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Wouldn't you find human artifacts all over the place even 60 million years from now? We have fossils much older than that, so wouldn't many many objects like go
by jules 9y ago
Wouldn't you find human artifacts all over the place even 60 million years from now? We have fossils much older than that, so wouldn't many many objects like gold wedding rings be around 60 million years from now?
- dorchadas 9y agoI don't think any of that would necessarily be indicative of civilization, though.
- i_am_nomad 9y agoYes, absolutely. The article is borderline clickbait. If there were a technological civilization on Earth in the past, we would have detected it by now. Concentrations of radioisotopes, industrial ceramics, signs of large excavations in the fossil record... those are just a few.
- coldtea 9y agoThose are just few that presuppose it would have to be an industrial civilization at our level ("concentrations of radioisotopes")...
- thaumaturgy 9y agoRadioisotopes decay; which isotopes are you thinking of that have half-lives of millions of years and would be found in detectable quantities? (I was going to raise the same point, thinking of low-background steel and the effects of nuclear testing on our atmosphere, but after some more reading it appears that most of those isotopes decay over shorter periods or weren't sufficiently elevated to be discernible from the background, if it were being examined in the far future.)
- garmaine 8y agoRadioisotopes decay, but it is the ratio that is important. We know, for example, that a natural (we assume?) nuclear reactor occurred in Africa 1.8bn years ago due the different isotopic concentration of uranium deposits from that era.
- acobster 9y agoWondering about this as well. INAG, but I think fossils are extremely rare relative to population. And things like wedding rings will have disintegrated after just a few million years. But still, you'd think some of them would survive under conditions similar to those that preserved dino skeletons?
- peatmoss 9y agoThat was my thinking as well, though apparently geologists are pretty pessimistic about both the survival of human artifacts and the probability that someone would find the rare oddballs that did survive. Plus, it’s possible that some hypothetical dino civilization mastered bio-degradable materials early on before taking to the stars ;-)
- y4mi 9y agoand settled the ...delta quadrant it was iirc? :)
- rainbowmverse 9y agoJust a misread of the data by a well-intentioned scientist and some meddling humans.
- nkrisc 9y agoAnd now they're back, to reclaim what was once theirs. Invasion of the Space Dinos!
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y agoThat is more-or-less the plot of more than one episode of Dr Who: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship_(TV_story) http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship_(TV_st... http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Silurian http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Silurian
- 9y ago
- thaumaturgy 9y agoThis is kind of the "why aren't we all buried in bones" question that YECs raise. Very little makes it into the fossil record -- fossilization is sensitive to a lot of different conditions, and then someone's gotta find it later besides. Going past a few tens of thousands of years, fossils start to either be of very large things, or of very large communities of small things. I'd be surprised if any future scientists could find even a single piece of modern jewelry a million years from now.
- ralfd 9y agoWhy though? At least gold is very nonreactive, isn't it?
- SolarNet 9y agoIt's also extremely soft (for a metal). Fossils survive in part because they are reactive and become harder in certain specific conditions.
- losteric 9y agoIt's also very soft
- thaumaturgy 9y agoSure, but that doesn't make it immune to the passage of time. Take Mesoamerican gold for instance: only about a thousand years have passed since much of it was made by humans, but it's still considered a rare and valuable archaeological find. (Granted, it was produced in smaller quantities than today.) Gold is melted by fires; gets scattered and buried by a million years of bioaccumulation; seas move, rivers appear or disappear, continents drift a little, climate changes, glaciers come and go and further destroy evidence. Google is feeding me a lot of really dumb stuff at the moment when trying to come up with numbers, but I'd guesstimate that most traces of our civilization would be buried a hundred feet below the surface after a million years' time. That makes it pretty difficult to find small things.
- sgt101 9y ago
- bufferoverflow 9y agoGold is soft (and heavy), it will be ground to flakes or completely misshapen over millions of years. Erosion and tectonic keep everything moving.
- cc439 9y agoGold is soft but Amber is softer and we've found intact insects encased in that substance which are 230 million years old*. You wouldn't be likely to find a complete car or something in 60 million years but there will certainly be plenty of artifacts which were preserved through sheer luck. I wouldn't be surprised if most small manifactured objects would survive in archeologically recognizable form if they were accidentally lost in an anoxic environment. For example, imagine you lose your iPhone when out in a swamp. Drop a phone in something as thick as Pluff Mud, which is abiotic below the surface, and you've basically encased it in the exact kind of environment which has produces the best fossils we've yet found.
- perl4ever 9y agoMy thought is how likely is it that crustal movements would bury things too deep on that timescale? If stuff stayed near the surface, that's one thing, but would it? We also see things trapped in glaciers, but if the timescale is large enough for all the glaciers to have melted...