Certainly not. But your initial statement suggested that the existing damage to the pyramids had been done by less than a thousand years of sandblasting. At best your statement was worded in such a way as to be misleading.
I’m sorry, I missed the part where you said “No bridge has stood for more than a thousand years without maintenance.” Perhaps what you meant was that no bridge would stand for 1000 years in the absence of maintenance, but that’s not what you said. What you said was false. A bridge (numerous bridges, actually) has stood for substantially longer than 1000 years.
Sure, these are nitpicks. No, they don’t invalidate your general argument. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth correcting.
I believe that there are places where fossils that were buried for eons have been revealed via erosion. If your sole point here is that some fossil humans might by some weird chance be revealed in this way then I accept the point. Unlikely since very few fossils are every revealed in that way in a manner where they can be seen for what they are to an untrained person. Normally a few points are revealed then the rest is revealed by digging. But we are not allowed to dig. You’re not talking about rolling six sixes. You are talking about picking the right atom in the right star in our galaxy. Possible but implausible. AFAIK in the entire world only
But if your sole point is that quantum physics says it’s possible albeit unlikely for an entire city to spontaneously teleport to the moon for a million years then teleport back unharmed then yeah, there are ridiculously improbable ways that preserved evidence could be revealed at exactly the right time. Somehow I doubt this is what the OP was referring to.
From the OP:No archaeological digs allowed – the ruins or whatever have to be in plain view.
And no, sand won’t generally protect artefacts from decay. Sand is highly abrasive, often salt laden and water permeable. As a result being buried in sand is often worse than being exposed to the weather directly.
Global warming so far has been too trivial to have any effect on dersertification. One of the predicted effects is that rainfall will increase globally, especially the monsoonal rains associated with most desert regions. An increase in cloud cover and rainfall is certainly what we have seen so far. Certainly past evidence says that deserts grow and the climate becomes drier during cold periods, and deserts retreat during warm periods.
Given that the areas of existing desert older than 3/4 of a million years are tiny to non-existent it would be an incredibly remote chance. The idea that you could multiply that by the odds of no changes in watercourses, no significant surface erosion, no earthquakes and so forth and come up with something that could ever happen isn’t real plausible.
Once again I point out that million year old exposed rock surfaces simply don’t occur. Ask yourself why? If even in desert regions even rocks vanish at greater than an 1/20" every 10, 000 years how could something standing on that rock hope to survive for a million years?
Even moreso. Sand is incredibly abrasive and usually saline. Objects buried in sand get ground down as the dunes roll over them and/or erodes as salt water percolates through the sand.
There are exceptionally rare cases where dunes become fossilised and cease moving so they don’t grind everything they contain to dust, but then your are back to talking about the improbability of this occurring at the exact time of abandonment and then multiplying it by the probability of them naturally eroding at exactly the point that someone starts looking in that area.
No. we find mounds in the desert. Some of them turn out to be Tels, many turn out to be natural landforms. Only excavation reveals them as evidence of human occupation, but No archaeological digs allowed – the ruins or whatever have to be in plain view.
Consider that hominds have existed on this planet for 4 million years or so yet only 1 fragment of skeleton has ever been uncovered that would allow someone to have a snowball’s chance in hell of identifying it without digging. And far more hominids have existed than there are humans alive today.
I think you have some idea that entire fossil skeletons or entire statues regularly pop out of cliff faces and reveal themselves for what they are. That isn’t what happens in reality. What actually happens is that a bank will reveal a tiny sliver of bone or fragment of pottery that is nowhere near enough to be evidence that we had ever been here unless you already knew we had been here. The tourist trap fossil sites in the southwest have usually been carefully prepared by removing material from around fossils because to a normal person the tip of femur is meaningless.
I’m getting the impression that to you a tiny pottery shard less than an inch long or a single molar will constitute evidence that humans exist. That is not the case. Such things could only possibly constitute evidence for someone already skilled in interpreting human remains. It seems clear the OP isn’t talking about fragments or microfossils that an skilled archaeologist could use as evidence with the aid of a microscope and several heft reference texts.
Very probable. He fell on top of the glacier. He wasn’t sitting on the valley floor when a glacier rolled over him. Two totally different scenarios.
That’s right, and the key word is that it’s been eroded down to that level. It hasn’t remained at that level for all that time. It was buried under metres of rock for most of the last million years. That sort of treatment will destroy cities.
You’re right, a whole field of study where folks go out and hunt for these things without being allowed to dig is incredibly obscure. I’ve never heard of it and would appreciate a reference if you can find one.
No, this wasn’t my point at all (though I do expect that SOME human remains would be found…only if one looked though). My point was that if animal remains can, through luck and the right combination of circumstance be perserved, then surely its possible (and even probable) that on an entire world of human artifacts SOMETHING will be perserved. I don’t think its as improbable as you are making it out to be (i.e. your star reference).
Yes, I got that. I’m proposing that its possible that a city (or distinct building) be buried but still recognizable from the air as SOME kind of artificial structure. Thinking of things like the lines in the desert in South America it doesn’t seem all THAT impossible that IF there was geological stability and the right circumstances that something that would indicate order would be preserved…even if its just a curious arrangement of mounds with straight lines or odd angles that aren’t natural.
Then my understanding of Global Warming prediction is flawed. I was under the impression that deserts, especially in the US, would expand, with markedly less rainfall. If this isn’t true then my whole arguement is built on, er, sand.
You are making predictions simply on the last million years (if I’m understanding properly). Are you saying that there has NEVER been long periods of relative environmental/geological stability (i.e. lasting millions of years)? That no desert has ever lasted so long…or any other environment? That there aren’t geologically stable places (where man lives) that don’t experience earth quakes and such?
The same way it happens in nature I suppose. Things are buried and compressed, then at a later date due to some geological or other process they are re-exposed as the overburden is erroded away. I don’t see why this couldn’t happen with a city or building the same way it does with, say, a sea bed, ancient river course, tree, dinosaur, a valley, etc.
This seems counter intuitive to me. After all we find things buried in the sands of egypt in pretty much the same state they were in when they were first put down. They even find (from time to time) people and other artifacts that were naturally buried in the sands (I remember reading about a chariot found buried in this way…made of wood of course) from time to time. IIRC the Sphinx was said to be buried (and re-buried) several times, perserving it from errosion (there are even theories that its much older than previously thought…perhaps as much as 10k years). I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t happen to an entire city or a single structure.
Even if you are right and it DID erode away eventually, seems to me that the same process that preserves natural features could be at work on an artificial one…and that the same erosion that reveals natural features from millions of years ago couldn’t reveal artificial ones (even if the structures that originally made them up are long gone).
Someone seeing the Nazca Lines from the air certainly can decern that they aren’t natural formation. Someone seeing an exposed hilltop that has eroded back to 2006 level (or exposed by a rare earth quake in the region or myriad other processes that expose such natural features to us today) showing regular lines, straight lines and regularly shaped mounds from the air would probabably draw the same conclusions.
All it would take is someone noticing something that looks odd from the air…a strange arrangement of mounds as you call them. Thats how WE find ancient cities after all (in some cases at least). And I’m proposing that by some fluke the same thing that preserve natural features could also preserve (and expose) artifical ones.
Er…are you claiming that more hominids existed 4 million years ago than humans AND their artifacts exist today? Over what period of time? In what concentrations? Were these nomadic hominids traveling widely in small groups…or concentrations of literally millions in small areas WITH a hell of a lot of artifacts about them?
Have no hominid artifacts been found from 1 million years ago? How about 500,000 years? Is this because hominids left less, were less concentrated and dispersed over wider areas in small groups, or is it because of the amount of time thats passed?
I’m no expert…but I’m not a complete idiot either. I DID take anthropology in college and even did some field work as a senior…so I’m aware that complete skeletons (or even partial skeletons) are vanishingly rare. Mostly you get fragments. There of course HAVE been completely intact skeletons from time to time (not hominid but other species…I recall several birds found in shale for instance). Hominids/humans, until fairly recently, weren’t very concentrated or numerous and didn’t really leave much for us to find…either skeletons or artifacts.
But I wasn’t really speaking to fossils of all the dead humans that would be laying about. I’m pretty sure that some of them would be preserved…but as you keep saying there is no digging allowed, and even if a fossilized human skeleton WAS exposed the aliens wouldn’t know it was more than some fossilized animal or other.
However, geologic features are sometimes captured in sediment and preserved…and I really see no reason why a city (even if only a small part of it) or other structure couldn’t be preserved in the same way.
Then I’m giving you the wrong impression I guess. My whole arguement boils down to a city being basically buried, compacted and the FORM preserved (like an ancient Tel as a series of mounds) and later uncovered such that from the air the artificial nature of the site is evident…at least enough for our incurious aliens to take a closer look.
Good point. Are you saying that there are no human artifacts today on top of glaciers? No weather stations or other buildings? How about some buddies and I getting a helicopter ride up onto a glacier just as this event that kills us all happens?
Why would it necessarily destroy a city? I have a building. It fills in with dirt that gets compacted. The building is made of steel, concrete and perhaps stone work. Over time layer upon layer of additional sediment continues to be deposited on top. The entire thing is then compressed and solidifies. Its then buried repeatedly under further layers of sediment. At some point a million years from now its exposed. Much of the original material is gone, but the impression still remains…and impression that, once exposed again could be seen from the air as potentially an artifical construction.
You are really taking this MUCH too seriously btw. I’m just mostly having fun here. And I admit I’m playing devils advocate as I doubt much would actually remain (except in some VERY protected spots…or if our aliens got off whatever constitutes their collective asses and dug a bit) after such an improbably long period of time. The million years kind of kills the topic IMHO…but you know, its fun to argue.
[my bolding]
Maybe you should do some research before spouting off? The Namib is the oldest desert in the world, having been arid or semi-arid since at least the begining of the Oligocene*. That’s ~23Ma. The Sahara, on the other hand, is only 2.5 Ma old - fits in with your 1Ma criterion, but trivial compared to the age of the Namib and even the Atacama (at 15 Ma). So I’d say structures in either of those areas would last a very long time indeed.
(wikipedia puts this at 80 Million years, from Nat.Geo.1992/01, but Oligocene is what I learnt in my Southern African geology courses for Benguela current origin)
Nobody is saying that a lot of shit won’t be fossilised. The problem is that you are arguing a lot of recognisably human stuff will be fossilised and revealed again in a from that immediately constitutes evidence of human existence. As I have pointed out it is the idea that it will present in a manner that is evidential with no excavation that is incredibly improbable.
And I’m pointing out all the reasons why that is so remote as to be impossible. You are basically suggesting that an entire city by somehow well constructed enough not to collapse in the thousands of years it will take to be buried. How could that even be possible.
Look. this was a nice typical volcanic cone around 2.5 million years ago. Almost all the cone has eroded in that time, and it was solid basalt. You are suggesting that somehow a city made of hollow building could survive? How is that even conceivable? As I said, I don’t think you appreciate just how long a million years is.
An entire basalt cone vanished at the timescale we are talking about. Can you even begin to explain the weird conjunction of events that might allow even one single building not to be knocked flat with 10, 000 years? What possible mechanisms will prevent fire, flood and weathering from simply eroding any building into dust within a million years?
There is some evidence that you can get that sort of climatic stability to limited extent with a supercontinent, but when the continents are dispersed as they are now the answer is no, you don’t get periods lasting millions of years without major climate change.
Parts of Australia are relatively stable because it sits in the middle of its own plate. Even there though taking of millions of years without a quake is fantasy. Maybe thousands of years. But such places are also flat precisely because they are geologically stable. That makes them extremely prone to flooding or waterlogging. It’s Hobson’s choice. Geologically stable areas are flat and so get inundated regularly enough to destroy any building, areas that aren’t flat are uneven because uplift and glaciers have roughened them up. But any area which floods, becomes boggy or has earthquakes is not a candidate for building survival.
How could that happen? A river or sea simply silts over, a dinosaur or tree gets buried. How can you silt over or bury an entire city? How can you silt over or bury a building and still allow it to retain its shape in any recognisable form? I have seen trees and bones being washed down rivers, I can’t see any plausible mechanism whereby a building or entire city can be swept down the river and be any more than scattered splinter by the time it reaches the delta. Can you explain what is holding the building together during this trip?
Do we? Can you give some examples? Things reasonably well preserved have been found buried in the clay of tells, or in caves or even buried in sandy loam. But can you name one archaeological find that was buried in sand of Egypt?
To give some idea of why I’m finding the claim extraordinary here is a picture of some statues buried a little over 1000 year in sand. As you can see they are heavily pitted and etched and eroded.
In what sense is the sphinx less eroded than a structure that was unburied?
Can you elaborate on what process could possibly preserve a city or a building for a million years? Are you talking about being rolled down a river an buried in the delta? Or are you suggesting that silt might start building up vertically, since siltation is the mechanism by which streams and oceans are preserved?
Once again though you seem to be suggesting that features that would allow someone who doesn’t already have evidence to identify human remains revealed in this way. How could that be done? Even with training and prior evidence it’s almost impossible to identify exposed remains without digging.
And how would those lines be preserved exactly? How did this city get buried in loco sans disturbance? By what plausible mechanism could that occur? How could you bury Dallas before fires, tress and general erosion obliterated those straight lines?
After 1000 years, sure. But we are talking about after a million years, and after the city has been buried. We never find ancient cities that way.
Can you find any evidence that any natural feature was ever exposed in a form which provided evidence for what it was without requiring any digging, and to people who had no reason prior evidence that such a thing had existed?
No, I am claiming that more hominids have existed in the pat 4 million years than exist at this moment. Not in any way a controversial claim.
It makes no difference. Fossilisation is about probabilities. If 1 in 1 billion get fossilised it doesn’t matter if that billion all lived at once or lived scattered over a million years.
Or are you trying to claim that animals that live in groups are more likely to be fossilised. In which case present evidence.
Do you honestly not see the difference between “hominid artefacts found” and “hominid artefacts found undamaged and sitting fully exposed and recognisable without any need for digging”?
It is because the chances of anything being conveniently fully exposed and recognisable without any need for digging at exactly the time that someone walks past is incredibly remote, a point that you seem to be having trouble accepting. Lots of artefacts have been preserved. Lots do not simply sit out fully exposed on cliff faces waiting for palaeontologists to see them
This has nothing to do with the rarity of skeletons. It concerns nothing but your repeated assertions that it is common to see recognisable material in the surface that requires no digging to whatsoever. Birds in shale do not simply lie on the ground surface in a recognisable state. They have to be dug out, and no digging is allowed. You always seem to want to ignore that point despite being well aware of it. I can understand that since you have no real argument with it inplay, but even so you have to play fair.
Even if complete skeletons were common they would not lie on the surface like in bad horror movies. They would reveal themselves as an inch of femur and a piece of skull, and before any more was revealed those bits will erode away. At any given time enough can not be seen without digging to constitute evidence of anything.
So explain how it could be preserved. What method do you think could preserve a city or even a single building intact?
How? How do you bury a city in a manner that wil preserve it for a million tears? You’ve seen what happens to granite statues after just a thousand years in sand. You surely can’t be suggesting an entire city swept down to the delta as most fossils are. So how can a city be basically buried?
The form of ancient tells was preserved precisely because they were occupied. The humans compacted the older layer under the new layer while retaining old property lines and streets. Do you really think that a sand dune will conveniently not roll over property boundaries? How is this even remotely possible? Can you name even one city that has been naturally buried whose form has been preserved?
Good grief, you must be doing this to irritate. You can’t really believe that something in a glacier will last a million years can you? And if you are I will give up right now.
How? Explain the physics of this to me. How do you compact the dirt without applying any outward pressure on the walls or downward pressure on the roof?
Half buried steel huh? You’ve just created a galvanic cell Please explain how you can half bury steel without it rusting away?
How does it solidify?
Where are these sediments coming form? How are they getting into the city?
I’m seeing a lot of handwaving here, sediments arrive somehow, they get compressed without applying any pressure on the structures somehow, they half bury material without allowing any decomposition somehow. But those things all seem to contradict the laws of physics, never mind reality.
I really can’t see any substance at all in your posts. It’s all just somehow this happens then somehow that happens by some remote chance. Yet you clearly have no concept of how these things actually work. I’m most amazed by your beliefs that glaciers last millions of years and that somehow you can compress sediment in building sufficiently to solidify it yet put no pressure on the floors, roof or walls of the structure.
So, we’re after a structure made of something hard-wearing like concrete, tall enough that it won’t get buried, in a desert which has been and is expected to be flat and arid for millions of years with no geological instability. Is concrete half a kilometre high and 2 kilometres wide in the Australian outback enough?
While I think in the long run you would have a definite winner there, the OP did specify that we all go tomorrow, so I don’t think currently unbuilt structures qualify.
Maybe you should? You seem to be having trouble understanding a couple of important points.
The first is that desert and semi-arid are not equivalent.
The second is that deserts other biomes can and do move in patches. Yes, parts of the Namib have been in existence for a long time that’s how unique desert species have managed to evolve but, and this is important, those patches haven’t been desert not continuously. The desert area drifts around the map as climates change. So although some parts of the Namib has been desert for millions of years no single part has been desert continuously.
Reference? Richards, L.E. and Young, A. 1983 Plants and soils. 3. Arid regions. Wiley and Sons.
“Few regions have been subjected to persistently arid conditions, the oldest being segments of the Australian western plateau where quiescent river systems have been dated to the mid-late Miocene and the Northern Sahel where the present degree of aridity has persisted since the Quaternary 2-2 ½ million years ago.”
I understand that this sort of thing can be confusing, with “age of desert” and “continous age” sounding similar but not being the same thing, but it really pays to be sure you know what you are talking about before accusing others of “spouting off”. There is a reason why both Australia and the Namib have equally highly adapted desert species despite the fact that Australian deserts as a whole are much younger than the Namib, and that is because the desert patches moved and the species moved with them. So although the Namib desert as a whole is 20 million years old you could not have stood on any specific spot for more than a million years or so and remained in desert.
Gee, I dunno. Will you believe some guy called Cecil Adams?
Not likely concrete. Tall concrete structures need reinforcing and reinforcing rusts, even in arid environments. And of course concrete is essentially limestone and exposed even in arid environments it will dissolve in normal rain. Even outback Australia has plenty of limestone caves to prove what water will do even there given a million years. You only have to look at the toll that rain had taken on concrete sculptures from thousand so years ago to get some idea of the prioblem.
Flat? Check.
Stable? Check.
Desert for millions of years? Not likely. That was actually a high rainfall region until a bit over a million years ago.
I’m having no trouble seeing how you just spout off facts without cites
I know this. I also know that “swamps and forests” are in no way, shape or form semi-arid biomes. And that’s what you said, “…deserts were forests or swamps”
I know this, too - but *you *were misleadingly implying that parts of the Namib and Atacama were “forests or swamps” in the last million years - they were not. This has got nothing to do with intermitent watercourses moving around, and everything to do with your blanket statements. The Namib Dune sea, while not as old as the Namib overall, has been unchanged for millions of years, because the Benguela Current has been there for those millions of years, and the current Namib is directly caused by the Benguela. The fact that the Dune Sea moves around in no way invalidates the existence of the Namib as an entity.
While the Namib may not always have had its current level of aridity (which is all your cite says), I’d like a cite for the bits of it that were swamps or forests in the last million years, please.
Quite a bit of activity since last night!
I think that people don’t realize that the OP :
1.) Didn’t ask if human reaims would be visible 1,000,000 years fro now. It asked how long they would be. I don’t know the answer, but I suggested (go back and read) that things like Mount Rushmore would be recognizable as works of intelligenmt hands from probably 100,000 years, and maybe 1,000,000. I don’t know how long the others would last, but suggest quite a long time, with things like th Manhattan foundations and the Pyramids getting into the 1,000,000 year range, too.
2,.) Recognizable as the work of intelligent hands doesn’t mean it will remain unscathed for that long. That’s asking a ridiculoyus thing from any human work left out in the open that long. Even Rushmore will erode abouit a foot in 10,000 years. But even if big chunks break off, it wil still be something obviously artificial. It’s just too damned big.
3.) Even if plants return to, saym, Easter Island in bulk, it will, I maintain, not swallow up the mostly-rock quarries completely. Ditto for other items I list.
4.) Even if we’re talking a million years, which is insanely long by human standards, it’s incredibly short in geological standards. You’re not going to see the wholesale reshaping of the landscape that takes place over tens and hundreds of millions of years, and which will definitely overwhelm human efforts.
Flint arrowheads get buried by vegetation and then exposed by erosion on a regular basis. I see no reason why this process (both with arrowheads and other similarly hard human artifacts) couldn’t continue for a million years.
I imagine that a million years from now you could paddle a river and see human artifacts being eroded out of the riverbank.
What happens to plastics over a million years? I would think that a GI Joe plopping out of a river bank or emerging from the desert sand, or lying partially encased in rock might be a giveaway.
I agree, Cal - a million years isn’t long enough to erase the pervasive prescence of humanity on the face of the earth. 10s of Ma, sure, but 1Ma? Nope.
spoke-, I remember leGuin’s Always Coming Home mentioning parts of the ocean floor being covered with plastic concretions in its far-future California setting, with them often washing up on beaches. (thousands of years, not 10s or 100s of thousands, but still…)
For that matter, we’ve got plenty of graveyards full of sealed metal caskets. Surely many human remains together with artifacts will survive long after the species itself is gone. If an an alien paleontologist dug up a skull with metal fillings in its teeth, he’s not going to miss the fact that this must have been a member of a fairly advanced civilization. After all, we have fossils of animals that lived tens and hundreds of millions of years ago.
Plastics degrade pretty quickly geologically speaking, spoke-, but I think you’re onto something with the erosion bit. While the vast majority of buildings will be buried, there are some areas which will largely only be eroded, and some buildings there which are designed to withstand pretty extreme events. I’m thinking large scale structures built into mountains, like rail tunnels or nuclear bunkers: erosion will just reveal more of them, and while they may well be sheared and crushed beyond use, I suspect some of them somewhere would still present something noticeably ‘weird’ at the surface for a million years or more (which is still not enough geological time for all the mountains on Earth to be literally turned over and churned about.)
