a long lost future

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On Saturday I was reading an article titled, Are we nearly there yet? on the BBC News app. It listed a few places in the UK, both man made and naturally occurring, which travellers often use as a reference point to being nearly home. One of the man-made structures was The Angel of the North. This is a steel sculpture of an angel, standing at 20 metres tall, with wings measuring 54 metres across. It lives in the north-east next to the A1, the main road from South to North in England. To my knowledge I have never seen this piece of modern art because it was put in place after I finished uni up north and I don't *think* I've been north of York since then. But I digress. What went through my mind when I was reading about it was what future people would think about us if it was only one of the few remaining objects from the present. Would they assume it was a god, a higher being whom we worshipped? They might think it was built to honour alien lifeforms. Would they understand and recognise it as a piece of art? Maybe that's just what the pyramids are. Art, later put to use as somewhere to bury the dead and their most treasured possessions. So, anyhoo, yesterday we tootled off to the cinema to enjoy Stephen King's The Dark Tower. As an aside, it was good, but I haven't read the books and had no expectations. In one scene two of the main characters are resting/eating/whatever and Jake points to a large, rusty, broken, overgrown structure - which looks just like a roller coaster! - and says, You have theme parks in this world? to which he receives the response, Those are ancient; we have no idea what they were used for. Jake offers Ronald an incredulous look and simply declares, It's a theme park! It made me laugh, mostly because less then twenty-four hours earlier I'd been thinking about that contemporary arty sculpture up north. Now I'm just trying to decide what other ancient man-made structures may have been simply art ...