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Earth Science Technology

What Fossils Will Modern-Day Civilization Leave Behind? (sciencemag.org) 183

Posted by BeauHD from the predicting-the-future dept.
sciencehabit writes: Millions of years from now, advanced humans -- or perhaps visiting aliens -- may dig up the remnants of today's civilizations. What are they likely to find, and how will they interpret our relationship with the creatures around us? A new study reveals that archaeologists will need to rely on bones, not any of our former technology. "If you read a lot of postapocalyptic science fiction, one of the things that disappears in almost all cases is written records, computer records, things like that," says one of the scientists. "There are computer records and code from decades ago that modern computers can't recognize because it's so far out of alignment. So imagine two million years from now... So what are we left with? It's whatever is buried in the ground."

And what will that be? Well, lots of humans, cows, and chickens. And, of course, tons of cats and dogs. "Of all the animals, dogs and cats are more likely to be buried in a manner similar to people," says another scientist. "There are pet cemeteries that are set up similar to human memorial parks. So if anything like that is stumbled upon, that's going to say something different than a pit that people threw a bunch of pigs into randomly. I think it's going to be obvious that we felt differently about dogs and cats versus pigs and cows and chickens."
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What Fossils Will Modern-Day Civilization Leave Behind? More

What Fossils Will Modern-Day Civilization Leave Behind?

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  • They won't find anything (Score:5, Interesting)

    by monkeyzoo ( 3985097 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:05AM (#59594548)

    On geologic timescales, there will be no "fossils" any future beings will likely find...

    "What paltry smudge of artifacts we do leave behind, in those rare corners of the continents where sediment accumulates and is quickly buried—safe from erosion’s continuous defacing—will be extremely unlikely to be exposed at the surface, at any given time, at any given place, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years in the geological future."

    The Anthropocene Is a Joke
    On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]

    • Re:They won't find anything (Score:5, Informative)

      by monkeyzoo ( 3985097 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:07AM (#59594554)

      "Dinosaurs lasted 180 million years—36,000 times as long as recorded human history so far. And we've only found a few miraculously preserved fossils!

      "A cryptic smattering of lakeside footprints represents their entire contribution to the Triassic period. A few bones and footsteps miraculously preserved in New England and Nova Scotia are all that remains from the entire 27-million-year Early Jurassic epoch. No trace of dinosaurs remains whatsoever from the 18-million-year Late Jurassic. A handful of bones from one layer in Maryland represents the entire 45-million-year Early Cretaceous.

      "If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries—it would be virtually impossible to tell.

      "So that’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record. What, then, will a few decades of industrial civilization get us?

      https://www.theatlantic.com/sc... [theatlantic.com]

      • Your very own article points out that our contributions to the sea floor will be noticeable millions of years from now.

        Further I would add that whereas dinosaurs had to get lucky to be fossilized (extremely lucky), humankind builds a LOT with stone. It may be that in our short time, we've built more with stone than there were fossils of the entire dinosaur race.

        • > humankind builds a LOT with stone.
          Not anymore - now we mostly use brick and concrete, which don't last very long. We remain astounded by the durability of ancient Roman concrete, which far outlasts anything we're using today, and has still mostly eroded away in a few short millenia.

      • Re:They won't find anything (Score:5, Interesting)

        by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @03:21AM (#59594648)
        I disagree. Evidence for modern civilisation will be easily detectable. From the distribution of radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing, to plastic particulates, there will be pretty significant and detectable evidence of human civilisation embedded in rocks for millennia to come.

        And even then, with the development of corrosion-resistant alloys and metals, such as stainless steel, aluminium, titanium, there's a high chance something will be preserved and still be identifiable in 100,000 years time. Something as simple as a lost iPhone, dropped in a river, could be preserved and be left practically undamaged for a very long time.

        • From the distribution of radioactive isotopes from nuclear testing,
          For that you need to have an idea that there was a nuclear test somewhere. And after a few decades, those spots are not easy to spot. No one is running around with a geiger counter and a mass spectrometer mapping every square meter of the planet.

          steel, aluminium, titanium, there's a high chance something will be preserved and still be identifiable in 100,000 years time.
          Completely unlikely ... in the long run they all will rot away. Especial

          • Re:They won't find anything (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Åke Malmgren ( 3402337 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @08:57AM (#59595092)
            All steel manufactured after 1945 is slightly radioactive, because the refining requires lots of air, and atmospheric remnants from atomic bomb tests become incorporated in the metal. Wrecks from WWI are harvested when low-background steel [wikipedia.org] is needed. Even when the radionuclides have fully decayed, the stable decay products will remain, in ratios not attainable by natrual processes.

            • That is an interesting point, but means, someone is dedicated looking for an old civilization.
              Perhaps we should try that, too?

              • We do, sort of. Archeologists and geologist study radioactivity and isotope balances in order to date findings. Carbon-14 is probably the most well known method, and is used to date relatively recent (up to tens of thousands of years, IIRC) biological material. Other methods work for older or non-biological findings. A natural nuclear reactor that was active 1.7 billion years ago was found because of the reaction products it created. This leads me to another thought: if global civilization collapsed in a r

          • More to the point stainless steel isn't rough-proof under any normal conditions. As the name says, it just "stains less", it's not "stain-proof" steel. Especially not on geologic timescales. And once rust gets started it doesn't progress all that much slower than in normal steel - in fact it's generally considered a very bad idea to put normal steel in contact with stainless, as the normal steel will begin rusting almost immediately, and the will can easily spread to the stainless.

          • No one is running around with a geiger counter and a mass spectrometer mapping every square meter of the planet.

            No one human using current technologies and without it's intergalactic archaeology Indiana Jones hat on.

            If I were an intelligence (human or otherwise) with the capacity of scouting planets, chances are I'd have some geiger-functioning gizmo around me.

            We are talking about speculative fiction with a bent for hard sci-fi here. In that context, it is not unreasonable to assume *this* cannot happen.

          • And after a few decades, those spots are not easy to spot

            There's no need to find a "spot". Isotopic evidence of nuclear testing is all over the planet, thousands of miles from the testing that caused them.

        • While I don't entirely disagree with you, I think it's worth pointing out that a fair bit of science has historically been just coming up with reasonably credible reasons the way things are as they are.

          Then again, the people who were pretty sure it was 'bad air' that gave you disease, or that baby formula is "obviously" better than breast milk had (in their time) very sound "scientific" reasons for what they believed to be true.

          "what we think we know is fact" != "what actually is fact"

          There are a pretty vas

      • Mining (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @03:31AM (#59594662) Journal

        If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries—it would be virtually impossible to tell.

        No, it would not because any industrial society would have required significant mining operations to provide the resources it needed and we would have seen clear signs of this in the form of artificial and partial discontinuities in the geological record which are simply not there.

        • The over 100,000 mines, most likely gold mines, made by mankind about 5,000 years ago all over southern Africa, were just discovered a decade ago. Why do you think we would "discover" a million year old mine?
          The maya buildings all over south america that recently got discovered were found by radar and lidar satellites. They were completely covered by jungle.

          • Why do you think we would "discover" a million year old mine?

            If we can discover the handful of tiny mines which existed 5,000 years ago (the Grimes Grave [wikipedia.org] flint mines in the UK are another example) which were created by primitive stone age tools how are we not going to see the effect of a massive industrial mining machine that strips huge quantities of minerals from the Earth? There are going to be huge areas with the geological record stripped away in a manner inconsistent with nature....and that's even before we consider the huge spoil heaps and tailings ponds that

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by eth1 ( 94901 )

          The cloud of junk left in higher orbits is going to be even more obvious!

      • "Dinosaurs lasted 180 million years—36,000 times as long as recorded human history so far. And we've only found a few miraculously preserved fossils!

        How many dinosaurs, 7 billions like us? Last time I checked, dinosaurs didn't know how to create complex structures, like the ones made with 99% titanium ; diamonds reserves ; some constructions, etc... and let's not forget nuclear waste... depending on what it is, like I129, 15 million years half-life, will tell our successors that something was going on here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ed_1024 ( 744566 )

        If the dinosaurs had started asteroid mining, then the evidence would be out there, almost undisturbed.

        For human influence, you only have to look closely at the sky and the large amounts of satellites in stable orbits (or the strange debris field that enclosed the Earth). There is stuff of ours on the Moon that will last millions of years, not to mention the other planets...

        • Actually, there's no such thing as a truly stable orbit. You get out near geostationary where there's (very nearly) zero atmospheric drag, and there's plenty that are stable enough on human timescales. But even those tend to need a little station keeping to correct for the constant perturbations by the gravity from the sun, moon and other planets, and especially the solar wind.

          Large asteroids and planetoids can remain in relatively stable orbits over those timescales, since the square-cube law makes them

          • Actually, there's no such thing as a truly stable orbit.

            Of course not. The moon isn't technically in a stable orbit. But there's a world of difference between LEO orbits and ones that will be around for millions or billions of years.

        • They had just started, when they miscalculated the orbital insertion of one of their bigger finds. It was blamed on human dinosaur error. The worst part was that after the disaster, those damn squishy hairy mammals took over the world.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        We can be fairly certain that "in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining" is not the case. Archeological record may not preserve individual artifacts (it is all random chance), but it would preserve signs of mining, plastics, energy production, agriculture. If humanity goes extinct tomorrow, in a million years from now our existence will still be detectable on geological levels by all the trash we produced - from nuclear isotope

        • First off there's no guarantee that dinosaurs would have plastics - plastics are made from oil, and (I think?) oil formation mostly happened after the dinosaurs died out.

          And there is in fact a global layer of radioactive iridium that we assume came from a natural asteroid impact - I don't know if anyone has analyzed it for the no-longer-radioactive decay products of nuclear waste that might have been present at the same time. And in fact there's no guarantee there would be any - current traces are almost e

    • I disagree.

      A lot of things suffer from oxidation and other transformation process, but in the Earth scale, until next civilization (asuming human extinction) could be around 100 millons from now, and in that time, a lot of things disappear, but certain materials clearly not.

      Our mining operations will be appreciable. Nuclear waste and operations too. Even certain type of hard materials like ceramic, jelwery and things like that could remain.

      Any building that remains in metals will collapse but other based on

      • Even more broadly, the distribution of metals on the earth's surface has been drastically altered from what is 'natural'. To the extent that it's possible future scientists, in a few millions years, won't actually have the same understanding of what 'natural' mineral ores look like.

        Deposits of fossil fuels will be much scarcer and of lower quality, too.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
          Plus we've created landfills. Evidence of our refuse will last - organics and non-naturally occurring alloys all mixed together in most unnatural and tiny locations. I believe our refuse dumps alone will be evidence of our existence, standing out on a planet otherwise stripped bare of its easily accessible metals.

          • Quite likely - assuming we don't mine them for raw materials in the future. However, landfills are generally placed in random, maximally uninteresting spots (within distance limitations). With no geologic suggestion that anything of value lies under the sediment, the only way they would be discovered is if someone decided to build a deep basement in the area, or weathering happened to expose it.

      • A lot of things suffer from oxidation and other transformation process...

        On Earth that's true but our civilization has made it further than that. We have left artefacts on the surface of the Moon where there is no atmosphere at all as well as in orbit. While some of the orbital material will be lost to de-orbit and burn up some will move gradually in the reverse direction and should still be there when the sun expands, swallowing the Earth.

      • Erosion will have destroyed everything above the surface. Tectonic activity will have destroyed everything below the surface.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

          Tectonic activity will have destroyed everything below the surface.

          Given enough time, yes. The Earth's surface is constantly renewing itself with new crust being made and old being subducted under some plate or other. But here we're talking billions, not millions of years. And even then it's not a perfect process and does leave patches of very very old crust. That's where one would have to look.

    • Plastics, ceramics, electronics and metal. There will be lots of plastics as well as shaped metal (stainless steel, aluminium, brass and bronze objects) and electronic waste (ICs and circuit boards) in the fossil record. Future archeologists will have millions of tonnes of cruft to sift through.

    • What paltry smudge of artifacts we do leave behind....

      Think about the reverse: what do we NOT leave behind? Even if any record of our existence is purged from the fossil record our impact on the geological record from mining and oil and gas extraction will be permanently etched for all to see.

      The other hugely significant clue that an industrial civilization once existed will be the ratio of radioactive isotopes remaining wherever we bury expended nuclear fuel rods. These will preserve a record of their production and decay in a fission-based reactor for bi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        Plus if the reason we're no longer there is because we finally managed to off ourselves in a nuclear war, the whole planet would be covered with a fine layer of Uranium, some isotopes of which half half-lives (238) in the billions or hundreds of millions (235) of years. That alone would be as significant as the discovery of the layer of Iridium leading to ideas of the bolide catastrophe. Uranium does not naturally occur in a geologic layer across a planet.

        • You realize the entire planet is already covered in uranium, right? It and thorium are literally everywhere, in large part because they have such astoundingly long half-lives (i.e. aren't appreciably radioactive) and readily oxidize so that they can be mineralized on the surface rather than sinking into the core like most of our heavy metals have done.)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

            You realize the entire planet is already covered in uranium, right?

            Not homogenously. Otherwise you could just open a uranium mine anywhere.

      • Sure, but who's going to go digging in mineral-poor areas to discover the collapsed remains of our mining tunnels? Much less notice the tiny holes drilled through rock for oil extraction - I mean dig down 5 feet to either side and there's no evidence that the drilling ever occurred, unless you knew that there used to be oil "bubbles" where the rock has long since subsided.

        The evidence will be there, but it seems unlikely it would be discovered.

        >making any evidence that such a reactor existed a dead-give

    • Bone-meal is a wonderful fertilizer.... I suspect that any bones extracted from the ground in the future will get ground down and used to help with growing crops.

    • At the very least they should find a spike in CO2. Any dedicated paleontologist should find a mass-extinction.

      They might find weird, carbon-rich compounds in rocks. ("Plastics") Which might lead some to speculate about a carbon-rich asteroid impact.

      Proving the "mammal overrun" hypothesis - let alone the "smart mammal" hyothesis - might be difficult. A competing theory might be that chickens escaped the Himalayas and overran the world's native species.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drolli ( 522659 )

      * They may find out scrap metal sites for tanks.
      * they may detect our long dissolved raioactive waste storages
      * They will find things in orbit

  • If you just think about what has sank into decently sized rivers and then covered by sediment, there are a ton of things that will be quite well preserved and available for study, all in an orderly timeline.

    Furthermore these days we don't let rivers wander as much, even large ones, so there's a greater chance some future historian can find an ancient riverbed to analyze.

    But really enough stuff will be transcoded over time and stored carefully that I don't think future historians will lack for data.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:06AM (#59594552)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Nokia 3310's (Score:4, Funny)

    by beepsky ( 6008348 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:13AM (#59594564)
    Nokia 3310's.
    Every single one of them will survive into the next millennium and beyond.

  • Rocks. Radioactive rocks. The descendents of roaches will wonder wtf happened. They'll also find some ancient dolphin hard-to-believe scripts telling them about our dumb species as a warning to all.

  • Do not step on the grass (Score:4, Funny)

    by famebait ( 450028 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:29AM (#59594582)

    They'll think we worshipped grass.

  • The fossils we leave will be nicely teflonated.

  • What fossils will we leave behind? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:59AM (#59594612) Homepage Journal

    Turds laced with microplastics.

  • Most of our shows, books and songs will still be around, outside of a percent that have mostly already died due to copyright and lack of good backup mechanisms decades ago. Lots of other data junk along with it too.

    There's just too much of a drive to hoard data, and it's likely going to be too cheap not to basically keep a couple archives per person sitting around somewhere on every place we make into a home in the galaxy and beyond.

    At some point, we'll be backing up humans casually, and a few exabytes of

  • ..people without cellphones.

    "We believe that these fossils found without a personal communicator in their hand might be a transitional between homo erectus and homo techno sapiens."

  • A Nokia 5190 is what they'll find.

  • In a few of million years the cockroach paleontologists will be puzzling over the end of the Age of Mammals, in much the same way we puzzled over the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs.

    They will find a thin layer of strange materials in the fossil record which corresponds to a rapid increase in global temperature and melting of the ice sheets. In the hotter more humid conditions insects grew to sizes not seen since the carboniferous era, and the Age of the Insects began.

    In the absence of any meteorite impact o

    • I suppose paleontologically speaking the Age of Mammals is already over: the mega fauna are mostly gone and we don't dispose of livestock remains in ways amenable to fossilization. I don't think that the way we usually deal with human remains is amenable, either, but there are so many of us that the Plastic Ape Explosion coda to the Age of Mammals will probably be notable anyway.

  • Containing only participation awards and attendance certificates for industrial training courses.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      Why do we assume that any "other" (as if we ourselves are) so-called "intelligent" life will exist in such a time and place that they can ever find their way to Earth

      Calm down. It's an exercise.

      O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion: What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, An' ev'n devotion! -- Robert Burns

  • Plastic (Score:4, Funny)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:53AM (#59594890)

    It will still be there, when we all are gone.
    Perhaps they'll find a Baby Yoda figurine and deduct that it was done in our image.

  • Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell

  • Silicon chips, if they don#t get grinded to sand again.
    Perhaps plastics - but that is doubtful.

  • The Statue of Liberty (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @08:20AM (#59595002)
    YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! DAMN YOU! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

    Filter error: /. is bad at detecting when caps is appropriate. Please let me make my post.
  • Stone and brick do not decay, compared to bones and teeth. We are leaving behind an over abundance of bricks, concrete, paved roads with gravel in the aggregate, cement, and glass. Steel and metals would have corroded away. Spectacles, etched glass, ceramic pottery, dishes, ... Plastics too. But these artifacts could remain.

    Fossils? Very unlikely.

  • Really? What's wrong with graveyard?

  • Tunnels will be our lasting legacy. Especially where they have been made in places with little geological activity. They will preserve tool marks and are erosion resistant. Man made isotopes will be left in the soil from things like metal refining and nuclear activities. These will last for a very long time. We have left our marks on the moon and Mars and these will last for millions of years. Satellites like Voyager will last until they crash or are consumed by something in space. Metal objects like battle

    • "Satellites like Voyager will last until they crash or are consumed by something "

      I don't think those are satellites. And there is another something to consider
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • I am corrected, they are indeed not satelites and should be called probes. Too little sleep. My point on their lasting millions, perhaps billions of years stands though.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Tunnels do indeed leak and the surface will eventually succumb - nothing is permanent. If nothing else the mountain they are dug in will eventually erode away. It takes very little time in geological terms to wipe out a chain of mountains.

        Those tunnels built in dry areas like Death Valley will leak very slowly and will last the longest. Build a tunnel, or a series of tunnels in a very dry area that is geologically stable, with little moisture and in a good position for the continental plates and that tunnel

  • Lots and lots of litte plastic bags of dog poop, especially in the Austin area.
  • plastic and radiation - both of which will be around a long, long time.
  • and mostly plastic everything else
  • I do have a gold-plated physical dogecoin (but without the QR private key, just a novelty blank). So that should survive at least.
  • We've dug up so many skeletons of dinosaurs and other creatures, that I like to entertain the fantasy that researchers thousands (or millions) of years in the future will think we coexisted with them, since we'll all be buried on the same archaeological plane.
  • There is an interesting book written about the future history of humanity that spans the next 2 billion years - First and Last Men. What is most fascinating to me is that the book was written in 1920 so it reveals much about the mind of the writer from a century ago and, quite frankly, we haven't progressed much since then in terms of our understanding of science, the world or humanity, other than developing what they already knew in more detail...
  • "Something as simple as a lost iPhone, dropped in a river, could be preserved and be left practically undamaged for a very long time."

    Those doing microsoldering to repair Macs and iPhones report that a single exposure to water, fresh or salt, begin corroding the minature device components immediately. Louis Rossmann and iPadRehab have several videos showing such corrosion and what it takes to fix the device. I doubt that any smartphone would survive a 100 years under water, much less 100,000 years unde

  • Practicing archeologists have told me, perhaps slightly in jest, that our day will be recognized by future archeologists by the ubiquity of ceramic coated drywall and deck screws. The hardened steel ones will be mostly degraded, but the ceramic coated ones and stainless ones are going to form a recognizable artifact layer.

  • Toilets will be one of the last traces of our existence. Unlike metal or ordinary concrete, a good ceramic toilet will last almost forever. Vast numbers of these will be found in certain parts of the world.

    The alien visitors will puzzle over these for a while and eventually assume that these glistening works of art are religious objects. They will build a theoretical model of our lifestyle and rituals with the sacred bowls.

  • And we are starting to store data in DNA.

    I want a message in mine to say: "This human is a genetically unmodified organism."

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