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)]

I haven't read any of these, but I did see the documentary "Life After People"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People

...and the Wikipedia entry suggested entries on these written sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_Is_Wild

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Man

In my experience, a good way to track down more books is to go to Amazon, look up a relevant title, then see what related books the Amazon algorithm suggests. You don't have to actually buy any books from Amazon or have an account; you can just use their automatic "you might also like" function to get suggestions, click on them, read the blurbs and reviews, decide what looks interesting, write the titles and authors down, and go ask the library to find the books for you or buy them from an independent source.

Happy hunting!

[ecosophia]

Thank you for these links! I avoid the Big Slimy River on principle; I'll see if some of the other online venues have a similar service.

[(Anonymous)]

My inner librarian comes out… check out LibraryThing.com: there’s the tags, auto recommendations, and member recommendations, and between them the leads are usually top notch.