Long-Lived Civilization May Be a Pipe-Dream
Last edited Thu Apr 19, 2018, 07:18 PM - Edit history (1)
Short but interesting, and sad.
Humans are a bit of a dysfunctional species I fear.
The two astrophysicists have turned one of the great questions in science into a way of examining the down-to-earth consequences of global warming, the pollution of the oceans with indestructible polymers, and the wholesale destruction of species in the last 300 years.
They put an innocent question: if there had been an advanced technological and industrial civilisation on Earth several hundred million years ago, how could anyone know? What marks would have been left by a race of intelligent reptiles with motorised transport, housing estates, international trade and an arms race?
In what they call the Silurian hypothesis a reference not to the geological period long before the first creatures crawled from the sea onto the empty continents, but to a 1970 episode of the British television serial Dr Who they turn to the only testbed available to contemporary Earthlings: the evidence of the Anthropocene, the geologists name for a new era that could be considered to have commenced with the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/long-lived-civilization-may-be-a-pipe-dream/
Girard442
(6,329 posts)A lot of things like small dams and other water control features have not been well maintained. It's amazing how nature chews those things to shreds in less than a century -- an eyeblink in geological time. The Silurian hypothesis may be a fun yarn, but it's not completely implausible.
DetlefK
(16,437 posts)All the metal in our sewage-systems, our underground-cables, our railways and cars, our buildings, our electricity poles and streetlights, our ships and planes and tanks and cannons... Humanity has created a layer that is enriched in metal and that cannot be explained by geological processes.
(Not my idea. Read that somewhere. Maybe Stephen Baxter.)
shraby
(21,946 posts)hatrack
(60,346 posts).
Pluvious
(4,681 posts)Excellent !!
MosheFeingold
(3,051 posts)I plan on being buried in an elaborate tomb with an aluminum confetti gun, triggered by something that won't decay.
I want to give that future archeologist a story to tell at cocktail parties.
Ukrainian Yankee
(89 posts)And we are not exempt!