Interesting scenario

[ToukieToucan]

Imagine that archaeologists would find remains of a very ancient civilization: what for an impact would  this discovery have on society and what kind of technology would they have, or another scenario: What would a future civilization make up out of our tech and beliefs if our entire civilization would freeze in time (due to an eruption of yellowstone for example)?

Edited April 6, 2016 by ToukieToucan

[p1t1o]

I'm sure I have read somewhere that if human civilisation died out, lets say everyone died overnight for some reason, that very little of what we leave behind would survive for more than a few hundred years or maybe some things a millenia or two. The vast majority of our buildings are made of concrete/steel/glass/wood, all of which will crumble and corrode to rubble in only a few hundred years, tops. High technology items like electronics would last even less time (without people to tend them) and apparently without human intervention, plants, trees and animals will reclaim the cities within years. Even all of our plastic trash would degrade.

So what could a future civilisation (say in 10,000 years) find? Probably not all that much, a concrete-dust layer laced with hydrocarbons in sediments and soil cores, a few large lumps of rust, maybe some stores of radioactive waste and the remains of the Svaldbard seed bank.

Even from that though you could deduce that we had reached a certain technology level, had a certain level of excess resources (from which you could infer quality of life levels) and went about certain activities. But I'm sure there would be a lot of guesswork.

 

On another note, I've fantasised a lot about writing a sci-fi book about present-day or forseeable-future humans finding the remains of an ancient civilisation on Earth (or elsewhere within the solar system), buried very deeply and consisting of mountain-sized machines of unknown purpose, like the machine from Forbidden Planet.

 

[ToukieToucan]

6 hours ago, p1t1o said:

I'm sure I have read somewhere that if human civilisation died out, lets say everyone died overnight for some reason, that very little of what we leave behind would survive for more than a few hundred years or maybe some things a millenia or two. The vast majority of our buildings are made of concrete/steel/glass/wood, all of which will crumble and corrode to rubble in only a few hundred years, tops. High technology items like electronics would last even less time (without people to tend them) and apparently without human intervention, plants, trees and animals will reclaim the cities within years. Even all of our plastic trash would degrade.

So what could a future civilisation (say in 10,000 years) find? Probably not all that much, a concrete-dust layer laced with hydrocarbons in sediments and soil cores, a few large lumps of rust, maybe some stores of radioactive waste and the remains of the Svaldbard seed bank.

Even from that though you could deduce that we had reached a certain technology level, had a certain level of excess resources (from which you could infer quality of life levels) and went about certain activities. But I'm sure there would be a lot of guesswork.

 

On another note, I've fantasised a lot about writing a sci-fi book about present-day or forseeable-future humans finding the remains of an ancient civilisation on Earth (or elsewhere within the solar system), buried very deeply and consisting of mountain-sized machines of unknown purpose, like the machine from Forbidden Planet.

 

But what about the traces we left in space? I'm pretty sure there would be atleast a couple of satellites eternally orbiting our/other planets.

[p1t1o]

1 minute ago, ToukieToucan said:

But what about the traces we left in space? I'm pretty sure there would be atleast a couple of satellites eternally orbiting our/other planets.

Perhaps some object would remain there for enough time, but really the stuff in space is a very, very tiny portion of our civilisation. Then you've got orbital decay (even objects in high orbit will have their orbits affected by sunlight), vacuum ablation (even solid monolithic bits of metal will eventually decay to dust left to their own devices in space), micrometeroids, cosmic radiation, orbital perturbations etc etc.

Over 10millenia artificial satellites will receive a great deal of punishment and if there is anything left after that long it won't be in any great condition. Kessler syndrome may rear its ugly head once there are no humans around to keep all of those sattelites nice and neatly herded, especially over such a long time.

Its not that absolutely nothing will remain, but that starkly few things that we perceive as permanent have any kind of lifetime at all over such timescales.

Only the most sturdy things, made out of the most chemically stable stuff, has any chance. Even all of the plastic trash floating around in the pacific will have degraded and dissolved by then.

I have to assume that a dedicated effort towards archeology by a future species would eventually be able to unearth a decent collection of relics and remains, but there are scant few objects remaining from civilisation 10millenia ago today, and those which do survive are things like stone tools, which are far more resilient than 99.99% of the stuff that we have around.

If you want to leave a really long lasting mark, carve your name deeply into the wall of a natural (inland!) cave, preferably some distance above sea level, far from any flood plains, areas of tectonic activity, tornado/hurricane hotspots, etc. It could be one of the last traces of our civilisation! I think some of the earliest signs of intelligent life that we know about are cave paintings - so long lived as they are protected from the elements, carved or painted onto solid rock and in a geologically and meteorologically stable place.