Welcome to this installment of Context Clues, where we give you some excerpts from past episodes that will help make our upcoming series a little bit richer.

I'm your host, Weber Smith and this is American hysteria.

Now during context clues I usually tell you what the future holds in terms of next week's episode

but this time I don't want to. I want to keep it a surprise so you don't Google it and ruin my whole presentation.

But what I will say is that this is a very haunting, strange, and sort of beautiful topic

about the future, the far away future, the kind of future

we can't even start to fathom. What will our world be like in 100 years, 1,000 years? What about 10,000 years, 10,000 years?

Of course, we often imagine this future to be apocalyptic,

with most of the human race burned to a crisp from climate disasters and nuclear

warfare or killed off by a vicious pandemic, nature strangling the massive buildings of the old world, taking it all back.

Or we imagine a reality of half cyborgs, humans in spacesuits, flying cars, a colonized Mars, a whole general Jetsons

vibe. Or maybe we're all just lying in bathtubs full of goo fed through tubes with a chip inserted in our brains,

our reality determined by whatever we want it to be.

We can predict these things, but we cannot know. This is the basis of our next

series, what is called deep Time, and how we, in the 21st century, think of our future

distant relatives that we will never meet, and who will likely remember us as we remember cavemen and study us as

specimens that made some questionable choices. If they can talk to the past, if they can talk to us through archaeology and

anthropology, is there a way that we can talk to them? We'll get started with context clues right after this.

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