One atom? There is nearly 300 tons of plutonium stockpiled in nuclear warheads across the Earth. It hasn’t disappeared from the planet.
You must have missed the first three words in my post…
All traces of Ozymandius’ empire, aside from a broken statue.
There are currently about 7,000 languages. The website below estimates that if languages have existed for about 100,000 years, there have been about 200,000 of them. So almost 200,000 languages have completely disappeared:
Heh. We had a wonderful microwave from 1984 until last year, kept alive with hoarded parts provided by a local 90 year old electrician. Then he died and and his hoard got dumped. Now we’ve a cheap plastic replacement. Ugh.
A single, shared continent.
Nearly everything that anyone has ever done in history is gone without trace and we’ll never be able to reconstruct it.
The glow of extreme heat from a young, fresh forming planet.
The Moon (assuming the theory that we split into two, to create it and the Earth is correct).
The sound of music, prior to the invention of musical notation, has for the most part been lost. We know they played certain instruments, but not how. We know they sang, and what the words were, but we don’t have the melodies. We have no idea what Viking-age music actually sounded like.
Similarly, medieval-or-earlier bread recipes. We can probably guess what they made it out of, but because it’s so basic, nobody bothered to write the recipes down.
We have quite a bit of stuff from the reign of Ramses II, including the Ramesseum .
Cool poem, however.
We could reconstruct it, are you kidding? We have advanced construction equipment, cranes, seasoned architects by the boatloads.
The French government is ordering for Notre Dame to be rebuilt exactly how it was before the fire. They were going to modernize it but now they have decided against that.
Something that has disappeared from planet Earth is the javelin the astronauts left on the moon haha.
Okay, so let’s count space probes and such that won’t crash-land on Terrestrial reentry. Bye-bye, Mariners and Voyagers and Mars landers. So long, Gene Shoemaker’s ashes. Sayonara to the anti-gravity sled that escaped the Area 61* lab. And those pre-tape TV broadcasts radiating outward - they’re gone, gone, gone.
- That’s the secret one.
a) You can’t reconstruct what you don’t know anything about. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example, are lost to history and we wouldn’t know where to start.
b) I was thinking more in terms of things like conversations that people had, furniture that people made, stories they told, etc.
nm
@ Sage Rat, That could be a myth. There’s no way to prove that it was real.
Based on the description if it actually existed we could build something multiple times more expansive and detailed with so much experience in Botanical gardens alone.
Do serious historians have doubts about the historical existence of the Seven Wonders? I mean, we may never know exactly how tall the Colossus of Rhodes was, etc.; but the existence of all 7 is considered factual, right?
No, only the Hanging gardens. Some aspects of the Colossus of Rhodes are doubtful, it likely didnt spread legs over the harbor entrance for instance. But what some think is the base is still there, and there are remnants of most of them- except the gardens.
Colossus of Rhodes: no one knows exactly how tall or where it was, but the ruins were a tourist item for over 800 years.
Lighthouse of Alexandria:archaeologists discovered some remains of the lighthouse on the floor of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor in 1994.
Mausoleum at Halicarnassus: ruins are still there, they have been excavated.
Statue of Zeus at Olympia : No ruins left but it was a major tourist attraction for nearly 1000 years.
Temple of Artemis:foundations and fragments remain at the site.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon:
The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders for which the location has not been definitively established.[6] There are no extant Babylonian texts that mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon.[7][8] Three theories have been suggested to account for this. One: that they were purely mythical, and the descriptions found in ancient Greek and Roman writings (including those of Strabo, Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius Rufus) represented a romantic ideal of an eastern garden.[9] Two: that they existed in Babylon, but were completely destroyed sometime around the first century AD.[10][4] Three: that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that the Assyrian King Sennacherib (704–681 BC) built in his capital city of Nineveh on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.[11][1]
None of the sources that describe them were first hand, they all referred to others.
You are of course correct, and I did check, but a quick perusal shows that there are no known current mini-moons. The last confirmed mini-moon was 2006 RH120 which escaped 13 months after its discovery.
There may very well be undiscovered mini-moons circling around the Earth, but none of them will have been in a long-term relationship with the Earth. They’d just be fly-by swingers having a fling.
Depends on how “mini” you want to get. Our old friend the Bad Astronomer recently had an article about a fireball seen by an Australian network in 2016. Based on the tracking it seems to have been in Earth orbit.
Along these lines, the methods castrati used to sing. Apparently it is different than modern endocrine castrato use. They use countertenor techniques but that is not the same as classic castrato techniques such as Farinelli used.
Indigenous Tasmanians. Moses’ conch. Shakers will be gone soon. The Library of Alexandria. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway. Our former homes that burnt down (well after we left). My autograph book.
Right, most of the temporary moons are going to be really small. Like sub-10 meters, and the smaller they are, the more common. So maybe 10 times as many sub-1 meter as 1 to 10 meters. (At some point they’ll probably be considered too small to count as a moon, but no one’s put an official number on that size yet.) At any rate, they’ll be in orbits where they spend most of the time further away than the moon. With the combination of small size and large distance, they’re really hard to find. So it’s not very surprising they’ve only found a couple so far.