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

Re: Let us build our Mount Voormithadreth

[vitranc]

Yes, I remember those.
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

[(Anonymous)]

Instead of parchment, I recommend sheets of copper or bronze.

- Cicada Grove