A Hundred Millennia From Now

[ecosophia]

I need a little help from my readers for a fiction project in the early conceptual changes.

I'm trying to find accurate information about the enduring legacies of modern industrial civilization. Assume that our civilization circles through the normal cycle of decline and fall. Assume that ordinary history continues for the next hundred thousand years or so. Assume that ordinary ecological and climatic cycles, perturbed by our current mess, return to normal in a reasonable period of time and persist for that same very long period. What traces will remain of the earth's first global technic civilization?

What I would like, if any of my readers can point me to this, are some easily accessible written sources by geologists and other people literate in the earth sciences which address this. Yes, I'm beginning to draft a story set in the far future; no, it's not going to be the fake future of so much bad science fiction, in which today's mental and cultural habits remain frozen in place across the ages while technotrinkets lurch into ever more elaborately predictable forms. We never went to the stars, nor did alien space bats ever come to visit us; life has continued to evolve; today's industrial society, the legendary First Technate, is a dim presence long since fallen out of mythology, and recalled only in fragmentary surviving records from less prodigiously ancient societies.

Oh, and there's a new ice age on, though the glaciers are slowly beginning to retreat. Fun times!

If any of you have scientifically based sources to suggest for the long-term destinies of our mines and freeways, dams and tunnels, landfills and miscellaneous waste, I'm all ears.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hello JMG,
Not a very serious example, but Dmitry Orlov once suggested that the most enduring artifact of our civilization is going to be a ceramic toilet :))
Kirsten

[ecosophia]

He may well be right. Heavy ceramic objects can last a very long time!

[(Anonymous)]

The satirical book Motel of the Mysteries by David McCauley has that hilarious sketch of the model wearing a 'headdress' from the Motel complete with toothbrush earrings.

JLfromNH/Murky Nauseous Curmudgeon

[(Anonymous)]

Though they're also quite easy to break. Don't ask me how I know...

[robertmathiesen]

Before Dmitry Orlov, there was a humorous article in (IIRC) The Journal of Irreproducible Results wherein several archeologists in the very distant future were puzzling over the possible functions of those large ceramic artifacts found everywhere in the oldest strata of their digs. IIRC, they settled in the end on "ritual objects" of uncertain purpose. 😛

ritual objects

[deborah_bender]

Frederik Pohl wrote a series of novels in which an alien species who attained faster than light space travel left for parts unknown and were thoughtful enough to leave behind a bunch of operable space boats where the descendants of Australopithecus could find them if they were able to get out of Earth's gravity well. The second title in the series is called Beyond the Blue Event Horizon.

These beings, called Heechee in the books, left a bunch of small objects in the boats which humans couldn't figure out what to do with. They called them "Heechee prayer fans" and kept them as souvenirs. Turns out that's not what they were. (No spoilers).