Long-Lived Civilization May Be a Pipe-Dream

[Pluvious]

Last edited Thu Apr 19, 2018, 07:18 PM - Edit history (1)

Short but interesting, and sad.

Humans are a bit of a dysfunctional species I fear.

Humanity’s cherished hope that we are building a long-lived civilisation may be nothing more than a pipe-dream. Human endeavour, two scientists argue, may carry within it the seeds of its own destruction.

The two astrophysicists have turned one of the great questions in science into a way of examining the down-to-earth consequences of global warming, the pollution of the oceans with indestructible polymers, and the wholesale destruction of species in the last 300 years.

They put an innocent question: if there had been an advanced technological and industrial civilisation on Earth several hundred million years ago, how could anyone know? What marks would have been left by a race of intelligent reptiles with motorised transport, housing estates, international trade and an arms race?

In what they call the Silurian hypothesis – a reference not to the geological period long before the first creatures crawled from the sea onto the empty continents, but to a 1970 episode of the British television serial Dr Who – they turn to the only testbed available to contemporary Earthlings: the evidence of the Anthropocene, the geologists’ name for a new era that could be considered to have commenced with the Industrial Revolution.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/long-lived-civilization-may-be-a-pipe-dream/

[Girard442]

1. Here in New York State, there are many parks that used to be estates.

A lot of things like small dams and other water control features have not been well maintained. It's amazing how nature chews those things to shreds in less than a century -- an eyeblink in geological time. The Silurian hypothesis may be a fun yarn, but it's not completely implausible.

[DetlefK]

2. Our piping. Alien geologists will find the metal of our piping-systems.

All the metal in our sewage-systems, our underground-cables, our railways and cars, our buildings, our electricity poles and streetlights, our ships and planes and tanks and cannons... Humanity has created a layer that is enriched in metal and that cannot be explained by geological processes.

(Not my idea. Read that somewhere. Maybe Stephen Baxter.)

[shraby]

3. Glass objects will outlast metal.

[hatrack]

5. Except for bronze, which is basically forever . . .

.

[Pluvious]

6. So my old bronzed baby shoes will be their best clue...

Excellent !!

[MosheFeingold]

4. Personally

I plan on being buried in an elaborate tomb with an aluminum confetti gun, triggered by something that won't decay.

I want to give that future archeologist a story to tell at cocktail parties.

[Ukrainian Yankee]

7. Two Words: Fermi Paradox

And we are not exempt!