# How long would it take for all traces of our current civilization to disappear?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-our-current-civilization-to-disappear/746528>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 19, 2016, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-our-current-civilization-to-disappear/746528 "2016-02-19T06:14:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2016, 6:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-our-current-civilization-to-disappear/746528/21 "2016-02-22T06:13:17Z")

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What about plastics? They’re not a naturally occurring material. They last for a really long time. And they’re common place.

So if humans disappeared tomorrow, an alien race landed on Earth a million years from now would find plastic still laying around and realize this is evidence that Earth had been inhabited by a technological civilization.

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**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2016, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-would-it-take-for-all-traces-of-our-current-civilization-to-disappear/746528/22 "2016-02-22T08:35:10Z")

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Here’s a glass data store that could, in theory, last more than ten billion years;

> **['Superman Memory Crystal' Could Store Data for 13.8 Billion Years](https://www.livescience.com/53783-superman-memory-crystal-data-storage.html)**
>
> Human texts could long outlast the human race with a new digital storage system.

It seems to be the case that a small (but non-zero) number of very resilient human-made artifacts are in existence that could outlast our planet, and these might contain a significant amount of data for future archaeologists to use.

However these artifacts are so few and far-between that it would require some remarkable good fortune for them to be both preserved intact and to be found in the future by persons unknown.

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