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Having considered the vast universe of what appears not even to be, this unbelievably talented but imperfect writer offers a different kind of answer: “What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.”

What will really succeed us, he fears is “plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain”.

That decay chain is what allows scientists to identify, retroactively, which element they've created.

Inside the detector, the atom will continue to shed alphas: In fact, several events in the decay chain will already have occurred before the scientists even register the sound.

Only later—when the scientists comb through the raw data and match every detected alpha particle to a specific element in the decay chain—can they reconstruct which element they initially created.