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I haven't seen the series, but frankly this sounds really implausible to me. There are many ruins in various parts of the world which are thousands of years old, and no one has been doing any maintenance on them for most of that time, yet they are still easily identifiable for what they are. Cuneiform tablets buried and forgotten for thousands of years are still intact enough to be readable. For that matter, flint arrowheads made by humans hundreds of thousands of years ago have been found intact enough to be indentifiable as manmade. And many artificial structures today use far more durable materials.
The idea that a technologically-advanced civilization might have existed in the past is an interesting one, but very unlikely. All we would need to suggest its existence would be just one transistor, or plastic washer, or computer chip, clearly dated to pre-modern times, but nothing like that has ever been found -- to say nothing of steel girders, car or airplane frameworks, ruins of hydroelectric dams, etc., which would almost certainly still exist in recognizable form, even after millennia or even tens of millennia.
On a tangentially-related note, there is actually one place where, if all humans were to suddenly vanish, evidence of our existence would remain for billions of years: the Moon. The various landing modules and even footprints of astronauts there will remain unchanged until the end of the solar system, unless they are disturbed by something, such as a meteor impact.
On the concept of an earlier advanced human civilization which left no traces on Earth, there is a much-better-than-average science-fiction novel called Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan on this theme. It starts with the discovery of a fifty-thousand-year-old human corpse in a space suit on the Moon -- obviously evidence of an advanced culture long ago -- and goes on from there.
I guess it *is* implausible...and I live in my own reality, I guess. I could have the timeline off, maybe it was more than 300 years. Yes, you're right there's a hellavu lot of evidence of mankind, thousands of years old...I do know this...really, I DO!
That sci-fi scenario is something I've thought about for quite awhile, and that's right up my alley. Thanks for the book tip...that's something I don't do enough of anymore with two kids. But we're heading to the Little Red Lodge up in the mountains, for my 50th birthday weekend, coming fast, ugh. I think I'll treat myself to a good book.
Interesting about the moon, makes perfect sense, no wind, freezing conditions. Preservation at its finest.
Interesting comments. I think I would like that book. :O
I also should of prefaced the survival of things like the arrowheads and the tablets to not just granite, but stone too. Again, anything manmade, like manmade bricks will not survive. They actually showed, of all places, Gary Indiana, as an example of how Earth takes back the land. The corrosion of the steel etc. The environment of extreme cold and water does quite a bit of damage.
Another interesting thing in the series was, Hoover Dam would run for over a hundred years until a power failure or the barrings wore out. Plus a sign in Time Square by RICOH, it uses a combination of wind turbine and solar panels, and it would run for quite a few years without man, until the light bulbs burned out.
Maybe they meant everything would be gone in 300,000 years rather than 300? That might be realistic. I'm sure they couldn't have meant that all trace of, say, New York City would be gone in just a few centuries or even a few millennia.
Man-made bricks from Babylon (about 3,000 years old) have been looted from the site in modern times and used to build houses. Obviously they haven't deteriorated much in that time. Also, metal parts of ancient buildings were generally iron and rusted away, but many modern alloys don't rust.
It would be interesting to know how long it would really take. My guess would be that alien archaeologists visiting Earth would still find at least traces even after a million years.
Well I'm way off...here's the Wiki Link on the show, along with "the timeline". It looks to be more like I wasn't paying much attention...okay, I'm done.
But it does destroy creationism, yet again,
Rush Limbaugh has been hooting and screeching and gibbering with outrage at the idea that this discovery re-affirms that he's descended from monkeys. He'll probably start flinging poo any moment now.
Commenting by HaloScan
