Works of Man that Would Last Millions of Years

It’s already starting to flood due to global warming destroying the permafrost that was supposed to keep it viable.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

What do you think made the intelligent Raccoons in the first place? :wink:

In terms of specific structures, only those that survive by happenstance. But there will be a lot that survives by happenstance - we have a lot of shit, all of it spread out everywhere. If we can find raindrops from 2.7 billion years ago, surely one of the more than
1,015,000,000 automobiles currently in existence will survive 10 million years.

In terms of “can they find evidence of an advanced civilization from 10 million years ago”, the answer is unequivocally “yes” - the geological records of cities will remain. Go to where, say, Dallas is today, dig deep enough, and raccoon archeologists and geologists will undoubtedly find bizarre discontinuities in the geologic record - “what are all those patches where the limestone has a 1 inch stratum of glassy/metallic/sandy materials?” “Why do we find fossils of this one animal all over the freaking world, and, speaking of them, what about the great die-off that our paleontologists say occurred at the same time these fossils came into abundance?” “Why are we compelled to eat our trash and live in the attics of our homes - what’s up with that?”

So, imho, the answer is undoubtably “yes”. But as to which work, the answer is “who knows?”

Stainless steel and bronze should survive quite nicely. Same story with glass.

I wonder what those raccoons would make of THAT?

The Earth After Us — a wonderful book by a geologist that answers this question. Basically, plate tectonics (subduction) and the erosion cycle will eliminate most everything structural (and machines, etc.), except for a handful of places which, by chance, are buried at major river deltas (e.g., New Orleans) and subsequently preserved in sedimentary rocks.

The other thing a future interplanetary geologist might notice is the anthropocene mass species extinction — and rise in CO2 levels — but they might not have enough evidence to attribute this to the actions of a particular bipedal primate.

Subduction isn’t going to do jack to the major stable cratons that have been in existence for billions of years.

If we can find 100 million year-old dinosaur bones in a bunch of places, I don’t think it’d be too hard for someone to find roads, buildings, etc. 100 million years from now. Esp. since they are already “fossilized”.

True — that’s where erosion cycles come in. Read the book — you’ll love it!

And if the future raccoons have the same level of technology that we have today to find small differences in element and isotope concentrations, human civilization will be blindingly obvious. We can detect the chemical signature of an asteroid that hit 65 million years ago; that had far less impact overall than human civilization has had. We can look at ice cores and (broadly) track historical events thousands of years ago by the amount of airborne lead or other metals deposited on the ice thousands of miles from the source.
When the raccoons 20 million years from now start doing chemical/isotope analysis of rocks, they’ll see a huge giant blinking shouting and jumping up and down discontinuity at 20 mya.
That’s in addition to all the physical discontinuities, many of which will still be obvious 20 million years from now.

I have on my desk a 2"x2"x2" cube of Tungsten. It’s surprisingly dense, very hard, amazingly heat resistant, and doesn’t corrode. I see no reason why it wouldn’t last a long, long time.

A lot can happen in ten million years. We could get tagged by an asteroid the size of a mountain, and that would reconfigure the earth’s surface enough to obliterate anything. As mentioned, one or even several ice ages could ensue. It just all depends on luck, really.

The Statue of Liberty will still be there, right?

How about quarried natural stone objects, like kitchen counter tops? A lot of them are made from granite, and I would presume if buried in a stable location would retain their shape. I can imagine a future archaeologist wondering why there are all these L-shaped and rectangular stone plates, some with a square cut-out, spaced a few yards apart, in groups in certain areas.

Or, under the same assumption, pool table tops made from slate?

Ok so, Mankind, at our height of insanity, sets off a coordinated sequence of neutron detonations.
being terribly insane, we have designed them to only kill humans.

And over the next say 3 to 12 million years, raccoons evolve to fill the gap
and develop big brains etc and become the new dominant intellectual species.
What do i think they would find of man?

Well, i will assume at least one period of extended glaciation has probably occurred
which does a wonderful job and sanding the environment clean of surface things.
I doubt mankind, even unleashing every carbon he could find, could do more than postpone leaving the interglacial for a very small amount of time geologically.

I also doubt in 12 million years the continents will have moved appreciably enough
to alter the present systems of weather, ocean and heat flow etc, so the ice age continues.

in 3 to 12 million years, concrete un maintained has crumbled and turned to gravel
mortar has crumbled to dust, brick has fallen and disintegrated, iron has rusted to dust, even many other corrosion resistant metals have oxidized and broken down.
Glaciers have ground and scrubbed a lot of it.

Time and weather could even scrub things like Mt Rushmore, but perhaps tunnels and cave like things could survive intact, barring things like major tectonic activity

But still, glaciers only come so far down, so not all will be scrubbed, there will be things buried should these raccoons develop the technology and the interest in finding them, some metals, glass, some ceramics, plastics i doubt would last that long, they tend to break down on their own especially if exposed to sun.

Books would sadly be lost, and i dont imagine electronic forms of data storage would survive the elements for millions of years.

I think the raccoons could learn we were here, but they might not ever learn who we were, we have trouble with that figuring out people who have only been gone for 1000’s of years.

It might be very much like us trying to figure out the most ancient of humans

I read a book about 10 years ago called *A world without us *. According to the book the most lasting work of mankind will be Mt Rushmore at just over 7 million years.

“Last,” maybe. But end up in a place where geologist 100 million years in the future will find it? That turns out to be very unlikely. I was surprised about this myself. As I said, read the book!

I think one surprising thing to such future scientists would be the sudden global mixing of the fossil record. Just like we can see a thin K-T boundary world-wide that separates fossil strata between very different levels of species count, the relatively thin slice representing the past 10,000 years or so of world history would not just show the extinction of many species - which could be natural, and correlated to evidence of significant climate change at the same time - but a weird and simultaneous translocation of species.

European Rabbits teleport to Australia! Asian Carp in the Mississippi! Macaque monkeys and Burmese pythons in Florida! Domesticated strains of cattle and chicken and swine! Even tiny things like ticks, mosquitoes, etc., would be seen to pop up on the other side of the world.

They’d have to conclude it was related to intercontinental trade on the part of a species willing and able to travel world-wide on a regular basis while carrying cargo, or that some outbreak of regular cyclones bearing live creatures great distances sprang up.

Couple that with the remains we’d leave behind from graveyards and the like, and they could probably tie it to our population explosion in the same time period.

There will be lasting planet-wide fossil evidence of the ongoing Sixth (Anthropocene) Extinction event coupled with a spike of various chemical and radiological markers in the layers and the fossils of the time that would be inconsistent with any known “natural” source and as noted tightly correlated with a spike of fossils of one hominid species.

Agreed with some posts above. It would be very obvious to any culture that is at our level of technology and scientific curiosity or greater that something else was here and gone long before even without any cultural artifacts.

Regarding satellites, the Kessler Syndrome is arguably underway now.

Deliberately placing something to find on the moon ought to be safe for a couple of million years.
Say, a magnetic anomaly in the Tycho crater. :wink: