Remnants of Modernity

[Aldarion]

So if modern-day civilization some 20 minutes in the future (or slightly more than that... but definitely not-interplanitary-level-yet) completely destroyed itself to the point of reducing us to the cavemen again (and rearranging the land masses in the process), what remnants of the civilization could still be visible some 10 000 years later by the time humanity again reached the medieval level? Is there anything that could theoretically survive at all and still be recognizable?

 

[pmmg]

With that much destruction, such that the land masses moved about, I would think not much. Maybe if I dug deep into the earth, I might find steel girders or such. Maybe some bits of concrete that had a peculiar straight line or a 90 degree corner.

10000 years, probably is not enough to make us disappear entirely though. Copper wire, steel, concrete would probably still be around to give proof to the existence of a race that constructed things. If it was buried, it would last longer, exposed to the elements, and it might rust and grind away to powder.

If the land masses did not move, I think it would be likely, much of it would still be standing enough that people 10000 years later would know that was part of a larger building, and a lot of them together were a city.

And of course, I am sure copies of my book would make it The dead green scrolls.

There was a TV series called something like Life without man, that looked ahead to the rate of decline of all our stuff if we did not maintain it. If I recall, the Hoover Dam would be one of the last things to go--which, incredibly, is still actually in the process of drying and hardening even today.

(I hope 20 minute future me can jump back and tell me there is only 20 minutes left )

 

[ThinkerX]

Depends on the location. Plastics last dang near forever. If properly stored firearms might remain functional, though ammo would be problematic. The same applies to other items as well. Cities and roads in dry, geologically stable areas would be mostly intact.

 

[Jackarandajam]

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635

Plastic degradation rates:
Bottles: 58 years
Pipe: 1200 years
Rates would go up for thicker and heavier duty plastics until you got to like Teflon abrasion pads for heavy equipment that might make it 10k.

I would think coated or non-rusting metals protected from the elements by for instance being sealed into basements by fallen buildings, anything military in vaults (some of it possibly pristine other than dry rot), anything stone, concrete, tile, glass, ceramic, etc, depending on environmental corrosion. Some bone in rare and specific instances.
I mean think, cars from the 70s are already completely rusted out if they weren't taken care of. Fiberglass would oxidize, peel and blow away by then.

10,000 years is a really long time.

Edit: in dry areas exposed metal would last longer. I could see the stumps of wind turbines still sticking up, albeit rusted thin. Alot of walls would stand, especially heavy concrete like prisons or nuclear plants. I think enough could be gleaned from like Manhattan Island (once it was rediscovered?) That humanity wouldn't have to take the same course all over again.

 

[pmmg]

Life after people was the series. They estimated the hoover dam would still be standing after 10000 years. But it would be one of the last things. Course… that did not include entire land masses moving.

 

[Finchbearer]

What I took from this was a more philosophical question of what would be recognisable in humans, such as traits and trajectory in terms of culture. Not literal stuff, such as plastics. So maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle, but I still think that if you have Homo Sapiens, then the one thing that mostly separates us from the animal world is creativity. There would probably still be caves, just different formations, and if you go from the first cave paintings where humans depicted animals using red ochre or whatever they had to hand to make basic marks, then you have the beginning of culture. I think we’d still therefore travel at a similar trajectory. You’d have the basic need for clothing and shelter, especially in colder regions. From there, if we still went from constructing using basic methods such as wattle and daub all the way to modern skyscrapers, maybe it’d look similar.

 

[Prince of Spires]

given the right conditions, a lot of things could survive for that long. Göbekli Tepe was build something like 12.000 years ago.

Most important is that stuff is protected from the elements. Mainly water, but also dust storms. Which means you're looking at being buried, being in a sheltered part of a desert, or preferably both. Being buried also helps with stuff collapsing. After all, being filled with sand removes the need for stuff to collapse.

Being buried and overgrown by jungle also protects stuff, since solid rocks can't move in such a setting. It's why we keep finding pyramids in Mexico and South America.

I also suspect main roads will survive in some form. You'll be able to see that someone built a 10 lane highway somewhere, since there will be a straight strip of land where vegetation will behave differently, since there's a hard and even surface underneath it.

Interestingly, it probably also depends on who does the finding and when. If the dead sea scrolls had been found in the middle ages, then very little would probably be left of them, simply because they wouldn't have had the skill to preserve them, and the people doing the finding and receiving probably wouldn't have the knowledge that what they'd found was important.

It also depends on what you mean with recognizable. I suspect that, barring some massive geological event, an archeologist will always be able to deduce New York existed where it did and what size it was. Big piles of rubble are hard to hide. But it might make little sense to an average peasant.

 

[pmmg]

The great unknown in this is rearranging the landmasses. Any thing big enough to do that could be the death of many things, including the hover dam and gobekli tepe. If the world is just rubble to dig through could anything be left standing?

 

[Ban]

In addition to certain peculiarly-shaped metals or plastic desposits, the global spread of certain species could be an indicator, especially for the sizable ones. The hippos in Colombia for example had no way of spreading there naturally. That said, it would take a mountain of additional evidence to convince any future human scholar that an ancient human civilization (ours) had such a profound effect on the biological world. Believing tomatoes and horses spread across the globe on their own might pass Occam's Razor more than the Columbian exchange.

 

[Genly]

Unfortunately, the rearrangement of the land masses is inconsistent with the survival of humanity in any form. This would imply an impact considerably larger than the K/T event that killed the dinosaurs. Such an effect would very likely destroy the entire biosphere. So in a scenario where humanity was forced back to the stone age, the land masses would have to stay where they are.

What could be different, though, is the sea level. Maybe the apocalyptic event caused a period of drastic global warming that melted all of the ice sheets. In some locations, this would cause very significant changes to the coastline. So some of the 10,000 year old artifacts (like Manhattan) could be under the sea. I don't know how long materials survive under sea water, but we are still finding shipwrecks that are thousands of years old.

 

[skip.knox]

>It also depends on what you mean with recognizable.
This is a crucial point that was memorably made by the classic short story "By the Waters of Babylon" by Stephen Vincent Benet.
Those distant descendants might see a thing, but how will they interpret it? There are devices from only a century or two ago that few people today could identify correctly. Context is everything. As per Mr Benet, context can even be a story.

 

[Gallio]

Always Coming Home is set 20 000 years in the future.
According to that book, plastic and some roads will survive, and not much else.

 

[ThinkerX]

The other thing to take into account would be groups with some technical knowledge actively trying to maintain old technology. A tech-cult, perhaps.

 

[Finchbearer]

The question was

The other thing to take into account would be groups with some technical knowledge actively trying to maintain old technology. A tech-cult, perhaps.

I think we’re already there!

 

[Prince of Spires]

The real question perhaps is, what do you need to have survive for your story? I think we can probably come up with plenty of reasons why things do or don't exist in your timeframe.

 

[Aldarion]

The real question perhaps is, what do you need to have survive for your story? I think we can probably come up with plenty of reasons why things do or don't exist in your timeframe.

Eh, I really don't... it was more for "atmosphere". I did play around with an idea of surviving AI murder bots from space, but how the heck would medieval fantasy setting deal with that?

 

[ThinkerX]

Eh, I really don't... it was more for "atmosphere". I did play around with an idea of surviving AI murder bots from space, but how the heck would medieval fantasy setting deal with that?

I have alien robots in my sword and sorcery setting - leftovers from when the ancient aliens ruled the world. But those days are long past, malfunctions abound, and parts are few.

 

[LostName]

Over 10000 years almost everything will have broken down to the point where it can at most be used for its materials but often they have degraded as well unless stored in very specific ways and with specific materials used. The only thing that does come to mind is stuff intentionally made to last, there is some project or other to preserve information for that eventually and they created some record or something that has a lot of information on it but it's split into different sections with each section requiring more advanced technology to read but the step before it having instructions on creating the technology required to read the next section, starting from what you can read with just your eyes and going all the way into binary code to be read by something like a cd player later on iirc.

This could be a way to jumpstart civilization in some way (it's not like every story has a Senku) but I don't there is much more aside maybe from radioactive waste containers. People were supposedly working on some that will be easily identifiable as toxic and dangerous even in such an event but I'm not sure anyone accomplished this already, I remember reading something some group doing this to have not even really tried and their result breaking down easily or something.

Though, ancient technology is different and there is a good chance some stuff made thousands of years ago and still in usable shape might survive another 10000 years without too much trouble. At least some structures like the pyramids, Petra (it's already 9000 years old by now), etc. and some early tool will survive and some companies also storedata in vaults in like salt mines meant to last centuries, if not millennia and while those are only readable with modern technology, pretty sure some people have stored other stuff in a way meant to preserve it precisely in case human civilization gets nuked back into the stone age and future humans need a way to quickly get back on their feet.