3 ms·

So cool. How many other uninteresting fossils are sitting around waiting to be scanned?

• nn3 7y ago
  There's a Ian Banks short story where one of the omnipotent Culture spaceships visits the Earth and scans it on its whole and sees all the fossils every fossilized. I always found this an fascinating thought. Imagine technology progresses so that we can just scan the whole earth, or at least large parts of the surface. Then you could look at everything ever fossilized in one go, and completely change natural history.
  • op03 7y ago
    Do you remember the name? Sometimes I get that feeling looking at the history of large software projects that have been around a while through upgrades, downgrades, branches, growth, layoffs, acquisitions, mergers etc etc. I like the sound of "whole earth scan".
    • nn3 7y ago
      The state of the earth The fossil scan is just a sentence or so, not really a significant part of the plot.