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Comment by TheHumanist | Hacker News Reader

That's a frustrating response, because you must surely understand as a whole what they are saying.

Artifacts that would have been used by these civilizations, whatever those may have been.

Its a reasonable question - what human made artifacts would survive for hundreds of millions of years? Would concrete and steel buildings still be intact after hundreds of millions of years of erosion and weathering? Would objects in a 5 story deep basement be intact? Would even something we placed on the moon be visible after a 500 million years of micrometeorite impacts?

Erosion would happen, but also icebergs would wipe out anything like buildings during the next ice age. And eventually subduction would consume the existing earth’s surface into the inner molten layer, leaving behind zero trace, but that might take hundreds of millions of years.

Cratons don't get subducted, that's a common misconception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton

Interesting! Thank you. So craton areas, say, near the equator where icebergs may not reach, could possibly contain remnants from indefinitely old civilizations?

Which exact artifacts do you have in mind that won't desintegrate in a few hundred million years? Pyramids won't last even one million and they're not among the most fragile products of human civilization.

You may have confused geology with archeology, they operate on completely different time scales.

Coins in the right conditions last two thousand years easily (I collect ancient coins, have some that are 2500 years old that are in excellent condition). I expect in the right conditions some would last a few hundred million years. There's plenty of other non-biodegradable, chemically inert, discoverable things like stainless steel tools, gold jewelry, and other artifacts that humans make that could easily persist for millions of years.

I have no idea if a coin can last 100 million years under excellent conditions, but just to contextualize:

The difference between a coin lasting a thousand (10^3) years and 100 million years (10^8) is five orders of magnitude.

That's the difference between 1,000 years and...3 days.

"I collect sandwiches. I have some that are 3 days old and in excellent condition. I expect that in the right conditions one could last 1000 years"

As soon as coins appear in a geologic stata they become the most common archaeological artifacts found from humans, and at this point we've got hundreds of billions of them spread all over the globe with many becoming lost in spots where even if they were submerged in water, they could easily still remain intact for hundreds of millions of years. Not all coins are inert, but many are, and many really are going to stick around millions of years. While volcanic heat and pressure can mangle inert metals, not many other natural processes will. There's no magical entropy that would cause inert artifacts in geologically stable areas that some coins would wind up in to just lose their form magically. In our world today there's a lot of stainless steel, gold, and other inert artifacts that are going to persist for hundreds of millions of years. It's not like there's volcanoes everywhere, nor do tectonic plates subsume everything - we've got Cambrian fossils after all...

Depends on the sort of water, I guess. Salty and oxygen-rich wouldn't be so good. I'll just leave the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism here for you to think about. That had ca. 2100 years +/-ca. 100 years of underwater seawater exposure, and look what it did to it.

What would only 10000 years more of that have done to it?

That's bronze. I'd assume any brass/bronze/copper to corrode away, that's what it does naturally. Now consider gold, stainless steel, and the many other inert materials humans work with. I assume 10,000 year old gold artifacts would look the same as the 5000 year old artifacts we know of which are very well preserved, and other similar materials would fare similarly.

A million is a mind bogglingly large number, especially in years. I honestly can not say eitherway if anything survives. Coins might end up as a lump of rock with slightly higher metal content than surroundngs.

(also, hi nemo! Found you. :P)

It is a very long time, but we still do have a lot of fossils, and with many human artifacts they won't fossilize so much as just sit there in their strata - we make artifacts that don't even need to fossilize since they are already stable, chemically inert, and resistant to biodegrading or corrosion, and if they do corrode, then in the right conditions those would be a kind of fossil. Ancient life made left lot of traces and humans are currently leaving as many traces as any other species has ever left, and we're leaving artifacts and other traces spread all across the globe, even in the oceans. We have fossils from >3 billion years ago. Not everything subducts. There's existent areas of long term geology stability and those areas are as littered with human traces, artifacts, and other remains as anywhere else. I honestly can't imagine all traces of humanity being undiscoverable considering in 100 million years, in 400 million subduction and time will have erased a lot, but I'm pretty confident there would be quite a few discoverable traces if some future life form were to apply modern archaeological methods then, esp. given that the scale and scope of changes humans are making is massive and global. At the very least future paleontologists would see the effects of humans on their habitat in the fossil record of the ongoing mass extinction, but I expect much more would be discoverable than that.

Over geologic timescales, almost all rocks on earth are pushed down far enough that they melt, mix, and are churned back up as new rock.

There’s still a lot of room to hide in that “almost”. Continental shields in Canada and Australia haven’t been recycled into the deep Earth and we can still find geological features there that are billions of years old.

We still find fossils from hundreds of millions of years ago, and giant constructions are much better at surviving than skeletons.

Only that so far back, we know Earth was not really inhabitable.

> That's a frustrating response, because you must surely understand as a whole what they are saying.

It's late and I couldn't come up with something that'd survive the timespan in question, so I just wanted an example.

Carbon ceramic brake discs from supercars will likely to survive a few billion years.

Surely plate tectonics after a few billion years would move these disc brakes down into the Earth's mantle and melt them?

We have fossils that are > 3 billion years old. While subduction does steadily erase the past, not everything subducts. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton

That depends where you leave them.

Mirror on the moon.

Hmmm, assuming there were an extra retro reflector on the moon, have we pointed a laser at enough of the moon to find it? At what rate would it acquire dust without wind?

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