They will wonder why our entire civilisation was based around plastic bags.
If we are talking millions of years it will become more and more unlikely that there will be anything left to find. In those timespans new geological formations happen.
Look at fossils as example. Yes, we have quite a lot of them but they stretch over a couple hundred million years, so imagen the things we don’t know about these periods. Now consider that modern humanity has been around for about 12 k years and the chances of researchers finding remains of our infrastructure in many million years by chance become tiny, just like the layers of sediment containing our remains.
What’s imho a lot more plausible is, that future researchers might find traces of our lasting impact on the atmosphere aka climate change in Arctic ice and wonder what caused it, prompting them to dig around in geological formations from our period which then might lead to some discovery.
Look at fossils as example. Yes, we have quite a lot of them but they stretch over a couple hundred million years, so imagen the things we don’t know about these periods
I get your point. But then again look at how many fossiles there still are. And those are all biologically, easily degraded. We’ve build quite sturdy things and even if only a tiny fraction survives there should be plenty for future archeologist to figure out that there was some civilisation at work.
With the extend that humans have changed the planet, we should leave a very obvious geological marker. Like suddenly there is plastic in the sediment layers …
But then again look at how many fossiles there still are. And those are all biologically, easily degraded.
You got that one the wrong way around. These fossiles are still here because of the special environmental circumstances in which they formed. Most biological matter decomposes without a trace.
Like suddenly there is plastic in the sediment layers …
If we were to go extinct today, these layers would be incredible thin. 12 k years of human history is a blink of an eye in terms of geological timeframes and for most of that we didn’t produce long lasting materials.
The crust has a few tectonically stable regions that have never slid into the mantle. This is where we’ve found rocks that date all the way back to 2-3 billion-ish years. We call them geologic shields.
Our current activities would leave chemical markers in these regions that would be detectable for a very, very long time, and could come from no known natural process.
Otherwise you’re right, everything else eventually slides into the mantle and gets turned back into magma over a long enough timeframe.
To be fair, the effect of stuff being cycled back into the mantle doesn’t destroy every human artifact regardless, given that some of our constructs aren’t even on earth. Though I’m not sure that the odds of anyone actually finding one of our space probes is that high, the solar system is a big place after all.
Nokia 3310
It’d still be charged
That, and my old gameboy
I think GB really only had about 4 hours of battery life, idk how long it can go turned off but it’s probably greatly dwarfed by some modern phones.
Depends on the sort of batteries you use. Modern AA batteries are a lot more efficient than they were in 1989.
Maybe saphire phone screens ?
Yeah maybe a few liars.
Ironically, our best bet is probably our space junk. Leave as much of our stuff in space and on the moon as possible.
Most stuff in space would lose orbit pretty soon and fall in the Earth’s atmosphere, or into the sun (for James Webb)
The moon hasn’t yet.
But it will eventually. It just happens to be a large enough mass in a stable-ish orbit to last a long time. The same isn’t true of most of our space junk.
The moon is moving away from earth at a rate of about 1 inch per year. If the sun didn’t expand and consume us first, this would likely continue for the next 50 billion years, putting the moon at more than 3x it’s currentndistwncenf om earth.
There would be signs, but I don’t think there is any guarantee that a new intelligent life form would care to look for such signs, or that they’d have the type of intelligence that would be able to interpret the signs of our existence and conclude that we had existed in their distant past.
At best, our existence would be one of several theories explaining abnormalities about the Earth that future intellectuals would argue about.
We were a … something? That will be completely irrelevant for whoever comes next.
The nuclear waste will be radioactive for thousands of years, it will probably be radioactive longer than our current recorded history as a whole. Think about that, ever since humans started recording our history, our nuclear waste will be radioactive longer than that.
This place is not a place of honor.
I have really appreciated your thoughts on this question. There are many different ways that we can think about this, and I appreciate every one of the ways that you have all espoused. Bravo! Thanks for answering my rather generic question.
The pyramids.
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I’d guess that even in the higher orbits the manmade materials will eventually fall down or spin away over the span of a few hundred thousand years. Even if it is currently in a perfect locked orbit, there will be some amount of mass loss over time that will alter the orbit. But I’m no physicist, so i easily could be wrong
Idk about mass loss, but space is full of small rocks and dust moving at high speeds. Impacts from those might not make a big difference on the human timescale, but a longer one, it would absolutely cause a shift in orbital momentum.
Almost certainly, depending on the time scale. Physical constructs will eventually break down, but the impact on the environment in total will likely be able to be deduced for millions of years.
For example, we already have a good record of the five previous mass extinction events, and can tie them directly to geological causes. On our current trajectory, a sixth wouldn’t necessarily tie well to any other factors other than the activity of a dominant species. This is one of many factors in the proposed geological epoch of the anthropocene.
You think plastic lasts millions of years?
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I would guess that things like massive landfill dumps would be almost impossible to wipe all trace of. There’s no natural process that can collect that huge number of different chemical elements in such high amounts into a single location. So even if literally everything manmade has broken down to its consistent elements, the presence of a mile-wide radius plot of earth containing every solid element in the chart would be a clear indicator that an advanced civilization must have been there.
