Ever wonder when our world will become a ruin for archaeologists to explore?

What will they make of us?

So far, this year has brought an unusually abundant crop of apocalyptic omens,

most obviously a global pandemic that's claimed half a million lives so far, but also fires raging

across one of the coldest places on Earth, Siberia, due to the climate crisis. Oh, and a brief

brush with the possibility of nuclear warfare back in January when the U.S. ordered the killing of an Iranian general.

In fact, that's when I first sat down with journalist and devoted amateur historian Dan Carlin,

creator of the compulsively listened to podcast Hardcore History.

He's the author of the new book. The End is Always Near, Apocalyptic

moments from the Bronze Age collapse to nuclear near misses. I called him because I couldn't

get one of those moments I first heard in his podcast out of my head. It was when Xenophon

the Greek encountered the disintegrating ruins of a great

Assyrian city, gaited at its 18-mile fortifications, its walls 100 feet high, Nineveh, possibly,

some 200 years after its fall, and imagining Xenophon standing there wrapped at its impossible grandeur.

Xenophon was an ancient Greek general who fought in a Persian civil war around the times of the

classical Greeks, so, you know, 400s BCE.

And while he's fleeing after the battle is over, he and his men stumble upon cities that are just deteriorating

in the dust. But he can see from the walls and the height of everything that they're mammoth

by comparison to what he knows about back home. And he quizzes the locals, and they just blamed it

on the previous people who live nearby. But a lot of people

have always thought these are Assyrian cities that a couple hundred years before had probably been

the capital of the greatest empire of the world had yet known. You know, the reason I think we find it

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