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Ceramics should last a very long time if they are buried. Ceramic toilets and stoneware dishes are like stone. If buried in sand or silt that collected over tim

Ceramics should last a very long time if they are buried. Ceramic toilets and stoneware dishes are like stone. If buried in sand or silt that collected over time they would be like other fossils. They might get crushed or broken, but I don't think they'd dissolve or corrode.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Yes we have fossils of many of the most delicate creatures that have ever lived, it seems impossible to believe that nothing of all the durable items we have created would remain or be fossilized. It’s a cool thought experiment wondering if we aren’t the first but it seems completely impossible. I’m afraid our generation will be known as “The Plastic Generation” from our layer in the sediment.
- garmaine 7y ago
  Nah, molds are already evolving to eat plastic in landfills. The fact that until now life hasn’t adapted to plastic as a good source indicates that no prior civilization had developed plastics before, or else it’d already be biodegradable.
  - ByThyGrace 7y ago
    But plastics don't occur spontaneously in nature, do they? So why would any species of plastic eating life form survive until our days after running out of all the available early plastic?
    - erulabs 7y ago
      Now that's an interesting thought - look at biological adaptations in the ancient ancestors of existing animals. If a 40 million year old extinct insect appears to be able to process plastics, that's a pretty good indication that _its_ ancient ancestors had a diet of plastics. Biology might just be the "last artifact". I suppose that's not terribly useful when looking at mars though :P
      - samstave 7y ago
        I like the idea that we are the biologic boot loader for AI, as Musk put it. Imagine that biologic creatures evolve over time long enough to develop, birth, and disperse AI out into the greater universe - and collapses after doing so. it takes a very long time for another civilization to evolve to the point that it spawns another AI form into the universe, and all remnants of the prior are gone. Gah - I just mean I enjoyed the thought experiment of his statement. If you are not aware, Elon said this on his appearance on Joe Rogan.
        Izkata 7y ago
        A universe of what we perceive as AI, reminds me of the short story They're Made out of Meat [0] (and a version on youtube [1]). [0] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
        PavlovsCat 7y ago
        "AI" is really just a wishy-washy way of offloading the responsibilities of leading a decent life today to some magic future. There is no reason AI will be "better "on any axis except scale and speed. So, think the Holocaust times a gazillion, in one microsecond, but don't think Bob Ross or Fred Rogers, because even if you could just make that "more powerful" (you can't, not in the same way you can crank up destruction and insanity), that's not even on the menu, there's no money in that. And hey, if AI is so great, and can spread it into all sorts of areas that are inhospitable to carbon-based life, what's the rush with getting rid of carbon-based life? Why does it have to be the extinction of humans and the destruction of spontaneity? Have you entertained the possibility that this outlook might say more about you than the state of things? > [Hobbes] foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - garmaine 7y ago
      Generally speaking organisms of today retain the adaptations of their ancestors, at least to a measurable degree. Whatever organism that ate plastics back then is unlikely to have gone extinct but rather gone back to whatever it was eating before, while retaining the plastic metabolism. Within the span of hundreds of thousands or millions of years (e.g. when a prior evolved primate would have had their technological period) those adaptations would probably remain intact and their descendants would be munching away on plastic today. If we suppose that the plastic culture existed further back than that, then there might not be organisms with intact metabolisms, but nevertheless there'd be some residual proteins that had an enzymatic decaying effect even if the organism didn't make good use of it. The fact that plastics have shown no deterioration at all for extended periods of time seems to indicate that nothing which survives today in contact with plastic has any lineage back to organisms which once consumed plastic in the past.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- weare138 7y ago
  > I’m afraid our generation will be known as “The Plastic Generation” from our layer in the sediment Maybe that's where we're getting all that oil from, prehistoric Silurian landfills.
  - aww_dang 7y ago
    "A Plasticene Lexicon" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X19308707 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X1...
- c048 7y ago
  "I'm afraid we'll be called the plastic generation", why are you afraid? Plastics are a hallmark of an era, like clay, bronze, bones, etc... . Social and regular media is currently making plastic out to be this big boogie man, intentionally ignoring the good sides of plastic, to sell you tweets/articles about the benefits of plastics (and will point out how you should suddenly feel bad for not using them already) in a few years anyway. They're not about a balanced discussion anymore.
  - kingkawn 7y ago
    Cause it’s gonna kill us, in spite of the good it’s done
    - c048 7y ago
      Where do you get that from? It's simply not harmless in every context, just like basically anything out there. Do you realize what it would mean if we'd stop using all the things that can be harmful when used in certain ways? It's a nice headline, though.
      - kingkawn 7y ago
        Yes, we need to stop using so many harmful things. It is becoming clearer by the day that the trade-offs are untenable. It is true, it will require a significant recalibration of our current methods. But engineering challenges are fun, interesting, and beneficial. The chance to improve our survival and give ourselves the chance to thrive. Why turn down this opportunity for the sake of empty pedantry?
        c048 7y ago
        Because you can break your neck by stepping out of bed. Despite that threat, the benefits of stepping out of bed are unquestionably worth it. When done properly.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      How would plastic kill us? The only issues I'm aware of are 1) the pollution of oceans, which seems very fixable with much less effort than replacing plastic (filtering water at river outlets and in coastal waters, preventing ships from just dumping their stuff everywhere). 2) microplastics. In marine environments that seems solvable by solving point 1, and while a cause for concern I don't think any negative effects outside marine environments or food chains containing marine animals have been shown? Of course particulate matter is somewhat related, but wheels on asphalt will cause tiny airborne particulates no matter what material we use to make tires, so we might be better off just filtering our air in any case.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
Over timescales of hundreds of millions / billions of years, preservation of an object outdoors in the elements is vanishingly-likely because mechanical erosion and chemical corrosion will attack every substance. In a cave or somewhere else protected, preservation over longer timescales is much more likely. It's also worth nothing that several billion years from now, the Sun will turn into red giant and the Earth's atmosphere and surface will be vaporized and left as a sterile rock over tens of billions of years. That is, unless we manage its supply of H/He by managing its fuel from burning up too quickly, which could extend the life of the Sun by several to ten billion years. Star fuel management is a difficult but necessary problem for advanced species to solve.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > Star fuel management is a difficult but necessary problem for advanced species to solve. I imagine that's not necessarily true. It may be that advanced civilizations harvest energy from stars, but live in interstellar space ships (which would also explain why we can't spot evidence of them).
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    Sure, but stars have the majority of mass in a solar system, so you might want to basically deconstruct them to make more ships/habitats. See Orions Arm/deep well industrial zone as an example. :)
  - anonsivalley652 7y ago
    That's assuming it would be worth the investment (because systems in most areas of the observable universe can be few and far between) to go to other systems, when you could invest in preserving your own home system by exploring and colonizing planets, planetoids and such around the home-world. When you commit to interstellar travel, you basically need an entire planet's-worth of supplies, energy and biosphere or you send self-replicating robots. It's not like we can miracle up another Earth or go to another solar system anytime soon. Our best bets are to preserve what we have and have a look at the moon, Mars, etc.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Yes we have fossils of many of the most delicate creatures that have ever lived, it seems impossible to believe that nothing of all the durable items we have created would remain or be fossilized. It’s a cool thought experiment wondering if we aren’t the first but it seems completely impossible. I’m afraid our generation will be known as “The Plastic Generation” from our layer in the sediment.

garmaine 7y ago
Nah, molds are already evolving to eat plastic in landfills. The fact that until now life hasn’t adapted to plastic as a good source indicates that no prior civilization had developed plastics before, or else it’d already be biodegradable.
- ByThyGrace 7y ago
  But plastics don't occur spontaneously in nature, do they? So why would any species of plastic eating life form survive until our days after running out of all the available early plastic?
  - erulabs 7y ago
    Now that's an interesting thought - look at biological adaptations in the ancient ancestors of existing animals. If a 40 million year old extinct insect appears to be able to process plastics, that's a pretty good indication that _its_ ancient ancestors had a diet of plastics. Biology might just be the "last artifact". I suppose that's not terribly useful when looking at mars though :P
    - samstave 7y ago
      I like the idea that we are the biologic boot loader for AI, as Musk put it. Imagine that biologic creatures evolve over time long enough to develop, birth, and disperse AI out into the greater universe - and collapses after doing so. it takes a very long time for another civilization to evolve to the point that it spawns another AI form into the universe, and all remnants of the prior are gone. Gah - I just mean I enjoyed the thought experiment of his statement. If you are not aware, Elon said this on his appearance on Joe Rogan.
      - Izkata 7y ago
        A universe of what we perceive as AI, reminds me of the short story They're Made out of Meat [0] (and a version on youtube [1]). [0] https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ
      - PavlovsCat 7y ago
        "AI" is really just a wishy-washy way of offloading the responsibilities of leading a decent life today to some magic future. There is no reason AI will be "better "on any axis except scale and speed. So, think the Holocaust times a gazillion, in one microsecond, but don't think Bob Ross or Fred Rogers, because even if you could just make that "more powerful" (you can't, not in the same way you can crank up destruction and insanity), that's not even on the menu, there's no money in that. And hey, if AI is so great, and can spread it into all sorts of areas that are inhospitable to carbon-based life, what's the rush with getting rid of carbon-based life? Why does it have to be the extinction of humans and the destruction of spontaneity? Have you entertained the possibility that this outlook might say more about you than the state of things? > [Hobbes] foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat. > For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. -- Hannah Arendt
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Generally speaking organisms of today retain the adaptations of their ancestors, at least to a measurable degree. Whatever organism that ate plastics back then is unlikely to have gone extinct but rather gone back to whatever it was eating before, while retaining the plastic metabolism. Within the span of hundreds of thousands or millions of years (e.g. when a prior evolved primate would have had their technological period) those adaptations would probably remain intact and their descendants would be munching away on plastic today. If we suppose that the plastic culture existed further back than that, then there might not be organisms with intact metabolisms, but nevertheless there'd be some residual proteins that had an enzymatic decaying effect even if the organism didn't make good use of it. The fact that plastics have shown no deterioration at all for extended periods of time seems to indicate that nothing which survives today in contact with plastic has any lineage back to organisms which once consumed plastic in the past.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
weare138 7y ago
> I’m afraid our generation will be known as “The Plastic Generation” from our layer in the sediment Maybe that's where we're getting all that oil from, prehistoric Silurian landfills.
- aww_dang 7y ago
  "A Plasticene Lexicon" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X19308707 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X1...
c048 7y ago
"I'm afraid we'll be called the plastic generation", why are you afraid? Plastics are a hallmark of an era, like clay, bronze, bones, etc... . Social and regular media is currently making plastic out to be this big boogie man, intentionally ignoring the good sides of plastic, to sell you tweets/articles about the benefits of plastics (and will point out how you should suddenly feel bad for not using them already) in a few years anyway. They're not about a balanced discussion anymore.
- kingkawn 7y ago
  Cause it’s gonna kill us, in spite of the good it’s done
  - c048 7y ago
    Where do you get that from? It's simply not harmless in every context, just like basically anything out there. Do you realize what it would mean if we'd stop using all the things that can be harmful when used in certain ways? It's a nice headline, though.
    - kingkawn 7y ago
      Yes, we need to stop using so many harmful things. It is becoming clearer by the day that the trade-offs are untenable. It is true, it will require a significant recalibration of our current methods. But engineering challenges are fun, interesting, and beneficial. The chance to improve our survival and give ourselves the chance to thrive. Why turn down this opportunity for the sake of empty pedantry?
      - c048 7y ago
        Because you can break your neck by stepping out of bed. Despite that threat, the benefits of stepping out of bed are unquestionably worth it. When done properly.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    How would plastic kill us? The only issues I'm aware of are 1) the pollution of oceans, which seems very fixable with much less effort than replacing plastic (filtering water at river outlets and in coastal waters, preventing ships from just dumping their stuff everywhere). 2) microplastics. In marine environments that seems solvable by solving point 1, and while a cause for concern I don't think any negative effects outside marine environments or food chains containing marine animals have been shown? Of course particulate matter is somewhat related, but wheels on asphalt will cause tiny airborne particulates no matter what material we use to make tires, so we might be better off just filtering our air in any case.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

Over timescales of hundreds of millions / billions of years, preservation of an object outdoors in the elements is vanishingly-likely because mechanical erosion and chemical corrosion will attack every substance. In a cave or somewhere else protected, preservation over longer timescales is much more likely. It's also worth nothing that several billion years from now, the Sun will turn into red giant and the Earth's atmosphere and surface will be vaporized and left as a sterile rock over tens of billions of years. That is, unless we manage its supply of H/He by managing its fuel from burning up too quickly, which could extend the life of the Sun by several to ten billion years. Star fuel management is a difficult but necessary problem for advanced species to solve.

ColanR 7y ago
> Star fuel management is a difficult but necessary problem for advanced species to solve. I imagine that's not necessarily true. It may be that advanced civilizations harvest energy from stars, but live in interstellar space ships (which would also explain why we can't spot evidence of them).
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Sure, but stars have the majority of mass in a solar system, so you might want to basically deconstruct them to make more ships/habitats. See Orions Arm/deep well industrial zone as an example. :)
- anonsivalley652 7y ago
  That's assuming it would be worth the investment (because systems in most areas of the observable universe can be few and far between) to go to other systems, when you could invest in preserving your own home system by exploring and colonizing planets, planetoids and such around the home-world. When you commit to interstellar travel, you basically need an entire planet's-worth of supplies, energy and biosphere or you send self-replicating robots. It's not like we can miracle up another Earth or go to another solar system anytime soon. Our best bets are to preserve what we have and have a look at the moon, Mars, etc.