Interesting piece in Scientific American. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it, but it turned out to be quite engaging. I’m sure MV can tell us if they’ve made any mistakes.
It appears to be open access, or at least free if you haven’t used any SciAm recently.
buffy said:
Interesting piece in Scientific American. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it, but it turned out to be quite engaging. I’m sure MV can tell us if they’ve made any mistakes.It appears to be open access, or at least free if you haven’t used any SciAm recently.
No glaring errors.
Interestingly, I did a very similar thought experiment when I was at university. I came to a similar conclusion. The longest-lasting thing I could come up with was very deep underground mines into low-erosion cratonic areas. It was a sort-of negative thing (ie a hole in the rocks).
There were two things I was thinking about:
Michael V said:
buffy said:
Interesting piece in Scientific American. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it, but it turned out to be quite engaging. I’m sure MV can tell us if they’ve made any mistakes.It appears to be open access, or at least free if you haven’t used any SciAm recently.
No glaring errors.
Interestingly, I did a very similar thought experiment when I was at university. I came to a similar conclusion. The longest-lasting thing I could come up with was very deep underground mines into low-erosion cratonic areas. It was a sort-of negative thing (ie a hole in the rocks).
There were two things I was thinking about:
- How long could indications of humans last?
- If dinosaurs had had a civilisation (they had been evolving for long enough for that to be a possibility, given mammalian evolution and humans), would there be any indication of that?
It is a deep and interesting thought pool.
The cities are semiregular patterns of concrete. The major cities have more than a billion sq metres of steel and concrete.
The buildings will fall down but one imagines that even after hundreds of millions of years, you would still be left with a suspiciously regular limestone formations.
There are also artefacts that have already been dropped in preserving environments. If a fossil can survive 400 million years then probably a tungten carbide blade can.
(There are also craft on the moon that we would anticipate would leave remnants more or less indefinitely)
Does said capsule have to be on Earth ?
Could if be in an asteroid or periodic comet.
Cymek said:
Does said capsule have to be on Earth ?
Could if be in an asteroid or periodic comet.
On the near side of the Moon would be best I suspect.
Much like Arthur Clarke’s monolith buried under the surface of the Moon in the movie 2001 a Space Oddessy. He wrote a short story with the same premise a few years earlier but only to the point where the monolith was retrieved. The intent was that humans had to reach a certain level of technology to both detect and then travel to the monolith and that meant we’d matured enough to understand the messages it contained.
The movie cranked that up a notch or three.
Cymek said:
Does said capsule have to be on Earth ?
Could if be in an asteroid or periodic comet.
Maybe it could be ’Oumuamua¡