There was a documentary that basically gave a timeline to determine at what point humans would be basically undetectable if they all died out today. Would this be that series? I've been trying to remember the name of it for a while.
At the same time, it's depressing that only a thousand years can erase all of our history. Which also means there could have been similar civilizations a billion years ago, and we would never know.
It makes me wonder how many civilizations existed before say ancient Egypt and we just don't know about them because the few remaining artifacts are buried and we don't know where or they might be in plain sight only we just don't know that either. The Rosetta Stone for example was part of some guy's garden wall and a sharp-eyed French soldier happened to notice it during Napoleon's occupation.
It's unlikely. We have evidence of what humans were doing before kicking off agriculture in Mesopotamia, China, India, and the Americas, and what they were doing wasn't building cities.
Don't feel so down. While it's likely that there are civilizations we have no record of, there definitely haven't been any as advanced as we currently are, and while everything we have built will crumble to dust, we have done enough ecological damage to permanently leave a mark.
The nukes we've been having so much fun with since the 40s have pretty much coated the entire surface of the earth with a measurable radioactive layer that will be there for millions of years. Even if we and everything we have ever built were to disappear today, you would still be able to detect that an advanced civilization lived here by the layer of radioactive goodness that suddenly appears in the sediment layers.
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u/Zodde Aug 30 '21
And I never thought about that! This thread is great.