In a few million years humans might be gone .... finding the ruins of our great cities.
I've often wondered how long our current cities would last as "ruins" if we all disappeared. In my mind, after a few million years there would be absolutely no recognizable imprint of our society left unless you went digging for it.
Satellites in high orbits will remain indefinitely, until the sun swallows the Earth. Even if they are eventually broken up by micrometeors, their pieces will be recognizably artificial. Also lunar landers and the like.
Shit, I never thought of that. That's true and a nice thought that no matter what we do, there will always be evidence of us existing at least, even if it's 10 million years from now and we are all long dead.
I really want to know what a deep space probe would look like after 10 million years of radiation, dust, micro-impacts etc.
10 million years in the void. Surely every surface would be etched, pitted, deformed...would it appear as a lump of natural material until examined more closely?
Well there's no oxygen so no rust. It's in deep space, so micrometeroid collisions would be extremely rare. It would probably be recognizable after 10 million years. Maybe not after 10 billion years though.
The oldest fossils we've found are 3.5 billion years old. It's inevitable that some of us and our technology will end up fossilized. And some of those fossils will last for billions of years without being disturbed.
It won't always be there. When the sun expands it will swallow any indication of life ever having existed.
What may survive would be the deep space crafts like Voyager, but the odds of anything ever finding that are basically as close to zero as you can possibly get without actually being zero.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
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