What fossils would OUR civilization leave behind?

A great thread that deserves discussion.

Imo, artificial geographic landforms such as islands and mountains built by our hands "could" survive the test of time.

But in all honesty. If it were up to me, i would leave all evidence and records of our civilization on or beneath the surface of the moon.

They will find nothing. NOTHING. The way we build things, all would disintegrate in just a few thousand years, let alone millions. Even the Fukushima radiation will be all gone in a hundred thousand years or so. The only thing that does not break down, rust away, or otherwise just crumble to dust is STONE. Ergo, only things made of giant blocks of stone would last. We do not build ANYTHING out of giant blocks of stone these days. We think we have better ways of doing it.

That's why all the ancient mysterious things on Earth are those made of giant blocks of stone. Such as Stonehenge, Easter Island, Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat, and of course the Great Pyramid at Giza. And, no matter what the "scientists" tell you, there is absolutely NO WAY of definitely telling how old these things are.

They will find nothing of this civilization except maybe some random fossilized skeletons, one in a billion. And yes, unless we are talking about future humans here in some far off future, they will probably think they are just some kind of weird, strangely weak and defenseless animal.

I think some may be already thinking along those lines...

Doomsday clock

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Clock One

The Long Now Foundation will be starting geologic testing this month for an underground space to house a 10,000 Year Clock. The Clock design, headed up by computer scientist Danny Hillis of The Long Now Foundation, has been in progress for over fourteen years. The Clock will be all mechanical, designed to keep ticking for at least 10,000 years, and will keep track of many calendric and astronomic events. The first eight-foot-tall prototype of the Clock resides in The Science Museum in London.

The idea behind the Clock is to be an inspiration for long-term thinking, to help make thinking long term automatic and common, instead of difficult and rare. It is hoped to be an artifact to connect its visitors to the future in the same way relics from ancient civilizations connect us to the past.
from top facing South

The Clock project in Texas, called Clock One, will be the first Clock built at monument scale by The Long Now Foundation, which also owns a potential site in eastern Nevada. The Clock will be almost entirely underground, and only accessed by foot traffic from the East once complete. The construction site and access is on property owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who is also funding the construction of the project. The Clock site overlooks the valley where his space company, Blue Origin, has its launch site.

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The Clock of the Long Now

* It must not be made of anything anyone would want to take.
* It must be clear how it works without taking it apart – so that no one will want to (or have to) take it apart.
* It must be powered by natural forces.
* It must be built so that even if during a dark age people forget how to build clocks, they can understand this one and how to keep it going.
* It must keep time for 10,000 year without being off by more than a second.

The Georgia Guidestones

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Source

A message consisting of a set of ten guidelines or principles is engraved on the Georgia Guidestones in eight different languages, one language on each face of the four large upright stones. Moving clockwise around the structure from due north, these languages are: English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature

Originally posted by 11azerus11
reply to post by nerbot

 

what do you mean final blast?
2nd

Big big nuke bangs. End of civilization. Bits and pieces hurtling though space from ejection. Scattered satellites and all sorts everywhere.

All it takes is one mad scientist and the wrong button or a few mad powermongers with big red ones.

"poof"...bye.

Lots of stuff would survive. There is a separate thread on this subject but I'll summarize a few of key points.

Fossils of life from our time will be available. There is a good chance that a modern human will be found fossilized and prehaps with some of their 'attainments' with them. Bodies are most often fossilized if placed into a place with little oxgyen and slow bacteria growth where minerals have time to do there thing in authigenic, permineralization or bioimmuration and other processes. Not to mention fossils like amber which will exist then and has for over three hundred million years

Our utilization of resources will be noted; in the nineteeth century people looking for resources often found that early man had beaten them to it. The depletion of coal and other resources will be noted. The sediments if cored will show that in those sediments are many odd things. Our moving things around will attract notice, a future archaeologist would wonder how fossils (from before our time) happen to associated with fossils from our time.

Many stone tools from before our time will still be there. We will provide certain ceramics which will survive being deposited into sediment, cut gems, radioactive isolopes and especially where we have modified the terrain, sinking mines and tunnels, these will be filled up but will still be there. Not to mention billions of tons of glass, brick and other substances that will still be doing just find not to mention the relics of our exploration of space.

The easiest way to visualize what we might leave is to look at what we've found from 65 million years ago...

in about 30 years there isn't much left of the remains in a grave... I don't think it makes good fossil material

Unless they get flooded maybe

reply to post by LadyTrick


the rubbish would then break down eventually tho: they say oil is from the dinosaurs breaking down after millions of years... maybe our rubbish will all break down to another new and different "natural" resource

reply to post by aRogue


but what about our fossils? i think that our islands and manmade mountains would be completely integrated back into the environment... after 10000 years mount rushmore would probably look like a 4 headed sphinx and after 65 million years it would probably look unrecognizable.... it would probably turn into something like the "face" on mars...

reply to post by SLAYER69



that is tite... it reminds me of that ancient clock they found at the bottom of the Mediterranean that shocked archeologist.... but even still its on a scale of a thousands of years.... what about millions? what would actually be left after all of the cataclysmic changes the surface of the earth would undoubtedly go through?

so far we've come up with a couple of good ones in my opinion.... an imprint of a cell phone since they are just thrown out these days and i think we would leave a tire track or two..

reply to post by Hanslune


but the only thing we've found from 65 million years ago are a few bones and footprints.... i think after 65 million years resources would replenish and also i think we will create new resources by the 65 million year mark.. they say oil is from dead dinosaurs but i don't know... what if oil is from millions and millions millions of old plastic bottles from a previous civilization of 10 million years.... haha.... so after 65 million years maybe all our trash and rubbish would break down to form some other new resource... I don't know.... how long did it take for the dinosaurs to turn into oil? and is that even true? what kind of evidence is there to support that...

65 million years is such a long time people can't really comprehend it... i think after 10 mil.... everything is completely gone and resources replenished

reply to post by Sinter Klaas


yeah i was thinking about that today while i was out.... open up a grave and the body is completely decomposed... the fossils of our remains would probably come from a cataclysmic event such as the mudslide in taiwan a couple years back that buried a town some thing like 50 feet under... or such as pompei

reply to post by AlreadyGone


never mind ... i just went to mcdonald's drive through and just realized what M you were referring too hahaha...

Originally posted by 11azerus11.. they say oil is from dead dinosaurs but i don't know... what if oil is from millions and millions millions of old plastic bottles from a previous civilization of 10 million years....

Well, where did they get their plastic from then?

reply to post by CaptChaos


see i've been leaning to your thought too... i really don't see much making it through, but somebody made a joke about finding a mcdonald's building and that got me thinking of all of the preservatives that they have in their foods... and I think that a mcdonalds hamburger might actually make it as crazy as that sounds

reply to post by SLAYER69


this is a serious question but it's kind of funny i wanted to add another thing to the list that would make it 65 million years..... and i really think a mcdonald's burger could easily fossilize and wanted to know what ya'll thought... cause they have so much preservative stuffed into every bite and that you tube video of the burger not breaking down...

so cell phone imprint, our bones from a disaster, a tire track, and now a half eaten mcdonald's burger.... what else would survive the 65 million year mark

reply to post by RedParrotHead


haha good question.... u made me realize the conundrum i put myself in.... but they could have gotten their oil from dinos and we're the ones getting the 2nd generation of crude oil made from their plastic bottles... haha... so it could just be a chain of reoccurring natural resources

Originally posted by 11azerus11
reply to post by Hanslune

 

but the only thing we've found from 65 million years ago are a few bones and footprints....

Hans: Not completely correct we have several hundred thousand fossils from that era, you may be thinking of later huminds which are very rare in the later layers.


[Quote] i think after 65 million years resources would replenish and also i think we will create new resources by the 65 million year mark..

The dug out coal beds and oil drilling holes will still be there. Most oil came from the earlier ages from plant life, millions of years of it, only minor amounts of oil are probably going to be produced from our era

65 million years is such a long time people can't really comprehend it... i think after 10 mil.... everything is completely gone and resources replenished

Hans: Nope lots of stuff will be fossilized, however that doesn't mean anyone will find it. I would suspect that the resources will not be renewed to any where near where they were when we began to use them, based on what we now know about the production of coal and oil. You might want to look at the science of sedimentology which studies ancient sediments; from that you'll find out what could be determined from a future study of our sedimentary leavings - I believe they will note the spike our chemical industry produced. You may also want to look at fossils produced since the beginning of the cenozoic era and the last fossils from the mesozoic era.

Enjoy

Originally posted by 11azerus11
reply to post by Hanslune

 

but the only thing we've found from 65 million years ago are a few bones and footprints...

Ah, now you're talking about things that I work with in the paleontology lab. I wish I could take you by the hand and lead you down here (into the archives with the fun stuff!) and show you what we've got from 100 million years ago, 200 million years ago, even 250 million years ago. The dinosaur vertebra that I'm working on had seeds in the limestone that surrounded it, and even a branch from some sort of shrub. And there's fossilized dinosaur poop, unfossilized bone, cartilage, mummified dinosaurs that are even older than 65 million years... just tons of things.

Quite literally tons. After we finish with this project we are moving onto the Alaskan material (90 million years old) and we really do have six tons of this stuff to process...and that's just from one site that's less than half a square mile.

I wish you could come down here and chat with the paleontologists! You'd be fascinated -- amazed -- and you might even get "fossil fever", too!

they say oil is from dead dinosaurs but i don't know...

Actually, that's what they said a century ago. Since then, we know it comes from ancient sea life (microscopic things) resources.schoolscience.co.uk...

Part of the evidence is in the type of stone where oil is found, the type of rock above it (salt domes which come from oceans) and fossils (yes, really) found within the rock that carries the oil. It's not just a big puddle down there. It's embedded in the rock.

oil is from millions and millions millions of old plastic bottles from a previous civilization of 10 million years

There's not enough mass there. Seriously. You could squish down all the garbage we ever produced and if you turned it into oil there'd be a lot of it, but it wouldn't be distributed worldwide and there'd be a lot less of it than we have.

how long did it take for the dinosaurs to turn into oil? and is that even true? what kind of evidence is there to support that...

It's written in the rocks. But that's not a simple topic and it takes a little studying of geology. Not a massive amount but more than most people have an interest in.

65 million years is such a long time people can't really comprehend it... i think after 10 mil.... everything is completely gone and resources replenished

65 million years is just the beginning of the fun. Now, 300 million years old (dragonfly fossils and insects in amber) -- that's getting kinda old.

Interestingly (or not) I was just talking to my wife about this very topic an hour ago. The conversation got around to these little material animal toys this lady makes. They are a bit odd in some instances, one of them is a little doggie in a gimp mask. Not in any uncompromising situation, just wearing the mask.

If found in the future, I was trying to figure out how the archaeologists in the next civilisation in 10,000years would fit the little figure in to a religious / worship type explanation for our culture.

tadasrevolution.com...

Any ideas?

For an amusing look at how archaeologists might interpret our era I can recommend the book. Its a good satire of the overuse of certain cliche's within archaeology.




Motel of the Mysteries - which has future archaeologist finding a motel

ISBN-10: 0395284252

It was a good one to start off freshman archaeology 101