41–50 of 181 posts
Conversely, a concentration of rusted metal is not likely to occur naturally.
A highly responsible civilization that achieves space fairing tech could rebuild its environment, leaving a clean planet as a gift for future species to emerge, and move to the stars. Sort of artifical-creationism, but phycally achievable, it's a matter of civilization goals.
Why would they spend resources doing this?
Every time this pops up on HN, people post insisting that it won't all go away, that the skyscrapers will, somehow, still be there. No, they won't. Look at any place in the world where there are mesas. All of the land around the mesa used to be level with the top of the mesa. It has all eroded away, and in only a few million years. So, the metals will corrode, collapse, and wash away. The stone will erode away. The c…
I've been working on a paper comparing the effects of the Anthropocene to mega catastrophes in the geologically recent past. In addition to the Younger Dryas Impact (12kya), there's the Oruani (26kya) and Mt Toba (77kya) eruptions. From my calculations, it seems the climate change from each of these dwarfs any actions humans are currently capable of, namely petrocarbon burning and also total nuclear war.
I'm also critical of the account given to these events in the IPCC reports.
It seems unbelievable to me that the climate change debate isn't considering these more, so I'm still debugging the numbers and research. But happy to take comments from anyone who's interested!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yo9yHMfEnEepefDCRdar-B-4...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After a couple thousand years of computational evolution, if you don't think there'd be a possible reason for leaving behind massive silicon crystals... Well, you haven't been reading enough science fiction. If you could grow pure crystals more easily (thinking Diamon Age), why not have giant plates serving as a piezo generator or ambient electromagnetic waveguide harvesters?
So a civilization thousands years more advanced than us failed to go to space (evidenced by the fact that they did not leave behind any space junk) but somehow produced energy from crystals?
The oldest hard-rock mountains are 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Those include some heavily mined areas, such as the Appalachians, If a previous civilization had been into serious mining, we'd probably have seen evidence of that by now. There may be nothing left of the mine, but an area without the good stuff and the remains of a big rubble dump would be interesting. Conversely, a concentration of rusted meta…
A highly responsible civilization that achieves space fairing tech could rebuild its environment, leaving a clean planet as a gift for future species to emerge, and move to the stars. Sort of artifical-creationism, but phycally achievable, it's a matter of civilization goals.
Why would they spend resources doing this?
While a stretch as a motivation, the Uplift saga by David Brin has this as a core point: ecology and biodiversity is important for all the species in these books; planets are leased and used for a while, and then lain fallow to let them regrow and potentially spawn more sentient beings that could then (be helped to) join the galactic community.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would guess that glaciers would encapsulate the skyscrapers and dislodge them from their foundation, and when they receded leaving a huge pile of steel and concrete. Even if that was later encapsulated by magma, future geologists would have to wonder about metal 'veins' that were so structured and why part of the rock was basalt and another part was an exceptionally hard and dense form of limestone. Note to self. D…
The oldest known iron artifacts, ca 3200BCE: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03054403130020... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After a couple thousand years of computational evolution, if you don't think there'd be a possible reason for leaving behind massive silicon crystals... Well, you haven't been reading enough science fiction. If you could grow pure crystals more easily (thinking Diamon Age), why not have giant plates serving as a piezo generator or ambient electromagnetic waveguide harvesters?
So a civilization thousands years more advanced than us failed to go to space (evidenced by the fact that they did not leave behind any space junk) but somehow produced energy from crystals?
Whatever space junk we leave behind will be gone 100 years from now. https://www.nasa.gov/news/debris_faq.html
The oldest hard-rock mountains are 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. Those include some heavily mined areas, such as the Appalachians, If a previous civilization had been into serious mining, we'd probably have seen evidence of that by now. There may be nothing left of the mine, but an area without the good stuff and the remains of a big rubble dump would be interesting. Conversely, a concentration of rusted meta…
Wouldn't metal dissolve over thousands of years? I'd be on the lookout for plastics.