials aren’t made to last. Reinforced concrete only lasts a century; asphalt far less. Most of what we make out of steel will turn into a brownish oxidized dust in a few decades. Information is even worse. The ancient Mesopotamians did their writing on clay tablets. Our knowledge is stored on hard drives, which die in a few years, or acidic paper, which dies in decades. Which receipt do you think will last longer? We do create things that will last. Glass (especially its shatter-resistant varieties), ceramics, stainless steel. 1000 years after the fall of our civilization, we will be known for one thing above all others: cutlery. Our heirs call us the Forkmakers. What Survives a Thousand Years Our civilization is large and powerful. We will leave lots of relics for the post-apocalypse. Coins, tires, aluminum cans. Vast landfills of disposable diapers. But all of that is useless. The most durable thing we make that our successors actually want to use is our silverware. Cutlery is metal - thick metal. Anything designed to last a hundred runs in the dishwasher can withstand the elements. And we’ve made a lot of it. In this post-apocalyptic world, even the poorest peasant can afford to eat with a stainless steel fork. The situation with plates is more complicated. Few natural processes can destroy them. But when the Forkmakers’ civilization died, they left many of their plates in wooden cupboards off the ground. The few survivors didn’t really prioritize safely removing the plates before the cupboards rotted, so billions of ceramic plates shattered in those dark decades. But somewhere like the Bay Area, which had a large and rich Forkmaker population, most middle-class families still have the ancestral Fiestaware. And it’s fortunate they have the cookware of a more advanced civilization, because one of their plentiful foods - acorns - is difficult to prepare. But with enough resourcefulness and inherited forks, the people of the Bay Area enjoy a diet of acorns, wild oats, grapes and figs. They call themselves Oaklanders. What about the rest of our metalwork? While stainless steel objects last forever, most other forms of steel rust away. The chassis of a car or the springs inside a mattress will be red dust before the first century is over. Aluminum will be more interesting. After iron and steel, it’s the most important metal in the modern world.[1] It’s corrosion-resistant. Early scavengers looking for finished goods they can use will ignore decaying engine blocks and crushed soda cans in favor of our forks and knives. But as they move up the tech tree, the Oaklanders will start to see aluminum as a useful raw material. Aluminum melts more easily than bronze, and can be cast just as easily.[2] During humanity’s first rise, we didn’t learn to extract aluminum from ore until the 1880s. But with millions of tons of the stuff already extracted, the Oaklanders will have an Aluminum Age before their Bronze Age. For a shining moment, before easy aluminum reserves are exhausted, they could appreciate their ancestors for something besides forks. Aluminum isn’t hard enough to make a sword. But I love the idea of future warriors carrying the lightweight metal shields. A thousand years from now, they still have some of our glass.[3] Our phone screens survive, long after the rest of the phone is gone. They might be fun to play with; I imagine my distant descendants hunched over the glass screen ignoring their parents. Windows and lightbulbs have mostly been smashed: either by time or by barbarian raiders from San Jose. Tempered glass - most of the windows of a car - is cooled non-uniformly, putting it under a constant pattern of stress and strain. This means if a car window breaks, the break spreads, turning it into gravel. The outer layers are under compression, meaning a tiny nick will get sealed up. But the strong internal forces mean that when the glass fails, it fails spectacularly. Tap a car window or shower door hard enough and the whole thing shatters. Tempered glass is neat! But tempered glass is tough. The future Bay Area has hundreds of thousands of car windows. Oaklander architecture allows for plenty of natural light, shining through glass from another civilization. Interestingly, while conventional wisdom holds that the Forkmakers are responsible for glass, natural philosophers have long disagreed. They rolled their eyes at a ‘Forkmaker of the Gaps’ who can be invoked to explain any unexplained phenomenon. Eventually, large window quarries are discovered in what was once Southern California. Each one corresponds to a large concentration of forks. The scientific consensus on what the Forkmakers could do shifts. Future window quarry So much for metal and glass. What