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

[walt_f]

I see what you're getting at, but it might just be too difficult to imagine from our perspective, or outright impossible. Mathematicians after all have spent a lot of time developing all kinds of different forms of mathematics. I can see having very different mathematical curricula and very different preferred technological applications, but imagining them resulting in pure math methods very different from what we know is beyond me. (If it weren't... well, think how publishable wholly different math would be!)

If flows or rates-of-change instead of counting was the starting point of your mathematics curriculum, then calculus (perhaps starting with Newton's fluxions) would come much earlier on. But as soon as you want to compare the magnitude of one flow with another (or, equivalently, measure a flow), that's a discrete number. (Or do I only assume that because of ingrained habits of thought? Either way, I can't think of another comparison that's more generally useful, or simpler.) So discrete numbers might not seem inherent in the concept of flows, kind of like how zero or negative numbers might not seem inherent in the concept of counting, but as with zero and negatives you'd run into them before you go past the elementary school level. Going farther, the distinction between integers, rationals, and irrationals might only be of interest in specialist branches. (Today, you don't need to know the difference between rational and irrational numbers, or set theory or what prime numbers are, to do e.g. weather modeling or rocket science.)

If you don't have arithmetic early in your curriculum, and hence widespread, you're going to be developing a lot of analog computation tools instead. How do you buy potatoes at a market? Your currency could be rods instead of coins, valued by length and material; the price is another length that's displayed and is also a setting for the levers-and-cams machine that cuts your rod to the right amount for the price, the deflection of the scale, and the value rate of the particular type of rod you're paying with. In your advanced civilization the value could be an inverse logarithmic function of the length of the rod (twice as long is 10x the value, perhaps) with the devices designed accordingly, and people looking back on the days of primitive linear cash. The use of a general-purpose slide rule would be associated with technical folk, not because of the use of nonlinear analog scales (familiar to all) but to the unusual process of using numbers to set the scale and read the result.

[(Anonymous)]

The potential hydraulic computers you described could be coupled with perturbation methods. I think the emphasis is going to be a lot more on manual simplification than computing, but that's just a guess.