What would the longevity of the LM descent stages be?
Good point. And the moon is moving away from earth. I was thinking man made satellites.
The Moon has no plate tectonics, vulcanism, or moonquakes. No erosion, no water, no wind. No bio-anything to eat or accumulate on the landers.
Unless a meteor happened to splash nearby they might look about the same a million years from now. Any pigment will have long since cooked off, but metal is pretty eternal.
MIcrometeorites will eventually erode/degrade them. The same with geosync satellites.
ETA: Cosmic rays will also weaken the metal, which will also degrade them.
True. But the CHA left behind by Chairface Cippendale when he tried to carve his name into the moon with a laser will last a long, long time.
Probably only if somebody else finds them; which seems to me to be quite a small chance in quite a large universe, even if there’s somebody else out there capable of doing so.
Or, I suppose, if the probes find something that turns out to be of long-range importance to our species, while they’re still able to communicate that to us.
Yes, and bomb isotopes also decay. It’s surprisingly hard to find information on the lifespan of a geostationary orbit, more specific than “almost forever”: The most specific cite I was able to find said “longer than the time since the dinosaur extinction”.
And I mentioned geostationary satellites rather than lunar landers or deep-space probes because geostationary satellites are easier to find. But those other things will also last next best thing to forever.
I’m not understanding the thinking, in terms of it’s impact on humans and our species, it seems to be nil.
And won’t be unless it’s discovered by another civilization and they decide to respond. Both of which seem to be about as close to zero as possible.
It’s a great technological stunt, but I contend no greater than building the rocket that put it on it’s way in the first place.
Prove it.
Prove that Columbus didn’t bring the first pair of crows to the New World like some sort of Italian Corvus Noah.
If the Americas didn’t exist/were just barren wastelands, humanity would have just kept ticking along fine. While the Columbian Exchange and subsequent interactions were certainly impactful, they’re not the most significant thing ever.
Agriculture isn’t any one thing, either, there were many independent centres of origin for it.
This smacks of some version of great man theory. Which is bunk. NDGT should stick to his lane.
Yeah that’s the reason Columbus arriving in America is a contender for most significant event in the history of the human race. There are other more significant changes but almost all of them, like the Agricultural revolution, were gradual social changes over long periods where you can’t pick a date (or even a year) and say this is when the event happened.
I mean it’s bunk in the sense that most of history was not brought about by the actions of specific rich old white dudes on specific days, something you might miss if you read a history book 100 years ago (or certain podcasts today). But there are a few events where history would be radically different if certain people had not done did a specific thing at a specific time. This is one of them. If a different European working for a different European monarchy had arrived at a different time in history, then history would have been different (you can argue about how different and whether the results would have been better for the population of the Americas, but it would have been different)
Language is a strong but problematic contender, as pointed out above.
A more specific, yet maybe more valid candidate in my opinion, is linguistic recursion.
As far as I know, this property exists only in the language of our species. Thanks to it, there are literally no bounds to the number of sentences humans can understand and produce.
Not significantly. We know this because it happened more-or-less the same in other places where different Europeans working for different European monarchs did arrive at different times in history.
Colonizers gonna colonize.
Columbus was first, but that’s an accident of history, not significant.
But those colonizations were significantly different. The English and Dutch colonies looked very different to the Spanish ones, plus their make up, timing, and location were all heavily influenced by the stranglehold the Spanish had on south and central America. Without that they would have been more different still.
Not to the colonized, they weren’t really.
No, they were very different for the colonized. Ever notice how the present-day inhabitants of most Latin American countries look a lot more like the natives than the present-day inhabitants of the US or Canada? That’s because the natives of the US and Canada were mostly killed off (mostly inadvertently, but dead is dead). I’d say that being killed off vs. not being killed off is a very significant difference, from the point of view of the colonized.
To the white people writing the histories maybe, who lumped all “indians” in together, but to the people involved not at all. e.g. The Quechua in Peru had a very different experience of the last five centuries to the Algonquian people of New England, they both shared the fact they were horribly oppressed by the invading Europeans, but in every other respect their experiences could not be more different
So were a lot of the Mexican, Caribbean and Central and South American natives - many more so than in the rest of North America. They mostly started from much higher population densities though, so the diseases etc still left many more.
But the overall effect of colonization was nevertheless significantly the same - oppression, exploitation and misery. And I wasn’t just talking about the Americas.
Nitpicking the finer details doesn’t change that. The misery is the overwhelmingly important part of the equation.
And by “most of”, I do mean “most of” - introduced diseases killed off 60-90 percent of the Inca and similar for the Mexicans. Those are both locales that each had an order of magnitude more population than all of the rest of North America. So the leftover population was still more than USA+Canada had before 1492.
The overwhelming native experience was only ever going to be significantly different if whichever colonizers showed up instead of Columbus and the Spanish were magically disease-free. Fat chance.
Different, yes. But how much different?
And there must, over hundreds of thousands of years, have been many cases in which if some particular person hadn’t done something on a given Tuesday (well, not yet called Tuesday in most cases), the results would have been significantly different for a lot of people; maybe for all humans. We just don’t know what most of those occasions were, or who was involved.
Some humans experienced a major flood thousands of years ago. The particular people who survived it moved religion in particular directions. If the survivors had been different people, might they have moved things differently? Probably; but if, and if so in what direction, we’ll never know. If the survivors had been different individuals, might some groups have died out which survived, and some groups have survived which died out? Probably; but we’ll never know. And might that have led to drastically different social structures later on? Quite possibly; but we’ll never know.
Some specific people decided to leave the continent now known as Africa; most likely without realizing that that was what they were doing. (Columbus didn’t know what he was doing, either. He had the size of the planet wrong, and he had no idea those continents were there.) Why did those specific people do so, who were they, who among those people made that decision? We’ll never know. What were the societal structures of the people who did so, and if it had happened sooner or later how would those structures have been different, and how would that have affected the current world? We’ll never know any of that, either.
Some specific humans first entered the continents now known as the Americas; quite possibly without realizing that that was what they were doing. Why did those specific people do so, who were they, who among those people mad that decision? We’ll never know. What were the societal structures of the people who did so, and if it had happened sooner or later how would those structures have been different, and how would that have affected the current world? We’ll never know any of that, either.
Some specific traders from European societies decided not to move further south on the continent now known as North America, hundreds of years before Columbus. Were they persuaded by someone in particular? We’ll never know. But if they’d done otherwise, Columbus wouldn’t matter.
For that matter, if any of a very long line of somebodies had decided not to carry a child, or not to nurse one, or even not to have sex at a particular moment: Columbus wouldn’t have existed.
What’s so special about Columbus? We know his name. We don’t know those other peoples’ names. The results of the European invasion of the Americas were important, yes; one of the major events of the history of the human species, and an “event” occuring over hundreds of years. But that invasion couldn’t have occured unless a whole lot of other things had happened first. Why should Columbus’ voyage be more important than the voyages of those who initially settled what’s now the Americas, or for that matter those who initially settled what’s now Europe?