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Would our roads would survive? Never before has humanity so dramatically changed the planet in such a fundamental way. Roads from older civilizations like the R
by djsumdog 9y ago
Would our roads would survive? Never before has humanity so dramatically changed the planet in such a fundamental way. Roads from older civilizations like the Romans and the Sumerians would probably erode, but our modern asphalt is pretty insane when you think about it.
If left on the surface for millions of years, yes they would fade to nothing. But in many locations, they'd get buried in layers of swamp and sediment. Even if they shifted around via plate tectonics, many of our modern highway junctions are quite massive. With 7 billion people and the insane amount of infrastructure on our planet, surely some of that would survive if a future civilization started digging a few hundred meters through bedrock.
How long before roads churned under the pressure of the earth into indistinguishable small pieces of rock? Would they be gone in less than a million years?
As a side note, this makes me think about all the world that goes into nuclear waste burial sites, and how we're currently trying to create warnings that may need to outlast our civilization by millions of years.
- greedo 9y agoAnything made of concrete would probably be gone in less than 1K years. Even granite slabs don't last very long...
- credit_guy 9y agoWhat about the Colosseum? The Pyramids are also in quite good condition. And the ruins of Gobekli Tepe are more than 10k years old.
- Udik 9y agoIt seems to me that commenters in this thread keep taking the durability of materials under average conditions as a measure of what traces would be left after millions of years. By the same standards, we shouldn't have a single bone or trace that anything that lived more than a few hundred years ago. However, when there is a very large amounts of specimens, some happen to be preserved in exceptional conditions or undergo transformations which let them survive or leave traces, direct or indirect, for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.
- yason 9y agoHow long before roads churned under the pressure of the earth into indistinguishable small pieces of rock? Would they be gone in less than a million years? When built on top of freezing and thawing soil the current roads and asphalt start crumbling away already in few years only.