We are Ken Jennings and John Roderick. We speak to you from our present, which we can only assume is your distant past, the turbulent time that was the early 21st century.

Fearing the great cataclysm that will surely befall our civilization, we began this monumental

reference of strange and obscure human knowledge.

These recordings represent our attempt to compile and preserve wonders and esoterica that would otherwise be lost.

So whether you're listening from an advanced civilization or have just reinvented the technology to decrypt our transmissions,

this is our legacy to you.

This is our time capsule.

This is the omnibus. Oh, You have accessed entry 798 dot PR 2303.

Certificate number 24537.

Modernist Cuisine.

In addition to cutaways, we also explain physics.

This is Fourier's law of heat conduction.

It's a partial differential equation.

We have the only cookbook in a world

that has partial differential equations in it.

But to make them palatable, we cut it out of a steel plate

and put it in front of a fire and

photographed it like this. Hominids of our era needed caloric intake to live.

Present. Last, uh, yeah, last 12,000 years post-agriculture.

Wait, are you saying hominids pre-agriculture didn't need?

That is correct. They just got everything from the sun and the air like orchids.

They wafted above the plains, although I do think I have been reading about

...