Yeah, I found that part strange as well…though they CLAIMED it was SETI that determined that (would love to see an actual quote since AFAIK SETI is STILL out there looking for signals…which would be moot if they actually thought it wouldn’t work).
I also thought some of their time scales were off a bit. They were saying that (some unspecified number of cities) would be pretty much completely covered/destroyed without much of a trace within a century or so. But when they showed whatever city that was in the Soviet Union next to Chernobyl after 20 years it still looked pretty much intact to me. I’ve seen buildings that have been neglected for a couple of centuries or so (there is a fort in Maryland I remember that was pretty much abandoned after the Civil War for instance that I recall) that were still recognizably buildings. And this doesn’t even get into buildings in cities in the South West. There are abandoned towns in Nevada that are recognizable despite being a century or so abandoned.
Some Googling appears to indicate that most of the nasty items have half-lives under 1000 years; in a million years or so not much of these will remain.
I don’t know if anyone mentioned this but the hiustory channel just did a special called “Life After People” and almost all traces of humanity are gone in 10,000 years. The pyramids, Hoover dam, the great wall, mount Rushmore and thats about it.
The most depressing part for me was that all human knowledge and artistry would disappear very quickly. Books moldering, paintings fading, statues crumbling. Even items that have been stored on computer storage devices wouldn’t last long. We need to get to work on chiseling the complete works of Shakespeare onto a piece of granite and then burying it. Then again, according to one of the greatest novels ever written our structures and knowledge will still be around 1000 years later.
I saw that part, but again I have to disagree with some of it. I know Iron Mountain stores a lot of data in underground facilities. I’ve actually been inside. Not all of them are controlled by electrical systems…and most of the facility is in a VERY geological stable and dry area. Some of that stuff could last for quite a long time in a dark, low humidity and stable area. Like they said on the show, the Dead Sea Scrolls lasted for thousands of years…and they were just scrolls sealed in clay pots and buried in the desert.
For that matter there are all kinds of libraries and such scattered throughout the South West. The library in Las Vegas is unlikely to be over grown with trees and such for instance.
Commander Pthfx and I would like to point out that technetium-99m is a synthetic element that is used in medicine, and its daughter, technetium-99, has a half-life of 212,000 years.
I keep coming back to erosion. A diverted stream exposed the early hominid fossils at Olduvai Gorge:
That same sort of process will continue after we are gone, but a million years hence, erosion will be exposing such things as fossilized ceramics and G.I. Joe action figures.
For a fictional take on the subject, tryEvolution by Stephen Baxter. It follows human evolution from the days of the earliest mammals, to our post-human descendents millions of years after our civilization has passed away. Yes, it drags in spots, as any novel about such a broad subject would, and I certainly didn’t agree with all of his speculations, but it’s still a fascinating read.
Agreed. Given that evidence of life from 1M years ago is visible (albeit not exactly common) without digging today, it seems to me almost certain that the same will be true 1M years from now.
I saw the show, and I don’t believe it. For example, the Empire State Building rests on bedrock. As long as its stone face stays on, the steel skeleton will stay intaqct. It will probably last several thousand years.
I don’t believe that you could take the example of New York and project that to every city on earth. There will be cities that are buried in sand, cities drown in lakes or seas, buried in mud. There are human structures that aren’t made out of structural steel today but made out of stone…and there are stone monuments as well. There are vast structures under ground…and vast stores of human data and other things stored in this manner. SOMETHING will survive somewhere.
I also don’t believe that even New York will be completely gone in a couple of centuries. That seems very unlikely regardless of how quickly nature begins to reclaim things. Just looking at that city in the Soviet Union that was abandoned 20 years ago one could project that it would take a couple of centuries at least to just knock down the buildings (which after those 20 years still seemed pretty solid to me), let alone things like that soccer stadium which looked to me to be good for a couple extra centuries right there.
One such story/novel/article that I read said, of all our human accomplishments, that the moon mission artifacts would last the longest (as would the various interstellar probes we’ve launched), subject only to micrometeorite pitting.
