The Paranormal, UFO's, and Mysteries of the Unknown

mkopec

mkopec

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Pieces of our cities will be left behind. Concrete and shit like that will probably survive for a while. Bronze statues, statues carved of stone, Places like Hoover dam, even if it breaks, thats a monolith that will survive long after were gone. Look at a city like NY. Even if fully destroyed and covered under feet of ash or sediment over time. You cannot believe that none fo that shit will be left if some later civilization discovers it during a dig of some kind.
 
Tuco

Tuco

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It's one thing if some aliens do a quick fly-by and don't see any structures because everything has been decomposed or melted into the ground. It's another thing to set up a new civilization and basically traverse the entire surface.
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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Screamfeeder said:
Nope. You might have missed my link.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/qa-will-fossil-record-preserve-your-computer
Click to expand...

Q: Are some cities more likely to preserve technofossils than others?

A: In San Francisco, Earth’s crust is rising. It’s being eroded and the material is being washed away to areas where the crust is subsiding. So an upland place like San Francisco will be eroded, and the fragments will wash into the sea. Los Angeles and the northwest of Britain—Manchester, say—are also on long-term upward-moving crust. These are both also destined to be eroded away.
Click to expand...

contributing to the needle in a haystack problem
 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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mkopec said:
Pieces of our cities will be left behind. Concrete and shit like that will probably survive for a while. Bronze statues, statues carved of stone, Places like Hoover dam, even if it breaks, thats a monolith that will survive long after were gone. Look at a city like NY. Even if fully destroyed and covered under feet of ash or sediment over time. You cannot believe that none fo that shit will be left if some later civilization discovers it during a dig of some kind.
Click to expand...

i don't believe that "none" will be left, just that what will be left in millions of years is going to be very hard to find.
 
Screamfeeder

Screamfeeder

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pharmakos said:
contributing to the needle in a haystack problem
Click to expand...
Keep reading homie. You left off part of that answer...

Q: Are some cities more likely to preserve technofossils than others?

A: In San Francisco, Earth’s crust is rising. It’s being eroded and the material is being washed away to areas where the crust is subsiding. So an upland place like San Francisco will be eroded, and the fragments will wash into the sea. Los Angeles and the northwest of Britain—Manchester, say—are also on long-term upward-moving crust. These are both also destined to be eroded away.

New Orleans, in contrast, is on a delta. It’s on what’s called a tectonic escalator, going downwards because that’s what the crust is doing, and because it’s being loaded by all the sand and mud being washed off from the Mississippi River. New Orleans is ripe for fossilization, all of the structures, the pilings, the concrete pilings, tens of meters into the ground to keep the skyscrapers up. And all of the stuff that’s underground: pipework, sewage, the electric.

Other places might be Amsterdam, Venice, Shanghai, coastal deltas on coastal plains. These places are ripe for fossilization.
 
pharmakos

pharmakos

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Screamfeeder said:
Keep reading homie. You left off part of that answer...

Q: Are some cities more likely to preserve technofossils than others?

A: In San Francisco, Earth’s crust is rising. It’s being eroded and the material is being washed away to areas where the crust is subsiding. So an upland place like San Francisco will be eroded, and the fragments will wash into the sea. Los Angeles and the northwest of Britain—Manchester, say—are also on long-term upward-moving crust. These are both also destined to be eroded away.

New Orleans, in contrast, is on a delta. It’s on what’s called a tectonic escalator, going downwards because that’s what the crust is doing, and because it’s being loaded by all the sand and mud being washed off from the Mississippi River. New Orleans is ripe for fossilization, all of the structures, the pilings, the concrete pilings, tens of meters into the ground to keep the skyscrapers up. And all of the stuff that’s underground: pipework, sewage, the electric.

Other places might be Amsterdam, Venice, Shanghai, coastal deltas on coastal plains. These places are ripe for fossilization.
Click to expand...

i did keep reading. yes, some places will be left behind, how does that mean i'm wrong about the needle in the haystack problem? you just said "yeah dude look there's a needle after all"

i never claimed there's no needle to be found. just that it will be hard to find. you just highlighted the needle, bro.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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pharmakos said:
i don't believe that "none" will be left, just that what will be left in millions of years is going to be very hard to find.
Click to expand...

LOL people found ancient cities in places like the desert, buried under feet and feet of sand. Or unearthed cities like pompay which were buried under hundred feet of volcanic ash.
 
Kiroy

Kiroy

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Theyd find them if they were there. Im saying in 10 million years nothing will be there (cept fossils)
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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mkopec said:
LOL people found ancient cities in places like the desert, buried under feet and feet of sand. Or unearthed cities like pompay which were buried under hundred feet of volcanic ash.
Click to expand...

right, and i like i already said, those have only been buried for 10,000 years or less, and were still incredibly hard to find. now extend that difficulty out to if they'd existed 10 million years before instead of 10 thousand
 
Screamfeeder

Screamfeeder

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pharmakos said:
i did keep reading. yes, some places will be left behind, how does that mean i'm wrong about the needle in the haystack problem? you just said "yeah dude look there's a needle after all"

i never claimed there's no needle to be found. just that it will be hard to find. you just highlighted the needle, bro.
Click to expand...
No I didn't. There is no needle. There is no haystack.

There is dirt. With layers. We go down a layer, that's older dirt. We find tectonic movement, that's shifted dirt. We can already do all of that.

If a future society is at our current level of science, they will be able to find an entire layer of "needles" buried right under the totally different pile of needles on top of it.
 
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pharmakos

pharmakos

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Screamfeeder said:
No I didn't. There is no needle. There is no haystack.

There is dirt. With layers. We go down a layer, that's older dirt. We find tectonic movement, that's shifted dirt. We can already do all of that.

If a future society is at our current level of science, they will be able to find an entire layer of "needles" buried right under the totally different pile of needles on top of it.
Click to expand...

you're talking about migratory paths and microbes. the industrial revolution has taken up 0.01% of human history. that's a really small sliver of the fossil record to look at.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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Screamfeeder said:
No I didn't. There is no needle. There is no haystack.

There is dirt. With layers. We go down a layer, that's older dirt. We find tectonic movement, that's shifted dirt. We can already do all of that.

If a future society is at our current level of science, they will be able to find an entire layer of "needles" buried right under the totally different pile of needles on top of it.
Click to expand...

dont we have satellites that can see under the earth? I seem to recall reading something about this, how some ancient buried sites were found through the use of ground imaging satellites.
 
Screamfeeder

Screamfeeder

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pharmakos said:
you're talking about migratory paths and microbes. the industrial revolution has taken up 0.01% of human history. that's a really small sliver of the fossil record to look at.
Click to expand...
Yup.

Which we can still do...

"Q: What will future beings be able to infer about us from these fossils?
A: The technofossils will strike them as quite different as anything that’s come before. We have the whole history we see through archaeology. Metals—Bronze [Age] first, then Iron and so on, different types of tools. And then we go into the Industrial Revolution and on to the space age and beyond.
If you’re looking at the point of the perspective of the future paleontologist, either human or nonhuman or space visitor or hyperevolved rat or whatever, as a geologist one thing will strike them. [All of these artifacts] will be crammed into a very small physical space. The stratum itself may not be much more than a few meters thick. In many places, it may only be a few centimeters thick. It will probably appear instantaneous, and it will be very hard work to figure out the path of this hyperevolution of the technofossils within the human stratum. "

But we can still find it...easily.

I think you really are underestimating our current understanding of previous worlds based on nothing but layers of dirt.
 
Archeron

Archdruid Archeron

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pharmakos said:
if humans were wiped out and in 10 million years another species advances to the point where they invent archaeology, the odds of them discovering anything about today's humans is pretty low. so of course, the same would be true of any pre-human civlizations.
Click to expand...

I have commented on this once before:
Archeiron said:
I will guess more than zero. My thinking is:

Modern phones use screens made from ion-hardened glass (potassium-sodium ion replacement) or synthetic sapphire. One of these buried in the ground will remain untransformed effectively indefinitely in some form because glass is geologically stable.

Modern cell phones contain yttrium, terbium, europium and gadolinium which would not be found together with large concentrations of lithium and silicon in a naturally occurring source, so they would be readily identifiable within the archeological record simply by their presence.

Micro-etched circuitry would leave tell-tale signs because the substrate is geologically stable (duh silicon) and the etching is too precise to be done by hand.

iPhones are manufactured in large volume and electronic recycling of goods is haphazard at best, so the statistical likelihood of one ending up buried in stable conditions is high. The places they are likely to be buried will show signs of man-made earth disturbances for a date period on geological time so they are the areas likely to be excavated for historical artifacts.
Click to expand...

Mineral redistribution and their presence in unusual combinations will be present on our planet for a tremendous length on the geological record, so I am not sure why you would think that there will be no record or that they wouldn't be able to see that we must have made semiconductor-based tech.
 
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