A Hundred Millennia From Now
Jun. 3rd, 2023 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-04 05:09 pm (UTC)Or maybe the Alexander Pillar will still adorn the middle of some pasture.
what interests me are the sites we do know were preserved to this day.
Göbekli Tepe
Gunung Padang
Those are monumental sites, whose ruins remained.
Now some years ago I was playing turist in Hallstadt. The site of the oldest salt mine in the world. And curiously The guide claimed, that those wacky nazis stored art in the tunnels during ww2. Why? Because the climate inside is just perfect for preservation. Link
And since the site has been stabily populateed for thousands of years there have been excavations yealding interesting results as to wood preservation.
Another one, although I admit I did not read this last one.
And the Alps were covered with glaciers in the last Ice age...
Now given some BIG "if"s;
Lets say there are structuraly sound mines, built or better still bored into solid ground, so that the inner chambers remain structuraly sound for tens of tausands of years.
Lets say the mine is situated in the land in a way, that it has adequate natural drainage, so it does not get flooded.
Lets say it gets covered with glaciers and one of the tunnels gets exposed with receding Ice.
Lets say that before the First Technate fell someone put artefacts inside.
...
Iâ, Iâ Tsathoggua!
Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-04 07:23 pm (UTC)Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-04 11:58 pm (UTC)https://phys.org/news/2018-08-salt-alps-ancient-austrian-bronze.html
See also, one of the oldest known shoes:
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/everlasting-shoe-what-does-5500-year-old-shoe-found-cave-tell-us-about-021382
cold+dry+cave= astonishing preservation. Maybe not 100k years' worth, but... hey, if wooly mammoth carcasses can last 30,000 years in the permafrost, who knows?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/well-preserved-30000-year-old-baby-woolly-mammoth-emerges-from-yukon-permafrost-180980388/
Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-05 03:02 pm (UTC)Maybe instead of leaving behind blueprints to our great technological achievements, there was an enterprising Druid, who transcribed the Archdruid report and Ecosophia on specially cured Parchment, sealed it in Airtight ceramic containers and left them in a salt mine.
Then after 100,000 years, when the Ice receded from the slopes of the Alps, and the rock near the what the people call „the twin piles of the First Technates“ a side tunnel leading to the chamber was found and the jars uncovered.
First named „the dead ice scrolls“ it was found that they contained a set of training Tablets to help future linguists decipher our language.
After two generations worth of scholarly work the whole ADR and Ecosophia was deciphered and the leading councillors of the Technate commented.
„Seems this JMG philosopher had some inkling of the problems they faced, but was ultimately not persuasive enough, or the population was nonereceptive. Anyway this confirms our long standing theory, that the first Technate had no idea how to manage resource depletion or sociological degradation due to industrial application. This confirmed it. Frank you were right! Oh well, ultimately it does not change our world all that much.“
:-)
OMG this is already happening!OMG this is already happening!
Quick somebody upload The Wierd of HAlli! Maybe the descendands will think it was our holy scripture. :-)
Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-07 12:45 am (UTC)- Cicada Grove
Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth
Date: 2023-06-05 07:34 pm (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchison_Storage_Facility which became https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubTropolis which mentions other facilities in Butler, Pennsylvania and Louisville, Kentucky
During a decline I expect that the usage of these sites would become kind of contentious, and who knows what different kinds of cultural significance would do to these sites after several civilization cycles?
There was a series of videogames called "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." about opportunistic trespassers in an alternate-history paranormal version of the Chernobyl exclusion site inspired by the story "Roadside Picnic". In Russia it gave rise to a subculture of young men who would go camp out and get drunk at surviving nuclear bunkers, eventually leaving them trashed and sometimes even burnt. Historians tried to get the practice stigmatized.
I've sometimes thought that the best way to keep something from being interfered with over the long run isn't to make a lot of cultural noise about a commitment defending it, because then the mean-time-before-failure is just however long it takes for the culture to undergo enantiodromia or something. (Is that a problem peculiar to modernity and its greatly intensified intracultural competition? It seems like pre-civilized societies maintain their values for longer.) Instead, the best way is to get whatever it is you want to preserve into a situation where nobody's even thinking about it. Although that creates complications if you do want people to stumble over it and react to it eventually.
I sometimes wonder what the long-term cultural reaction would be to various attempts to make primers and archives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive but more durable and unambitious and mass-produced and widely distributed, like imprints on bricks or three-dimensional patterns in glass. Would people shun them as repeating whatever mistakes the past was mythologized as having made? Would they regard trying to learn the primers as a fool's pursuit, the way humanists regarded medieval alchemy? Would the equilibrium be that they just picked up the easiest levels of primer to unpack as common knowledge, taking away anyone's competitive incentive to acquire the specialized techniques needed to delve any deeper? Would a descending civilization try to destroy and fake a previous one's primers to deter future civilizations from investigating the real ones closely enough? Would there be some other competition dynamic that resulted in still-relevant ancient truths getting lost in noise?