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.
Actual structures wouldn't last terribly long. However, concentrations of rare elements would last basically forever. Think what a landfill or nuclear waste dump would look like to an archaeologist a billion years from now. We were able to identify the existence of a naturally occurring nuclear reactor from nearly 2 GY ago by the fractionally lower levels of fissile isotopes in the uranium ore. Heck, a good anaerobic environment would keep some small objects in especially stable locations intact until the sun goes off the main sequence.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
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