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> Not a bad contribution to science starting from a sci-fi premise!

1. Ancient civilization enters industrial and post-industrial era.

2. Carbon levels rise, so do global temperatures.

3. In a desperate attempt to save themselves they try geo-engineering by slamming a massive asteroid in the too hot and thus unpopulated area of Yucatan.

4. Goes wrong.

I can see it working as sci-fi novel

If you write it, I'll buy it.

This reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer

As far as geo-engineering goes, I think what they'd be wanting to do is cause a super-volcano or three. You really don't want to be pulling asteroids down - just a couple of finely place nukes will do. Get a volcano going, put a few tons of sulphur in the air and you have a nice cooling effect. Just be careful of the unintended tsunami. Should probably just evacuate Iceland and keep popping the volcanoes until it's cool again.

Is there any theory that suposes this might happened, on a small scale, and the temps (and crust) warm? Could that loosen things up, so to speak, and trigger more volcanic activity?

Perhaps the asteroid was just an asteroid mining operation gone horribly wrong, or some form of planet killing warfare?

Maybe the Earth-based technological civilization attracted the attention of a space-faring civilization, who dropped an asteroid to wipe out the Earth civilization (successfully, as it turns out).

Which means maybe we should be a bit more careful about bleating our existence out into the universe these days...

People who had this thought have also liked "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" by Liu Cixin :) (These are part 2 and 3 in the "Three Body Problem" series.)

And in the 1970s by Gregory Benford, In the Ocean of Night.

And Footfall by Niven and Pournelle. And the Galacti Milieu series by Julian May.

Also 'The Forge of God' [0] by Greg Bear [1987]:

"We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why. Planetisms that don't know enough to keep quiet, get eaten".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God

Yes, it makes you realize this pop song from the seventies is not only incredibly cheesy but could be catastrophically dangerous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BrSVOOK610

How about:

- bacteria with engineered enzymes for recycling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16856246) mutate/go wild and wipe out most/all traces of civilization

- what we can find today is just slightly elevated levels of whatever these bacteria mostly ignored.

Here's the paper:

https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...

That’s the one! I was hoping someone would be interested enough to fact check me :-)

He’s not too far off what this article suggests as a marker of civilization in the past. But they have positives!

“Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).”

What happens to the atmosphere when you suck all the oxygen out of the oceans?

Also, how long would it take for the oceans to reabsorb that oxygen? Do the current records follow these expectations?

Perhaps there are proxy signals? For example, there's ocean re-oxygenation faster (or slower?) than expected? Could a species that required more oxygen tip the scales?

Wouldn't you find human artifacts all over the place even 60 million years from now? We have fossils much older than that, so wouldn't many many objects like gold wedding rings be around 60 million years from now?

I don't think any of that would necessarily be indicative of civilization, though.

Yes, absolutely. The article is borderline clickbait. If there were a technological civilization on Earth in the past, we would have detected it by now. Concentrations of radioisotopes, industrial ceramics, signs of large excavations in the fossil record... those are just a few.

Those are just few that presuppose it would have to be an industrial civilization at our level ("concentrations of radioisotopes")...

Radioisotopes decay; which isotopes are you thinking of that have half-lives of millions of years and would be found in detectable quantities?

(I was going to raise the same point, thinking of low-background steel and the effects of nuclear testing on our atmosphere, but after some more reading it appears that most of those isotopes decay over shorter periods or weren't sufficiently elevated to be discernible from the background, if it were being examined in the far future.)

Radioisotopes decay, but it is the ratio that is important. We know, for example, that a natural (we assume?) nuclear reactor occurred in Africa 1.8bn years ago due the different isotopic concentration of uranium deposits from that era.

Wondering about this as well. INAG, but I think fossils are extremely rare relative to population. And things like wedding rings will have disintegrated after just a few million years. But still, you'd think some of them would survive under conditions similar to those that preserved dino skeletons?

That was my thinking as well, though apparently geologists are pretty pessimistic about both the survival of human artifacts and the probability that someone would find the rare oddballs that did survive.

Plus, it’s possible that some hypothetical dino civilization mastered bio-degradable materials early on before taking to the stars ;-)

and settled the ...delta quadrant it was iirc? :)

Just a misread of the data by a well-intentioned scientist and some meddling humans.

And now they're back, to reclaim what was once theirs.

Invasion of the Space Dinos!

That is more-or-less the plot of more than one episode of Dr Who:

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship_(TV_st...

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Silurian

"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" was mildly disappointing given the amazing ridiculousness of the title, but "The Hungry Earth" / "Cold Blood" is a top-notch two-part episode. It feels so authentically human in both the highs and the lows.

Also reminiscent of an episode of Voyager where dinosaurs had evolved on earth millions of years before humans and started exploring space.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode)

How optimistic are geologists regarding the survival of bones? Or small insects?

They discuss that in the article. Essentially everything would be turned asunder by the changing of the earths crust. The oldest part of the earths crust is something like 1.7 million years.

Then how would we have dinosaur bones from 65 million years ago +?

Fossils represent a very tiny portion of whatever was there at that time.

Yes, but the point is the 1.7 M number for total crust turnover can't be valid, as none of that tiny portion would still exist.

I find it hard to believe that there won't be at least some human fossils lying around 60 million years from now.

It’s an angle that a funeral directors could use as a selling point - Fossilisation.

see Ancient Egypt

In Gene Wolfe's SF/fantasy tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, set very far in the future, he refers to corpses preserved by extreme means and rendered essentially indestructible and basically just cluttering up the world.

We don't have bones, we have fossils.

Fossilized bones (plus the occasional feather/tissue), and way to miss the point.

Not trying to be pedantic but the devil is in the details.

Bones are common, fossils are formed by a relatively rare geologic process. Fossilization supplants slow to rot organic material with stone, embedding it in the strata, in just the right conditions. It's unclear to me what (if any) industrial rememants would become fossilized and if they'd be recognizable as such.

Given that pillow lavas can be recognised in some eclogite facies rocks, I think a porcelain toilet would stand a good chance of remaining recognisable at all the way to granulite or eclogite facies, as long as it is not too deformed.

Pyramids? Statues? Stuff that is already made of stone to start with?

How long has it taken the pyramids to decay to their current status?

If I'm not mistaken, Greenland has crust from over 3 billion years ago. 1.7 million years ago is nothing, I don't know where you got that number from but it is wrong.

The article.

“For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.”

The article refers to ancient surface, as in, the oldest place that we can find that has continuously been an exposed surface. The take away is that most areas don't remain stable at the surface, either they erode away, or get buried via sedimentation.

The article is in no way stating the oldest bit of the Earth's crust is 1.8 million years old. Crust has a specific meaning, the chemically differentiated rocks at the surface i.e. everything but the very very rare bits of exposed mantle. Oldest oceanic crust is <200 Ma, oldest continental crust dates to the Hadean (4.4 Ga, if you set the bar at only zircons).

All comments in a thread based on an article should be read in that context. Unless, of course, the links are never followed and we’re just here to massage each other’s preconceptions.

As does much of northern Canada. However, the ancient rock, billions of old as it may be, wasn't surface rock 1.7 million years ago. It's only been surfaced since through erosion.

> The oldest part of the earths crust is something like 1.7 million years.

Wasn't the article more meaning "the oldest part of the earths crust, that's still on the surface"?

eg everything else has been buried, or destroyed, via other geological processes

This is kind of the "why aren't we all buried in bones" question that YECs raise. Very little makes it into the fossil record -- fossilization is sensitive to a lot of different conditions, and then someone's gotta find it later besides.

Going past a few tens of thousands of years, fossils start to either be of very large things, or of very large communities of small things.

I'd be surprised if any future scientists could find even a single piece of modern jewelry a million years from now.

Why though? At least gold is very nonreactive, isn't it?

It's also extremely soft (for a metal). Fossils survive in part because they are reactive and become harder in certain specific conditions.

It's also very soft

Sure, but that doesn't make it immune to the passage of time.

Take Mesoamerican gold for instance: only about a thousand years have passed since much of it was made by humans, but it's still considered a rare and valuable archaeological find. (Granted, it was produced in smaller quantities than today.)

Gold is melted by fires; gets scattered and buried by a million years of bioaccumulation; seas move, rivers appear or disappear, continents drift a little, climate changes, glaciers come and go and further destroy evidence.

Google is feeding me a lot of really dumb stuff at the moment when trying to come up with numbers, but I'd guesstimate that most traces of our civilization would be buried a hundred feet below the surface after a million years' time. That makes it pretty difficult to find small things.

Mesoamerican gold was looted and melted down wholesale (along with a lot more silver) by the Spanish. The artefacts were considered unchristian and so were deliberately destroyed, and this has meant that we have barely a fragment of the artistry of the Inca and Aztec.

There is some hope though! It's thought that the melting process was done in Spain so as to allow a reliable royal assay, if so then some of the ships that sank in the trade may have holds full of crushed and squashed precious artefacts.

That’s interesting, can you provide any citations?

Mesoamerican gold is quite common in the gilded church alters of Spain.

There are tons of small fossils. There’s a 50M year old fish in my son's room that’s about an inch long.

Granted the coral fossil in the living room is many small animals, but it’s not a big object.

Right, I had fossils like that as a kid too, and even had a friend with a ranch in the East Bay that had an exposed fossilized seabed with lots of fossilized shells.

But typically those are extracted from deposits with lots of similar pieces, like the three-foot-long slab of fossilized seabed I had. Professionals might carefully carve something like that up and turn it into lots of small fossils of fish, but they all came from the same chunk of rock.

That's what I meant by "large communities of small things".

So, it's possible that some bunker of physical storage of wealth, with gold bars for instance, will survive a hundred thousand years longer than most of the rest of our civilization. Or, maybe one of our many many landfill deposits will end up with just the right conditions to preserve for a long time the preservable stuff. But I don't think bits of gold jewelry will just be sifted out of the dirt.

Come to think of it, the best bet for evidence of our civilization a million years from now are currently the bits we've left behind on the moon, and Musk's roadster! (The latest calculations have a 6% chance of it crashing back to Earth within the next 3.5 million years -- but it will continue to swing back around every hundred years or so until then.)

What about steel? Carbon fiber? It’s hard to imagine that fossils survive while a million tons of steel framing for a skyscraper would not.

The process of fossilization by definition replaces organic material with very hard minerals. The fossils we find today are the ones that by chance have fossilized into the hardest minerals under the best conditions for preservation -- buried in the right kind of mud at the time, or by tar more recently, or in ice, or in a bed of limestone.

I can find one not-great reference suggesting that carbon fiber items are expected to be in landfills for on the order of hundreds of years -- not very long in geological scales. Steel rusts and degrades spectacularly easy, and a lot of the steel we've produced is exposed to conditions helping it along.

Neither of these items is susceptible to the process of fossilization; it's that process that helps preserve some things for a long time. The stuff we make has to last that long all by itself, and we're not that good at making things yet.

I'd expect ceramics to survive better than steel. A lot of our archaeological artefacts from former human civilisations are ceramic.

I had some interest in this question a decade or two back. What I found from my searches was that it was thought that some human-made ceramics were tough enough to last a million years, pretty much nothing else. How much longer, IDK. Ice sheets will wipe out large structures like the dams and pyramids, but how long will it take to destroy or scatter the remains so that they are not recognizable?

Gold is soft (and heavy), it will be ground to flakes or completely misshapen over millions of years. Erosion and tectonic keep everything moving.

Gold is soft but Amber is softer and we've found intact insects encased in that substance which are 230 million years old*. You wouldn't be likely to find a complete car or something in 60 million years but there will certainly be plenty of artifacts which were preserved through sheer luck. I wouldn't be surprised if most small manifactured objects would survive in archeologically recognizable form if they were accidentally lost in an anoxic environment. For example, imagine you lose your iPhone when out in a swamp. Drop a phone in something as thick as Pluff Mud, which is abiotic below the surface, and you've basically encased it in the exact kind of environment which has produces the best fossils we've yet found.

My thought is how likely is it that crustal movements would bury things too deep on that timescale? If stuff stayed near the surface, that's one thing, but would it?

We also see things trapped in glaciers, but if the timescale is large enough for all the glaciers to have melted...

Over 20 years ago, I read a good sci-fi story which I would love to see in a movie; the book is “The Ice People” by Barjavel (French author).

Article on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_nov...

Highly recommended! At least from my recollection!

Excellent book

What about the ring of debris in geostationary orbit? Will that decay in 60M years?

And the stuff at the Lagrange points, assumedly in rather stable orbits.

To answer both of your questions: none of that stuff will be in orbit in 60m years.

Geostationary is only stationary in relation to a specific point on earth (geo). It just means it stays above a point on earth. It requires regular minor adjustments.

L1, L2, and L3 aren't stable. L4 and L5 are... but you would still need to adjust for the earth and moon not being perfect spheres; the moon moving slowly away from earth; tidal variations; solar wind; debris; etc.

L4 and L5 would last the longest, but not 60m years.

Could you move in a moon orbit?

Same problem. I don't think it could be in orbit.

Someone else mentioned the objects we've placed on the moon. Seems to me that those would last the longest. The moon gets hit by small meteorites daily, but nothing that would destroy what's up there.

>none of that stuff will be in orbit in 60m years. where will it go? it wouldn't have the drag or the delta-v to reenter. i think the parent meant geostationary altitude, but "geostationary" orbits are "relatively" cyclically stable. most significant perturbations, you mentioned some, are all <100 year cycles. If there was another spacefaring civilization >60m years ago i think there would be evidence, in orbit.

What about the rovers, plaques, and flags on the moon?

> What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into the future

Nuclear reactors are recognizable for their crazy isotope distributions for billions of years. Geosynchronous sattelites might be stable for that long, too. The anthropocene mass extinction is likely to show up in the fossil record, and the rapid climate change based on burning carbon out of the ground (which doesn't match the isotope mix of atmospheric carbon) will likewise be detectable from sediment.

But I suppose that the weird isotope distribution caused by nuclear reactors affects areas so small, that they would be incredibly unlikely to be detected?

It's not like you can smell it, but these things exist (from natural fission chain reactions, not progenitor civilizations!) and have been discovered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

Hi Peter,

I am giving a talk on my Masters project this week at the University of Hartford. I was doing some background reading a found this thread and your comment! Interestingly the Atlantic published article last year abut a new report (Nature Scientific Reports) that hinges on my Masters work: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/the-exti...

We need to have a beer some time and catch up!

I hope it was okay to share your story! It's honestly one of the most inspirational science research stories I know of.

Turning sci-fi into science speaks volumes to your creativity and intellectual capacity to run an idea to ground.

> if some other advanced industrial civilization had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know?

Wastes, particularly those that get everywhere such as plastics.

I am told that one long-term marker of human presence on earth at this time is that strata being laid down at present contain small pieces of plastics.

See "The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221330541...

Also:

"Human impact has created a 'plastic planet'" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160127083854.h...

http://www.newsweek.com/theres-even-more-plastic-ocean-floor...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/17/tiny-pla...

edit Even though it will change over time into something other than plastic,

1) it will affect the composition of rocks being formed now

2) through sheer ubiquity, some of it is likely to enter into the fossil record.

I have a hard time believing plastics will persist as plastics. It doesn't take much heat to denature most plastic, and geologic sediments tend to experience a good bit of pressure and heat over time.

I doubt that they will be the same after a few million years, no. But what kind of rock will it make? Won't it be unlike anything else?

Aren't plastics hydrocarbons? Would the hydrogen be driven off (cracked) leaving something like coal.

I think that we might be more likely to find concentrations of metals left over from artifacts of civilization. If so, would these look different from naturally occuring metals?

Yes - I find it hard to imagine I-beams couldn’t be found embedded in a geological layer somewhere.

Very few large things make it into the fossil record ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16837795 ), and a small fraction of those are discovered. It's possible, but I-beams are rare compared to plastic particles, which are basically carpeting the seabeds, rivers and beaches now.

"microplastics everywhere". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43363545

"Microplastic pollution in oceans is far worse than feared, say scientists", "pervasive and persistent nature" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/micropla...

"The deep sea is a major sink for microplastic debris" http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royopensci/1/...

We don't know what the effect of millions of years on this debris will be, but I am suggesting that due to the fact of the human species as a geological force, most of the rocks from this era will be a bit unusual in composition.

I-beams would dissolve into rust very quickly.

Your best bet for metals might be gold as it is not typically reactive with water or oxygen. And as a reminder, we do sometimes find solid blobs of gold... :-)

Agreed about the gold. That came to mind also.

I also agree that the I-beams would rust away, as would rebar embedded in concrete. Would they remain as identifiable shapes or would the material migrate?

"remain as identifiable shapes" is basically fossilisation, which does happen. And it likely applies to I-beams as much as it does to coke cans, plastic bottles and cigarette buts. Except that the latter are going to be much more numerous.

So you're pretty sure the OP's geologist friend is mistaken?

I'm not certain of anything, but as for "OP's geologist friend" I would like to hear the comments of someone with the relevant domain knowledge on the long-term fate of all of these plastic particles.

Maybe WE are the waste.... Former civilization created organic automatons for amusement. The civilization is long gone, but their relics continue on to this day in the form of 'life'.

If you love fictional settings based on such concepts, check out Numenera [0]: A "hyper sci-fi" set a billion years in the Earth's future, after at least 8 great civilizations have come and gone, leaving the planet covered with the effects and remnants of incomprehensible technology.

Also has a computer RPG [1] by some of the people behind Planescape: Torment.

[0] http://numenera.com

[1] https://www.gog.com/game/torment_tides_of_numenera

You might enjoy Marooned In Real Time, in which a few humans accidentally persist 50 million years past the seeming annihilation of the rest of the human race.

I'm confused though - the oldest fossils are 3-4 Billion years old? Is the hypothesis that we just haven't stumbled on creatures of this time?

Sure, the KT event isn’t the result of ancient civilization, there's nothing saying we couldn’t have had civilization at some other point in time, or that didn’t leave a record noticeable to us from that time.

They cremated their dead for fear their decaying bodies would corrupt the Earth (or their karma or their gods or whatever). And voila, they're gone.

This is implausible; you're assuming that every civilizational stage from every point in this hypothetical species development would have had the same burial practices?

Though, I'll grant it's possible they could've been soft-bodied creatures that leave very little in the fossil record or might otherwise look ambiguous to us. A future civilization looking back on human fossils might think we lived no differently than any other Hominidae. Anatomically modern humans have been around for ~2.5 million years, if our civilization were to end in even another couple million years that would still be a fairly tiny window in which we developed the intelligence to create civilization and then went extinct. If some jellyfish species developed human-level intelligence 300 million years ago and then went extinct in the same window, it's entirely possible we wouldn't be able to recognize the difference between their fossils and those of their less intelligent ancestors/descendants.

I'm sure it's a dumb question, but it's a genuine one. How do we know that the Yucatan crater is from an asteroid, and not from some kind of man-made explosion created by an advanced civilization?

Bomb explosions look fundamentally different from meteorites. Both may be modeled by modern tech.

Basically: because it has a lot of characteristics in common with all the other, better preserved, asteroid craters we know of. So our hypothetical advanced civilization would have to have deliberately mimicked all the little details of an asteroid impact, not just created a big explosion using some other method. That's possible, of course, and if they did it well enough we'd never know. But it seems much more plausible that it was an asteroid impact.

Maybe they had started asteroid minding and in an attempt to bring one into local orbit, it went horribly wrong.

It's definitely an asteroid.

What we can't know is if someone aimed it there.

> What does humankind make that would survive 60 million years into the future, and if some other advanced industrial civilization had existed 60 million years ago, how would we know?

I wonder if a swarm of artificial satellites that are little more than time capsules on various highly stable orbits, combined with radioactive markers/beacons on the moon that is arranged to somehow point towards the swarm, might survive that long? The moon's orbit is stable on the order of billions of years [1], but surface impacts might bury any artifacts we leave, so radiation is likely the only way an artifact can stand out millions of years from now.

If the swarm is a solid procession of one satellite passing near the Earth once every 50 years, then the markers' arrangement might be able to point to that intersection somehow. Bonus points if we can figure out passively-controlled, self-repairing solar sails for better detection. I haven't sketched the math yet though, so I don't know if we're talking about more satellites than we can create (would more than likely require von Neumann mining bots on an asteroid to produce, and definitely more mass than we can realistically lift at this time).

This has the advantage of letting us continuously launch updated capsules, as well as capture and update probes (like modifying a massive continuous loop) if our civilization lives that long.

I really Iaian Banks' idea of a civilization "restart button": deep space-resident AI-manned ships that all but just wander and hibernate within vast gulfs of vacuum, equipped with the tech necessary to reboot their civilization, and run silent all the time except when they opt-out of the service. That requires AGI and a fictional inexhaustible energy source to pull off, so we have to settle for what we can do for now.

[1] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/19658/what-def...

Fun fact, Yucatan means "I do not understand".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucat%C3%A1n#Origin_of_%22Yuca...

The page provides several alternatives, ending with "the Chontal Maya people refer to themselves as the Yokot'anob or the Yokot'an, meaning "the speakers of Yoko ochoco." Thus Yucatan most likely derives from Yokot'an."

While this is marked as "citation needed", given the information provided, it seems illogical to prefer one of the other explanations just because it sounds more amusing.

Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chontal_Maya which seems to at least confirm the term "Yokot'an" exists.

It is probably specious reasoning to assume that the name originated at the moment the Spanish first met the indigenous people, but it seems to be such a good story that most don't question it, even when they are debating the different possibilities.

What about artifacts on the Moon?

Long since buried by moon dust.

I'm unclear why they would be buried, there's no Moon-wind storms as far as I know.

Footprints from the Apollo missions can still be seen.

Anyways, I was thinking that the metal from the spacecraft wouldn't have gone through the weathering/oxidation that anything man-made still on earth would go through.

Long poles anchored everywhere around the moon.

Even if some of them will get covered by dust and some get destroyed by asteroid impacts, the others will remain visible.

You don't get a better anoxic environment than space!

Moon artifacts would be there for a very very long time, and yes there would be no burying, techtonic activity, or oxidizing. Only impact events and solar wind really change the moon, the former is rare now and the latter insignificant. Evidence of a human presence on the moon will be there for potentially at least a billion years. The footprints might last that long, and actual artifacts made of metal (including gold) surely will.

One of my favorite sci fi stories posited that the civilization was centered on the land that is currently Antarctica and the disaster that destroyed it shifted the earth, moving that continent to the South Pole. Prior to the event, it was a lush South American style landscape.

Maybe we are just looking in the wrong place for our evidence. ;)

We dig up numerous and various animal remains from dozens of millions of years ago. Some are pretty well preserved.

While any particular structure has a very low probability to be preserved in 60M years, some specimens of ubiquitous artificial structures have reasonably good odds of survival. Something like a coke bottle would more likely signal a part industrial civilization.

Interesting. Thank you for that.

Some years ago a friend of mine coily posed this same question to me

In this part, I think you meant coyly which has a different meaning from coily.

Yup, my undergrad journalism profs would be moritified. In my defense, it was early and I was still working on my first coffee.

If I had a penny for each time I used the wrong word I'd be riff.

"But how would you know? So my friend, as part of his research, went taking samples of his cenospheres from around the globe. What he found was interesting: namely, the further one gets from the Yucatan (where scientists had already validated there was an asteroid strike), the cenospheres get smaller. The big heavy ones precipitated out of the air closest to the Yucatan asteroid strike. Hardly likely to be coincidence."

I am reminded of the famous talk by Richard about "where does fire come from, where does. plant get Carbon, well it gets it from the AIR, and it grabs water from the earth, and the flame that you see in fire is the energy from the sun being released!" (Paraphrasing, [0] )

so my point is, that if you look at Plant Life distribution and look at all of South America, with their dense rain-forest plant biome - you have a crap ton of plants which may have had the ability to absorb more carbon based on the Yucatan crater (gulf of Mexico) and thus thrive based on the abundance of the carbon flood that happened during this impact.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifk6iuLQk28

This is the best explanation of fire/plants/atmosphere that I have ever heard.

---

Question:

Why would oil concentrations happen in the places they do over many billions of years?

So why would the seemingly devoid-of-water places on earth (Middle East) be oil rich, where, at the same time, South America also has oil rich deposits?

The idea being that they are carbon-rich underlayments that become oil under pressure.

Or, how "soluble" (for lack of a better term) is carbon in Magma. i.e. how can carbon be dealt with in a magma stream other than heat and pressure which results in oil deposits over time?

So, any geologists who can educate me would be appreciated.

This article is beginning to convince me:

https://www.upi.com/Vast-expanse-of-melting-carbon-found-ben...

estimate the amount of carbon trapped in Earth's upper mantle. Scientists suggest there's as much as 100 trillion metric tons of CO2 stored there.*

So based on this data point and the comments from Richard, I think that life is a function much like the sodium-potassium pump, and oil is a function of the subduction plate tectonics which converts carbon to oil over millennia....

We will always have oil. Just how fast can we consume vs. how fast can earth produce. Supply and demand is a. universal constant.

/speculation.