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> For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million ye
by cubefox 3y ago
> For example we've only found about one dinosaur fossil per 10,000 years of dinosaur history. The dinosaurs were around for a long time, from 65-250 million years ago.
Dinosaurs presumably fossilize very badly compared to many artificial artifacts, like buildings made out of machined stone.
- rini17 3y agoStone does weather too. It either needs uninterrupted dry climate (not really possible for millions of years) or being placed inside a stable geological formation (we don't usually build that way).
- cubefox 3y agoI'd bet stone weathers many orders of magnitude less than dinosaur bones.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoFossils are stone. The porous bone that housed the minerals are long gone by the time we find them.
- cubefox 3y agoWe are talking about actual bones in living animals though, and those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> those surely fossilize (preserve over eons) much more rarely than many civilizational artifacts I don't think they would fossilise. It's a process specific to the porosity of organic tissue. They might be preserved, but the Cambridge paper explains why it’s unlikely they would last for a hundred millennia or more.
- cubefox 3y agoBut surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> surely it is much more unlikely that animal bones would last for a hundred millennia Why? The Cambridge paper gives a scientist’s reasons for that not being the case being supposition.
- withinboredom 3y agoMan, I’ve been in castles that are less than a thousand years old that are barely recognizable. Machu pichu is a good one as well.
- inglor_cz 3y agoCastles that stay above ground, yes, but there likely would be some buried structures, too. Pompeii looked remarkably fresh when dug out.
- withinboredom 3y agoPompeii was literally buried in a matter of hours, so that’s kind of a unique case. Any underground structures would be turned into a cave from water seeping in. Most people don’t dig into the side of caves, so it’s likely we’d never know. A great example is the millennium old water passages in Afghanistan. You can’t tell they are man made any more. The point stands, most things don’t survive all that long (in the grand scheme of things). Occasionally, the conditions are exactly right to preserve something, but there is a limit.
- cubefox 3y agoStructures / cities might also get buried within a few hundred years due to overgrowth.
- datavirtue 3y agoSufficient sized meteorite impact would melt the entire surface of the planet.
- jiggawatts 3y agoThat did happen — the Moon is theorised to have formed from the ejecta of a planet-sized impactor. However, that happened very early in the history of the solar system, likely before life had a chance to start.
- K0balt 3y agoOn the timescale we are looking at coastal areas are completely destroyed or created and substantial destruction and renewal of crust occurs. No guarantee of anything being found at all.
- cubefox 3y agoDinosaur fossils also didn't have a guarantee of being found. It's all in the probability.
- K0balt 3y agoIf you flip a fair coin 1000 times I guarantee it comes up heads at least once. If you set a cup on a table I guarantee it won’t pass through the table, even though both the glass and the table are mostly empty space. Those things also are all in the probability.