Ask Lemmy

26890 readers

3358 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

When our species has become extinct, is there anything that would survive long enough to tell the next intelligent species to arise that we were a technological civilization? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

57 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Look at fossils as example. Yes, we have quite a lot of them but they stretch over a couple hundred million years, so imagen the things we don’t know about these periods

I get your point. But then again look at how many fossiles there still are. And those are all biologically, easily degraded. We've build quite sturdy things and even if only a tiny fraction survives there should be plenty for future archeologist to figure out that there was some civilisation at work.

With the extend that humans have changed the planet, we should leave a very obvious geological marker. Like suddenly there is plastic in the sediment layers ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

But then again look at how many fossiles there still are. And those are all biologically, easily degraded.

You got that one the wrong way around. These fossiles are still here because of the special environmental circumstances in which they formed. Most biological matter decomposes without a trace.

Like suddenly there is plastic in the sediment layers …

If we were to go extinct today, these layers would be incredible thin. 12 k years of human history is a blink of an eye in terms of geological timeframes and for most of that we didn't produce long lasting materials.