If for some unexplainable reason, you were the last person alive on earth, what would you write or leave for intelligent life to discover?

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I’m the last person on earth. It’s been pretty sad and lonely. And since i don’t have any particularly useful skills, I spent the rest of my life crying and masturbating. To be honest Mr Alien, 99% of the human race would have done the same. We’re a bunch of whiney wankers.

scat

@janbb Beat me and Ford Prefect to IT.

A sign reading: “This planet closed for repair.”

So long & Thanks for all the fish.

What makes us think our scratching on paper or some other surface could be decoded by aliens?

Next time feel free to spend your capital.

Nothing… I would just get depressed and die somewhere. Preferably close to somewhere that has some of the basics to get by.

“I think we blew it. Learn a lesson, get along with each other and care for your planet.”

Are we redoing Wittgenstein’s Mistress?

@Hawaii_Jake We have decoded past societies’ writings without any understanding of the language. So it might be possible.

@RandomGirl I am unaware of such a situation. Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mystery until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which enabled linguists to translate what was gibberish up to then. I don’t know of any other instances where we’ve been able to decipher a completely foreign and unused language. I am open to being proven wrong, though.

Study what we humans did here. Never do likewise.

@Hawaii_Jake Computer decoding at Oxford University is beginning to let us read ancient proto-Elamite, an extinct language dating back to 3,200 BCE. This is the oldest known written language.

MIT has already used computer analysis to crack 5,000 year old extinct Semitic language, Ugaritic.

I would be stunned if a species with a sufficiently advanced technology to travel over multiple light years in a single lifetime did not have computers far, far more advanced than ours. I believe you could expect everything you saw in the Star Trek series and more. So I’d just suggest they power up the world electrical grid and switch on all the Internet hubs, then use Bing and Google to learn all they wished. But just in case they didn’t have time for that, I’d give them directions to all the great Boston Area libraries.

Another perspective to look at this question is:
If you landed on a new Planet , “What would you like to find their that could help you to understand the life of its inhabitants before it disappeared”?
Wouldn’t it then be advantageous to discover a lone inhabitant that could answer for those
that perished etc?

I can’t believe I was modded off topic (or maybe unhelpful) simply for expressing my personal wants, beliefs and probable last act. Why is wanting to have Pink Floyd playing “Goodbye Cruel World” any less of a legitimate, helpful, on-topic response than a quote from Douglas Adams or describing the human race as a bunch of whiny wankers?

what a bunch of whiny wankers

@rojo It does seem like this should be in Social altogether. (And now this will get modded off.)

I would leave behind Jon Stewarts Earth, and the golden disk from the voyager probe.