Inspired by the post about the hieroglyphs the one dude hoped would last forever.
People always talk about future historians being confused at memes and old forums, but surely a lot of catastrophic events could just wipe out the internet wholesale, right? If something REALLY COOL 
like a giant meteor wiped out everybody, what if aliens came along and were deeply confused that our culture seems to end randomly in the mid 2010s, subsumed by an internet whose only remaining shreds are references in big scientific studies?
The history textbooks on our dumb asses would surely read “and the humans all talked into screens and used “hyper links” to share information and opinions. Very little is known about this obscure human ritual as no evidence can be found of its existence beyond scattered references in ancient texts contemporary to its existence.”
Thinkin bout the impermanence of the internet rn
It’s interesting how an alien civilization finding hard drives and stuff after our extinction would probably have a really hard time reverse engineering the way we store information and what that information even is. It even comes down to what their mathematics looks like. The binary system alone, and number bases in general, already require quite a lot of maths if you reduce them to their primitive functions. Going as far as to assume they have the same maths as us and have figured out binary system data representation, they still need to reverse engineer a crapton of computer science theory, with help from any physical books that can be found.
A cool project would be a massive stone codex that teaches the reader how to read magnetic tapes
Yeah that too, they’d need at least one working x86 computer and a linux or windows install disc at minimum. Our tech would probably be useless to them!