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

Silurian Hypothesis

[(Anonymous)]

If you haven't yet, try googling "Silurian hypothesis". That is a thought experiment (not really a hypothesis as such) that says, suppose a high-tech civilization existed on this planet during the Silurian Period, i.e. ~400 million years ago. Would we know? What signs would there be and how obvious would they be? (This is generally thought to be about when air-breathing terrestrial animals were first appearing, so presumably any such actual civilization on Earth would've had to've been alien colonists, I suppose.) There have been a lot of essays and even some peer-reviewed papers on the subject. Often such writings are a jumping-off point for considering what will be left of our own high-tech civilization 400 million years from now.

My recollection is that our longest-remaining traces will be geological evidence of a mass extinction event as well as an unusually rapid increase in atmospheric carbon over a very short timeframe (and no evidence of concurrent volcanic activity or any other natural explanation). The evidence of such things will be part of the geological record long after all our concrete and plastics and dead bodies have dissolved to nothing. Also, square/rectangular traces of building foundations will be obvious for a very long time-- and clearly artificial, since right angles are not super common in nature (though one can still imagine far-future skeptics arguing for some natural cause nonetheless)-- long after there's little or nothing else left of the buildings themselves.

The Silurian hypothesis was inspired by a Doctor Who episode which portrayed a civilization of lizard people living on Earth during the Silurian Period, who (coincidentally? I guess?) called themselves the Silurians.

-troy jones iii

Re: Silurian Hypothesis

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Thanks for this. That's much longer than the time frame I have in mind, but it will doubtless give me some ideas.

Re: Silurian Hypothesis

[(Anonymous)]

Silurian hypothesis: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20200000027/downloads/20200000027.pdf

The Ninth Mouse