Imagine if humanity disappeared today. In 50 million years, all our skyscrapers would have crumbled to dust, and all our wonderfully complex machinery would have rusted to a powder and blown away in the wind. All that would be left would be some dusty bones.
Any future civilizations that found us would just classify us as another one of the apes.
Any thoughts on this?
(For example, could there have been an intelligent species on earth before humans came along?)
For the record, I did not come up with this idea. I can’t remember whose theory it was.
Nah. Even after fifty million years, there’d still be some artifacts left over from our time on Earth. It’s all well and good to throw around handy-dandy literary phrases like “our skyscrapers crumble to dust”, but how long does it take, say, a steel I-beam to decompose? Or hardened nuclear fallout shelters, or places like NORAD? Or what about fighter jets and aircraft carriers? Heck, how about the things we left on the Moon, for crying out loud?
Things like that don’t just disappear, even after fifty million years.
There have been several books written about this. In one, everything is fine and dandy until some archaeologists decide to dig deeper than ever before… and find an ancient radio.
Any glass bottle filled solid with dirt will last almost indefinately.
Ceramics will last for uncounted ages when buried, especially if glazed.
Bones fossilize under the right conditions, what would happen to artifacts under the same condtions? After all, petrified wood is only fossilized wood; therefore, a wooden chair can fossilize.
You could wait a billion years, and i bet the old fashioned McDonald’s styrofoam containers would still be in mint condition. Nothing short of the sun going nova is going to rid us of those suckers.
There are limestone caves near Carthage, MO. that are used for storage of frozen foods mainly, but there are also parts used for other types of long term storage. A doper once told about his job being underground in caves, somewhere like PA. There are more such underground facilities than we will ever be told about and surely some of these will survive. Of course, first thing the new intelligent beings will be rather ignorant and will just loot, rather than preserve what they find.
Newspapers from the 30s have been found in landfills in almost perfect condition. 50 million years is a bit different from 70, but I think it would be great if a future civilization or alien exploreers came to Earth and saw how we destroyed our environment and shat where we ate, and actually learned from our mistakes
I always thought it would be neat if some time during the Jurassic some dinosaurs took a quick 5 million year path to intelligence. Now this is 2 to 3 times further back then 50 million years ago. So I’ve done some amateur thought experiments on this.
Now in that time wind and water can erode some pretty durable stuff. Even stuff like platic, which doesn’t degrade will need some luck to stay around that long. Maybe by being lucky enough to be buried in a landfill that has not been weathered through. I mean stuff like plastic bags and glass are very attractive to animals. But look how many dinosaur bones we have? And they’re degradable. There would be evidence aplenty as long as we looked in the right places, and we have.
Now let’s say they never got out of the iron age. Kinda like us getting wiped out in 1300. A lot less stuff to find. Making it much harder to see their intelligence. But still we should be able to find some things. Even a sword left to rust in the dirt would still exist as a rust stain in 100 million years is it was covered ok.
As for us I think we’re pretty safe. I mean those moon landers ain’t going anywhere for a very, very long time. They’ll still be there for the finding in … let’s say 3 billion years. So some future species (assuming we’re wiped out) finds them, uses Occam’s razor and says, they must be earthlings from around the 4.5th billion year.
You know, if we really want to make a lasting mark we can carve “KILROY WAS HERE” in the moon with a great big laser or strategically aimed nukes. Now that will be immediately visible to any intelligent creatures that come along as the act of an intelligent species. Boy I’d love to hear the debate about what those ‘strange moon carvings’ meant. A message from God? The meaning of life?
