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> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our

> Even our metal based structures would not withstand it very well over a few thousand years. Well, not steel framed buildings or anything like that. But our modern civilization has certainly done things that I think stand a good chance of lasting hundreds of millions of years. Take for instance glass bottles. Those tossed into the ocean won't last more than a few decades before they're eroded to nothing (see: sea glass), but we've created so many glass bottles and distributed them so far and wide, it is virtually certain that many of them will survive in the soil for a very very long time. There is no doubt that glass can last for millions of years under the right conditions; there is a lot of volcanic glass around that attests to this. There are so many glass bottles in landfills or littered around the world, at least some of them are certain to be in geologically stable conditions. Then there are things like mountaintop removal mining. Maybe normal quarries get filled in and hidden over time, but there's no hiding the top of a mountain being sliced right off.

gibolt 5y ago
Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then, and there were orders of magnitude less people. On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.
- robonerd 5y ago
  > Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;) Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago. Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  Old things aren't necessarily that far under our feet. I've excavated 4,000 year old sites under a couple inches of dirt, and found 10,000+ year old artifacts on the surface.

gibolt 5y ago

Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then, and there were orders of magnitude less people. On top of that, we don't even have exact knowledge of where to look. Most places we do discover have plenty of signs and evidence, they are just buried under 10ft of dirt and thus essentially undiscoverable.

robonerd 5y ago
> Humans were not mass manufacturing things back then Ah, but how do you know that? You weren't there. ;) Sometimes the absence of evidence really is evidence to the contrary, but other times it isn't. It all depends on whether or not it's reasonable to expect evidence to be found given the amount of looking we've done and the nature of the evidence we're looking for. If we don't find a ton of glass coke bottles in the soil around the world, after digging around in innumerable construction sites on almost every corner of the globe, that's strong evidence that nobody was mass manufacturing coke bottles 50k years ago. Contrast that with the lack of evidence for ancient wooden sailing vessels. We don't have any evidence of wooden ships 50k years ago. But supposing there were a shipbuilding culture back then, would we really expect to find evidence for it? All those wood artifacts would be LONG gone, even the oldest bog wood ever found is less than 10k years old. In this case, the absence of evidence is weak evidence to the contrary at best.
AlotOfReading 5y ago
Old things aren't necessarily that far under our feet. I've excavated 4,000 year old sites under a couple inches of dirt, and found 10,000+ year old artifacts on the surface.