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Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robinx, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, we are at the Bloomsbury Theatre,

which is actually the place that Brian Cox and I did our very, very first gig.

About two years before we started doing this series,

and it was a kind of mash-up of science and music and

I came on and did some jokes about Schrodinger's cat and Brian came on and sang I'll be your long-haired

lover from Liverpool and then I had my hair cut shortly after for personal safety reasons

actually this is what I love about Brian he didn't have his cut. We replaced the previous hair that he had on his head. And then, in fact, we replaced your head because you're kind of like a replicant Wurzel Gummage, aren't you, really? They've started adding little bits of grey in your hair now so that you look more human. A illusion. Yeah. They take it from you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll tell you what, they're going to start harvesting other people for long.

Not much of a crop left there, is there?

So, today we are talking about fossils.

And not only the fossils of ancient animals and plants, but the fossils of the future, techno fossils.

What remnants of our 21st century civilization will survive into the far future?

And what might the inhabitants of that future be able to infer about our technology, customs and way of life?

To help us unearth the answers, we are joined by someone interested in decay, someone interested in clay, and someone interested in replay.

And they are...

I'm Mark Mio Dovnik, I'm Professor of Materials and Society at UCL. And the techno

fossil, I think that archaeologists of the future will be most confused about are these

rectangular lozenges of material that they'll find everywhere. And when they analyze them, they'll find there's more than 50% of the period table are in them.

...