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Glass and pottery fragments both last "forever" if they're left someplace relatively dry, or get buried, or otherwise protected from physical and chemical weath
by LarryMullins 4y ago
Glass and pottery fragments both last "forever" if they're left someplace relatively dry, or get buried, or otherwise protected from physical and chemical weathering. A glass bottle thrown away on the beach will be eroded to nothing in mere years to decades, but a glass bottle thrown aside and buried by some soil can stay there for millions of years easily. Stone artifacts are similarly robust. These relatively permanent traces get left behind long before a civilization gets "industrial". Pottery and glass predate our own industrial revolution by thousands of years.
For such a civilization to develop and go unnoticed to historians, their influence must have been very small, they must have been geographically limited. For instance maybe they lived in low-lands and rising sea levels erased all trace, but this would still require that their artifacts rarely if ever got carried up hills where they might have been untouched by the rising oceans. It seems deeply implausible.
Certainly there was nothing even remotely like our civilization in the past. There are glass beer bottles laying around on virtually every corner of the planet, on mountain tops, in caves, in landfills. Just everywhere really. It will take longer than a mere few million years to erase all these.
- gibspaulding 4y agoIt sort of makes me happy to think that millions of years after civilization is consumed by fire and humanity goes extinct, all that will be left is the beer bottles.
- askvictor 4y agoGeological processes, given enough time, will probably destroy your glass bottle. And everything else. Assuming the Earth doesn't stop being geologically active, I would suspect that eventually, everything will get churned through magma.
- LarryMullins 4y agoEventually sure, but think about all the dino fossils, 100+ million years old, that we find in sedimentary rock today. I expect that eventually, beer bottles lost in the mud at the bottom of lakes and rivers may become inclusions in sedimentary rock, permanently preserved for as long as it takes that part of continental crust to get recycled in the mantle.
- pixl97 4y agoWell, it's a lot more complicated than that. Anything on the oceanic crust will get recycled in short order, think hundreds of millions of years at most. On continental crust it is far, far more complicated. There are areas we call 'shields' that are over 3 billion years old and are the original cratons that seeded continent formation. Now, they've tended to be scraped clean by glaciers and other processes over time, but not all is recycled. But while direct evidence is somewhat easy to erase, indirect evidence is very, very hard to erase. The banded iron formations are an indirect sign of life in the oceans at the time and cover massive areas with varying chemical compositions. The same is true for the for the anthropocene. The chemicals we've released in to the air, water, and ground will leave fingerprints for hundreds of millions of years on this planet as they fossilize into rocks and get pushed into mountains.